Get Azure Virtual Networks with PowerShell

11th of November, 2014 / / 6 Comments

I needed to make my life easier the other day as a colleague and I worked through setting up a Azure IaaS network topology to connect to an enterprise production network. One of our clients requirements meant that whilst we created the network sites, subnets and segments we needed to report on what we had created to verify it was correct. This simple task of viewing network names and associated subnets is currently missing from the Azure cmdlets, so we have pieced together this quick bit of re-usable code.… [Keep reading] “Get Azure Virtual Networks with PowerShell”

Testing your mobile app – plan ahead before it’s too late

10th of November, 2014 / / 1 Comment

More than ever before, organisations are now preparing themselves to engage with their customers not only to attract business but also to get to know them better. This proliferation of information makes it possible to personalise user experience for a targeted audience. Building your own Mobile App is a great medium to achieve that. But be cautious – a poorly rated app can ruin everything!

The inspiration for this blog is a piece of work that we did for one of our customer few months back.… [Keep reading] “Testing your mobile app – plan ahead before it’s too late”

Kloud Sessions from TechEd Australia 2014

7th of November, 2014 / / No Comments

Consultants from Kloud are always looking for ways to help public cloud adoption by contributing to community events and sharing our knowledge. The premier annual Microsoft technical event to do this at in Australia is TechEd.

As in previous years Kloud had speakers presenting at TechEd 2014 and you’ll find their session videos below. Click through to the Channel 9 site to gain access to the deck to go with the session.

Azure VM Security and Compliance Management with Configuration Manager and SCM

Presenter: Andreas Wasita.… [Keep reading] “Kloud Sessions from TechEd Australia 2014”

Addressing Cross-Site Request Forgery in public/hybrid APIs

6th of November, 2014 / / No Comments

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF or Session Riding) is the invocation of unauthorised commands that are triggered by a trusted user. A malicious website could make use of the fact that a user is logged in to a vulnerable website to then ride that session and forge requests. CSRF is a very common type of attack and ASP.NET has had the AntiForgery library for a long time. What’s interesting is when you have a hybrid/public API that your website is using and it is also used by other clients like Powershell, Mobile, etc.… [Keep reading] “Addressing Cross-Site Request Forgery in public/hybrid APIs”

Connecting Salesforce and SharePoint Online with MuleSoft – Nothing but NET

5th of November, 2014 / / No Comments

Often enterprises will choose their integration platform based on the development platform required to build integration solutions. That is, java shops typically choose Oracle ESB, JBoss, IBM WebSphere or MuleSoft to name but a few. Microsoft shops have less choice and typically choose to build custom .NET solutions or use Microsoft BizTalk Server. Choosing an integration platform based on the development platform should not be a driving factor and may limit your options.

Your integration platform should be focused on interoperability.… [Keep reading] “Connecting Salesforce and SharePoint Online with MuleSoft – Nothing but NET”

Office 365 PowerShell and Modularised code.

5th of November, 2014 / / 1 Comment

I’m going to preface this article by saying “This is not a guide to resolve a specific problem, but rather a discussion on how to work through a problem/issue which requires a script to resolve”.

Often when you first look at some of these problems they seem incredibly difficult and you can rapidly end up down a rabbit hole you didn’t intend to. (I was going to quote Yoda during the Dark Side cave scene in Empire Strikes Back, but decided against proving myself to be of a certain techie stereotype.… [Keep reading] “Office 365 PowerShell and Modularised code.”

The Little Gotchas of managing certificates in Azure

5th of November, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Azure and I have been friends for quite some time now, and I love the power that Azure gives me. He enables me to spin up a whole enterprise-like infrastructure in seconds. However, when it comes to managing certificates, Azure disappoints me. In a recent project that I have worked on, I got frustrated with some of Azure gotchas when it comes to managing security keys. In this blog post, I will share my experience on these issues.… [Keep reading] “The Little Gotchas of managing certificates in Azure”

Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 2

4th of November, 2014 / / 2 Comments

In the first post in this series we setup our scenario and looked at how we can build out an ultra highly available Azure SQL Database layer for our applications. In this second post we’ll go through setting up the MVC Web Application we want to deploy so that it can leverage the capabilities of the Azure platform.

MVC project changes

This is actually pretty straight forward – you can take the sample MVC project from Codeplex and apply these changes easily.… [Keep reading] “Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 2”

Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 1

3rd of November, 2014 / / 2 Comments

As public cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure mature it is becoming easier to build deployment architectures that are substantially resilient to faults in cloud platforms that are increasingly unlikely to ever eventuate due to the previously mentioned maturity!

We’ll take a look at how we can deploy an ultra highly available database-backed ASP.Net MVC Website using Microsoft Azure across this post and my next one.

Desired State

The diagram below shows what we will be aiming to achieve with our setup.… [Keep reading] “Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 1”

Decoding Behaviour Driven Development

29th of October, 2014 / / No Comments

I have been thinking for a while to write a piece on BDD (aka Behaviour Driven Development), not that it was absolutely essential (I consider myself as lazy) but more so because there is very little write up available on relevance of BDD and its use in a .NET environment. BDD is also known to many in the community as ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Development), certainly for some similarities that can not go unnoticed.

So really, why bother about BDD?

… [Keep reading] “Decoding Behaviour Driven Development”