Logging with log4net and Azure Diagnostics on Web and Worker Roles

22nd of October, 2014 / / 11 Comments

Once you start publishing content to Azure Cloud Services it becomes increasingly critical to have insights into what is going on with your Web or Worker Roles without the need to manually connect to the hosts and inspect local logs.

Logging locally to file is an option but results in a couple of challenges: there is limited local persistent disk space on an Azure Role and local logging makes it hard to get an aggregated view of what’s happening across multiple Instances servicing a single Cloud Service.… [Keep reading] “Logging with log4net and Azure Diagnostics on Web and Worker Roles”

Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator – Part III Scaling Out

22nd of October, 2014 / / 3 Comments

There’s recently been some interest in the space of accelerating Office 365 SharePoint Online traffic for organisations and for good reason. All it takes is a CEO to send out an email to All Staff with a link to a movie hosted in SharePoint Online to create some interest in better ways to serve content internally. There are commercial solutions to this problem, but they are, well… commercial (read expensive). Now that the basic functionality has been proven using existing Windows Server components, what would it take to put into production?… [Keep reading] “Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator – Part III Scaling Out”

Publishing to Azure Event Hubs using a .NET Micro Framework Device

21st of October, 2014 / / 6 Comments

In previous posts, Kloudies Matt Davies and Olaf Loogman have shown how we connect Arduino based devices to the Azure platform. Preferring the .NET Micro Framework (NETMF) platform myself, I thought it time to show how we can publish senor data to Azure Event Hubs using a NETMF connected device.

.NET Micro Framework

Like Arduino, the .NET Micro Framework is an open source platform that runs on small, microcontroller based devices or “things”as we call them now in the world of the Internet-of-Things (IoT).… [Keep reading] “Publishing to Azure Event Hubs using a .NET Micro Framework Device”

Fix: Azure Cloud Services Error: No deployments were found. Http Status Code: NotFound

21st of October, 2014 / / 1 Comment

If you find yourself having to move existing .Net solutions to Microsoft Azure you may come across an initial deployment issue if you add a Cloud Service Project type to your existing application and then publish it to a new Azure Cloud Service using Visual Studio. It’s not immediately obvious what the source of the issue is so let’s take a look at how we can troubleshoot the source of the problem.

Visual Studio provides you with the vanilla error message “Error: No deployments were found.… [Keep reading] “Fix: Azure Cloud Services Error: No deployments were found. Http Status Code: NotFound”

Azure Table Storage little gem – InsertOrMerge

19th of October, 2014 / / No Comments

This blog describes the usage of the InsertOrMerge operation for Azure Table Storage.

Each entity in Table Storage is defined by the PartitionKey/RowKey combination. InsertOrMerge will insert the entity if it doesn’t exist and, if it exists, it would merge the properties of updated entity with the existing one. For more details, see the Azure Storage blog.

When comparing with the existing table schema, not all properties are required to be specified for this operation.… [Keep reading] “Azure Table Storage little gem – InsertOrMerge”

Manage Azure Resources Using Tags

14th of October, 2014 / / 4 Comments

A feature request for quite some time in the Microsoft Azure space has been the ability to group individual resources such as websites and databases so that they can be grouped and managed as part of a single solution or system. In this post we’ll take a look at what has been introduced so far through 2014 to meet these needs.

Say Hello to Azure Resource Manager

The first piece of the solution to these requests was the introduction of the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) way back at Build 2014 along with the new Azure Preview Portal which offers support for Resource Groups.… [Keep reading] “Manage Azure Resources Using Tags”

How to fix 403 errors when managing Azure SQL Database from Visual Studio

8th of September, 2014 / / No Comments

I was recently trying to manage Azure SQL Databases via Visual Studio in a new Azure subscription and was unable to open the SQL Databases node at all and received the following error message.

Screenshot of Visual Studio error dialog.

The text reads:

Error 0: Failed to retrieve all server data for subscription ‘GUID’ due to error ‘Error code: 403 Message: The server failed to authenticate the request. Verify that the certificate is valid and is associated with this subscription.’.

and my Server Explorer window looked like this:

How Server Explorer Looked

I must admit that I don’t often manage my Azure assets via Visual Studio so it had been a while since I’d used this tooling.… [Keep reading] “How to fix 403 errors when managing Azure SQL Database from Visual Studio”

Kloud Solutions — MAPA 2014 Winner

6th of September, 2014 / / No Comments

Kloud is thrilled to announce we will take home 2 gongs as part of the 2014 MAPA Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards. We were named both Microsoft’s Cloud Solutions Partner of the Year as well as Collaboration and Content Partner of the Year. The awards, won in the face of tough competition, were awarded for a range of customer solutions, including the Coles intranet portal, mycoles and the Spotless mobility app, MyWork. Both innovative solutions empower workforces by enabling anytime, anywhere access and closely align to Microsoft’s mobile-first, cloud-first strategy.… [Keep reading] “Kloud Solutions — MAPA 2014 Winner”

Mobile platform increases productivity for integrated services company

25th of August, 2014 / / No Comments

Customer Overview
Spotless Group is an Australian owned, managed and operated provider of integrated facility management services. With operations across Australia and New Zealand, the Group’s 33,000 employees deliver millions of service hours a year across hundreds of specialist services to industry sectors including:

  • Health
  • Education
  • Leisure, Sport and Entertainment
  • Defence
  • Government
  • Resources
  • Business and Industry (AU) (NZ)
  • Laundries

Business Situation
Spotless service workers and supervisors (employees and sub-contractors) generally work at customer locations rather than offices.… [Keep reading] “Mobile platform increases productivity for integrated services company”

HOW I REDUCED THE WORKER ROLE TIME FROM ABOVE 5 HRS TO LESS THAN 1 HOUR

10th of August, 2014 / / No Comments

This post talks about my experience in reducing the execution time of the Worker Role from above 5 hours to under 1 hour. This Worker Role is set up to call some external APIs to get a list of items with their promotions and store them locally. A typical batch update process that you would see in many apps. Our client was only interested in quick fixes that would help them reduce the time it is taking the Worker Role to run.… [Keep reading] “HOW I REDUCED THE WORKER ROLE TIME FROM ABOVE 5 HRS TO LESS THAN 1 HOUR”