Release Management Architecture in Visual Studio Online with vNext Environments

31st of July, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Release Management – The Background

Release Management Service in Visual Studio Online (referred as RM-VSO in the rest of this blog post) automates the process of deploying the builds into the target environments. It integrates nicely with the Team Build Service in VSO and both the services can work together to implement a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. The on-premises version of Release Management has been around for a couple of years, however the Visual Studio Online version has just been recently released, in November 2014, and somewhat different than the on-premises version.… [Keep reading] “Release Management Architecture in Visual Studio Online with vNext Environments”

Sharing HTTP sessions between WebView requests and HttpClient on Windows Phone

15th of July, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Introduction

I have been working on a hybrid mobile application that requires displaying/containing a few mobile apps in a WebView control. In the background, some HTTP requests need to go through to collect data and do further processing. We need to maintain the same session in all of the web requests going through the mobile app. This means all web (HTTP) requests originated by the Webview as well as our background (HttpClient) requests need to share cookies, cache, etc.… [Keep reading] “Sharing HTTP sessions between WebView requests and HttpClient on Windows Phone”

Using Azure Machine Learning to predict Titanic survivors

12th of July, 2015 / / No Comments

So in the last blog I looked at one of the Business Intelligence tools available in the Microsoft stack by using the Power Query M language to query data from an Internet source and present in Excel. Microsoft are making a big push into the BI space at the moment, and for good reason. BI is a great cloud workload. So now let’s take a look at one of the heavy hitters at the other end of the BI scale spectrum, Azure Machine Learning.… [Keep reading] “Using Azure Machine Learning to predict Titanic survivors”

Azure MFA Server – International Deployment

1st of July, 2015 / / 2 Comments

Hi all – this blog will cover off some information to assist with multilingual/international deployment of Azure MFA server. There are some nuances of the product that make ongoing management of language preferences a little challenging. Also some MFA Methods are preferable to others in international scenarios due to carrier variances.

Language Preferences

Ideally when a user is on-boarded, their language preferences for the various MFA Methods should be configured to their native language. This can easily be achieved using MFA Server, however there are some things to know:

  1. Language settings are defined in in Synchronisation Items.
… [Keep reading] “Azure MFA Server – International Deployment”

Programmatically interacting with Yammer via PowerShell – Part 1

26th of June, 2015 / / 5 Comments

For my latest project I was asked to automate some Yammer activity. I’m first to concede that I don’t have much of a Dev background, but I instantly fired up PowerShell ISE in tandem with Google only to find…well not a lot! After a couple of weeks fighting with a steep learning curve, I thought it best to blog my findings, it’s good to share ‘n all that!

    It’s worth mentioning at the outset, if you want to test this out you’ll need an E3 Office 365 Trial and a custom domain.
… [Keep reading] “Programmatically interacting with Yammer via PowerShell – Part 1”

Use Excel, PowerQuery and Yahoo Finance to manage your Portfolio

24th of June, 2015 / / 25 Comments

There are some new and powerful Business Intelligence options available to all of us, from scalable cloud platforms to the Excel on the desktop. So its a good time to demonstrate some of them and show where BI and Application Development meet.

Power Query and the language M have been quietly making their way into the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack and in particular Excel for some time. The set of “Power” components (Power Query, Power Pivot and Power BI) all sound a bit like the marketing guys won the naming battle again and don’t really help explain the technology nor where they fit so I avoided it for a long time.… [Keep reading] “Use Excel, PowerQuery and Yahoo Finance to manage your Portfolio”

Azure Internal Load Balancing – Setting Distribution Mode

23rd of June, 2015 / / 3 Comments

I’m going to start by saying that I totally missed that the setting of distribution mode on Azure’s Internal Load Balancer (ILB) service is possible. This is mostly because you don’t set the distribution mode at the ILB level – you set it at the Endpoint level (which in hindsight makes sense because that’s how you do it for the public load balancing too).

There is an excellent blog on the Azure site that covers distribution modes for public load balancing and the good news is that they also apply to internal load balancing as well.… [Keep reading] “Azure Internal Load Balancing – Setting Distribution Mode”

FIM 2010 R2 and the Missing Log File

16th of June, 2015 / / No Comments

Anyone who has had anything to do with FIM will probably have experienced moments where you question what is taking place and ask yourself if you really understand what FIM is doing at a specific point in time. This is partly due to FIM’s extraordinarily unpredictable error handling and logging.

While working on a long running FIM 2010 R2 project where we chose to make heavy use of PowerShell within action and authorisation workflows. We chose to make use of some of the PowerShell extensions for FIM 2010 R2 at Codplex.… [Keep reading] “FIM 2010 R2 and the Missing Log File”

Tips on moving your Visual Studio Online from Microsoft to Organisational Accounts

11th of June, 2015 / / 2 Comments

If like me you’ve been a keen user of Visual Studio Online since it first came into existence way back in 2012 you’ve probably gotten used to using it with Microsoft Accounts (you know, the ones everyone writes “formerly Live ID” after), and when, in 2014, Microsoft enabled the use of Work (or Organisational) Accounts you either thought “that’s nice” and immediately got back to writing code, or went ahead and migrated to Work Accounts.

If you are yet to cutover your Visual Studio Online (VSO) tenant to use Work Accounts, here are a few tips and gotchas to be aware of as part of your switch.… [Keep reading] “Tips on moving your Visual Studio Online from Microsoft to Organisational Accounts”