HoloLens – Continuous Integration

28th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Continuous integration is best defined as the process of constantly merging development artifacts produced or modified by different members of a team into a central shared repository. This task of collating changes becomes more and more complex as the size of the team grows. Ensuring the stability of the central repository becomes a serious challenge in such cases.
A solution to this problem is to validate every merge with automated builds and automated testing. Modern code management platforms like Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) offers built-in tools to perform these operations.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – Continuous Integration”

HoloLens – Continuous Integration

28th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Continuous integration is best defined as the process of constantly merging development artifacts produced or modified by different members of a team into a central shared repository. This task of collating changes becomes more and more complex as the size of the team grows. Ensuring the stability of the central repository becomes a serious challenge in such cases.
A solution to this problem is to validate every merge with automated builds and automated testing. Modern code management platforms like Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) offers built-in tools to perform these operations.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – Continuous Integration”

VSTS Build Definitions as YAML Part 2: How?

26th of November, 2017 / / 13 Comments

In the last post, I described why you might want to define your build definition as a YAML file using the new YAML Build Definitions feature in VSTS. In this post, we will walk through an example of a simple VSTS YAML build definition for a .NET Core application.

Application Setup

Our example application will be a blank ASP.NET Core web application with a unit test project. I created these using Visual Studio for Mac’s ASP.NET… [Keep reading] “VSTS Build Definitions as YAML Part 2: How?”

VSTS Build Definitions as YAML Part 1: What and Why?

26th of November, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) has recently gained the ability to create build definitions as YAML files. This feature is currently in preview. In this post, I’ll explain why this is a great addition to the VSTS platform and why you might want to define your builds in this way. In the next post I’ll work through an example of using this feature, and I’ll also provide some tips and links to documentation and guidance that I found helpful when constructing some build definitions myself.… [Keep reading] “VSTS Build Definitions as YAML Part 1: What and Why?”

A modern way to track FIM/MIM Attribute Value History utilizing Power BI

20th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

Microsoft Identity Manager is fantastic for keeping data consistent between connected systems. Often however you want to know what a previous value of an attribute was. FIM/MIM however can only tell you the current value and the Management Agent it was received on and when.
In the past where I’ve had to provide a solution to either make sure an attribute has a unique value forever (e.g email address or loginID (don’t reuse email addresses or loginID)) or just attribute value history I’ve used two different approaches;

  • Store previous values in an SQL Table and have an SQL MA that flows out the values
  • Store historical values in a Multi-Valued attribute on the user object in the Metaverse

Both are valid approaches but often fall down when you want to quickly get a report on that metadata.… [Keep reading] “A modern way to track FIM/MIM Attribute Value History utilizing Power BI”

Exchange Online & Splunk – Automating the solution

13th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

NOTES FROM THE FIELD:

I have recently been consulting on, what I think is a pretty cool engagement to integrate some Office365 mailbox data into the Splunk reporting platform.
I initially thought about using a .csv export methodology however through trial & error (more error than trial if I’m being honest), and realising that this method still required some manual interaction, I decided to embark on finding a fully automated solution.
The final solution comprises the below components:

  • Splunk HTTP event collector
    • Splunk hostname
    • Token from HTTP event collector config page
  • Azure automation account
    • Azure Run As Account
    • Azure Runbook
    • Exchange Online credentials (registered to Azure automation account

I’m not going to run through the creation of the automation account, or required credentials as these had already been created, however there is a great guide to configuring the solution I have used for this customer at  https://www.splunk.com/blog/2017/10/05/splunking-microsoft-cloud-data-part-3.html… [Keep reading] “Exchange Online & Splunk – Automating the solution”

Connect SharePoint Online and SQL Server On-Premises with BCS/SharePoint Apps using Hybrid Connection and WCF Services

13th of November, 2017 / / 2 Comments

SharePoint Online cannot directly connect to on-premises data sources such as SQL Server. A recommended approach is to use Hybrid with SharePoint 2013/2016 but adds an overhead of infrastructure and maintenance costs. Hence to overcome it, I am going to describe in this blog how to use the Azure PaaS workloads and connect to on-premises data sources using BCS.
Using Azure Hybrid Connection (refer this post) and BCS with Azure Web App hosting WCF endpoint, we can now expose on-premises SQL data to SharePoint Online and Cloud by external content types (ECTs) or SharePoint Hosted Apps.… [Keep reading] “Connect SharePoint Online and SQL Server On-Premises with BCS/SharePoint Apps using Hybrid Connection and WCF Services”

Resolving “User not found” issue while assigning permissions using SharePoint CSOM

7th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

I was recently working on a SharePoint Online project where we were trying to automate library creation and provide required permissions on those libraries. We had an issue while modifying permissions with CSOM code on SharePoint libraries when the Created By user had left the company.
In this post I will outline the cause and the resolution as there was no online reference for resolving this error.
Issue: The CSOM code was throwing an error “User not found” even when creating a User object from web.EnsureUser()… [Keep reading] “Resolving “User not found” issue while assigning permissions using SharePoint CSOM”

A tool to find mailbox permission dependencies

5th of November, 2017 / / 30 Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com
When planning to migrate mailboxes to Office 365, a lot of care must be taken around which mailboxes are moved together. The rule of the thumb is “those that work together, move together”. The reason for taking this approach is due to the fact that there are some permissions that do not work cross-premises and can cause issues. For instance, if a mailbox has delegate permissions to another mailbox (these are permissions that have been assigned using Outlook email client) and if one is migrated to Office 365 while the other remains on-premises, the delegate permissions capability is broken as it does not work cross-premises.… [Keep reading] “A tool to find mailbox permission dependencies”

Azure Functions Cold Start Workaround

4th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Intro

I love Azure Functions. So much power for so little effort or cost. The only downside is that the consumption model that keeps the cost so dirt-cheap means that unless you are using your Function constantly (in which case, you might be better off with the non-consumption options anyway), you will often be hit with a long delay as your Function wakes up from hibernation.

So very cold…

This isn’t a big deal if you are dealing with a fire and forget queue trigger scenario, but if you have web app that is calling the HTTP trigger and you need to wait for the Function to do it’s job before responding with a 200 OK… that’s a long wait (well over 15 seconds in my experience with a PowerShell function that loads a bunch of modules).… [Keep reading] “Azure Functions Cold Start Workaround”