Xamarin Test Cloud – the new kid on the block?

9th of January, 2015 / / No Comments

Early last year I was working for one of our customers to find out an optimum test solution for their upcoming mobile application. The idea was that it should be heavily automated, efficient and cost-effective. The first observations (and the feeling) that I had was that we have very little choice in the way of tool choices. That was unfortunate, but the reality.

Almost a year later, when looking back and reflecting on some of those findings, I can see things have changed immensely.… [Keep reading] “Xamarin Test Cloud – the new kid on the block?”

Sharing Azure SSO Access Tokens Across Multiple Native Mobile Apps

8th of January, 2015 / / 3 Comments

This blog post is the fourth and final in the series that cover Azure AD SSO in native mobile applications.

  1. Authenticating iOS app users with Azure Active Directory
  2. How to Best handle AAD access tokens in native mobile apps
  3. Using Azure SSO tokens for Multiple AAD Resources From Native Mobile Apps
  4. Sharing Azure SSO Access Tokens Across Multiple Native Mobile Apps (this post).

Introduction

Most enterprises have more than one mobile app and it’s not unusual for these mobile apps to interact with some back-end services or APIs to fetch and update data.… [Keep reading] “Sharing Azure SSO Access Tokens Across Multiple Native Mobile Apps”

Using Azure SSO Tokens for Multiple AAD Resources From Native Mobile Apps

9th of December, 2014 / / 3 Comments

This blog post is the third in a series that cover Azure Active Directory Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication in native mobile applications.

  1. Authenticating iOS app users with Azure Active Directory
  2. How to Best handle AAD access tokens in native mobile apps
  3. Using Azure SSO tokens for Multiple AAD Resources From Native Mobile Apps (this post)
  4. Sharing Azure SSO access tokens across multiple native mobile apps.

Introduction

In an enterprise context it is highly likely there are multiple web services that your native mobile app needs to consume.… [Keep reading] “Using Azure SSO Tokens for Multiple AAD Resources From Native Mobile Apps”

How to Best Handle Azure AD Access Tokens in Native Mobile Apps

2nd of December, 2014 / / 6 Comments

This blog post is the second in a series that cover Azure Active Directory Single Sign On (SSO) Authentication in native mobile applications.

  1. Authenticating iOS app users with Azure Active Directory
  2. How to Best handle AAD access tokens in native mobile apps (this post)
  3. Using Azure SSO access token for multiple AAD resources from native mobile apps
  4. Sharing Azure SSO access token across multiple native mobile apps.

In my previous post, I talked about authenticating mobile app users using Azure AD SSO.… [Keep reading] “How to Best Handle Azure AD Access Tokens in Native Mobile Apps”

Implementing Azure Active Directory SSO (Single Sign on) in Xamarin iOS apps

2nd of December, 2014 / / 2 Comments

This blog post is the first in a series that cover Azure Active Directory Single Sign On (SSO) Authentication in native mobile applications.

  1. Authenticating iOS app users with Azure Active Directory (this post)
  2. How to Best handle AAD access tokens in native mobile apps
  3. Using Azure SSO access token for multiple AAD resources from native mobile apps
  4. Sharing Azure SSO access token across multiple native mobile apps.

Brief Start

Two weeks ago the Azure AD (AAD) team released the Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) to enable developers to implement SSO functionality leveraging AAD.… [Keep reading] “Implementing Azure Active Directory SSO (Single Sign on) in Xamarin iOS apps”

Installing WordPress in a Sub-Folder on Azure Websites

27th of November, 2014 / / 7 Comments

This blog post shows you how to install a wordpress website in a sub-folder on your Azure website. Now somebody would ask why would I need to do that, and that is a good question, so let me start with the reasons:

Why do it this way?

Assume that you have a website and you want to create a blog section. This is a very common practice and most companies nowadays have a blog section of the website (which replaces the old “news” page).… [Keep reading] “Installing WordPress in a Sub-Folder on Azure Websites”

Getting Started with Office 365 Video

21st of November, 2014 / / 1 Comment

Starting Tuesday November 18 Microsoft started rolling out Office 365 Video to customers who have opted in to the First Release programme (if you haven’t you will need to wait a little longer!)

Kloud has built video solutions on Office 365 in the past so it’s great to see Microsoft deliver this as a native feature of SharePoint Online – and one that leverages the underlying power of Azure Media Services capabilities for video cross-encoding and dynamic packaging.… [Keep reading] “Getting Started with Office 365 Video”

IoT – Solar & Azure

18th of November, 2014 / / 6 Comments

Ever since we got our solar system installed about two years ago, I’ve been keeping track of the total power generated by the system. Every month I would write down the totals and add it to my Excel spreadsheet. Although it’s not much work, it’s still manual work… yes all 2 minutes every month.

So when the whole “Internet of Things” discussion started at our office (see Matt’s blog “Azure Mobile Services and the Internet of Things“) I thought it would be a good opportunity to look at doing this using Azure – even if it was only to prove the IoT concept.… [Keep reading] “IoT – Solar & Azure”

Migrating Azure Virtual Machines to another Region

16th of November, 2014 / / 11 Comments

I have a number of DEV/TEST Virtual Machines (VMs) deployed to Azure Regions in Southeast Asia (Singapore) and West US as these were the closet to those of us living in Australia. Now that the new Azure Regions in Australia have been launched, it’s time to start migrating those VMs closer to home. Manually moving VMs between Regions is pretty straight forward and a number of articles already exist outlining the manual steps.

To migrate an Azure VM to another Region

  1. Shutdown the VM in the source Region
  2. Copy the underlying VHDs to storage accounts in the new Region
  3. Create OS and Data disks in the new Region
  4. Re-create the VM in the new Region.
… [Keep reading] “Migrating Azure Virtual Machines to another Region”

Publish to a New Azure Website from behind a Proxy

13th of November, 2014 / / 5 Comments

One of the great things about Azure is the ease of which you can spin up a new cloud based website using Powershell. From there you can quickly publish any web-based solution from Visual Studio to the Azure hosted site.

To show how simple this is; After configuring PowerShell to use an Azure Subscription, I’ve created a new Azure hosted website in the new Melbourne (Australia Southeast) region:

That was extremely easy. What next?… [Keep reading] “Publish to a New Azure Website from behind a Proxy”