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”

Azure ExpressRoute in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange

1st of July, 2015 / / 4 Comments

Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute provides dedicated, private circuits between your WAN or datacentre and private networks you build in the Microsoft Azure public cloud. There are two types of ExpressRoute connections – Network (NSP) based and Exchange (IXP) based with each allowing us to extend our infrastructure by providing connectivity that is:

  • Private: the circuit is isolated using industry-standard VLANs – the traffic never traverses the public Internet when connecting to Azure VNETs and, when using the public peer, even Azure services with public endpoints such as Storage and Azure SQL Database.
… [Keep reading] “Azure ExpressRoute in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange”

Windows 10 – First Look: Scaling on the Surface Pro 3

10th of June, 2015 / / 2 Comments

As a fellow Surface user, I love my device.

The surface is a great device, which packs plenty of performance for heavy duty workloads such as running guest virtual machines or 3d rendering. It’s also extremely light which is great for work meetings and note taking on the go. You could say the Surface is great for any task that you can throw at it, almost…

Remember the first time you plugged your brand spanking new Surface into an external display to enable a little more desktop real estate in the office?… [Keep reading] “Windows 10 – First Look: Scaling on the Surface Pro 3”

Kerberos Web Application Configuration and Federation.

4th of June, 2015 / / 2 Comments

I’ve spent a lot of time at a client site recently working on a large complex application migration project. In my scenario, the client is migrating applications from another domain, to their own. There are no domain trusts in place, so you could consider it as an acquisition/merger type scenario.

One of the common challenges often encountered in this type of work is troubleshooting Kerberos authentication process for web apps. Once the concepts of Kerberos authentication are understood, the process is relatively straight forward.… [Keep reading] “Kerberos Web Application Configuration and Federation.”

Automate your Cloud Operations Part 2: AWS CloudFormation

16th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Stacking the AWS CloudFormation

Automate your Cloud Operations blog post Part 1 have given us the basic understanding on how to automate the AWS stack using CloudFormation.

This post will help the reader on how to layer the stack on top of the existing AWS CloudFormation stack using AWS CloudFormation instead of modifying the base template. AWS resources can be added into existing VPC using the outputs detailing the resources from the main VPC stack instead of having to modify the main template.… [Keep reading] “Automate your Cloud Operations Part 2: AWS CloudFormation”

Let’s Hack It: Securing data on the mobile, the what, why, and how

6th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Here is the presentation of tonight’s talk. It was great to see so many passionate developers and business people at Melbourne Mobile. I have embedded the slides below and I hope you find it useful.

Talk Summary

This presentation is basically a summary of what I have learned and the experience I have had going through my recent project. In trying to secure the users data on the mobile device, I have come to learn quite few common flaws in the security implementation, I have learned more reasons why you need to protect the data on your mobile app, and have come to know and use few useful open source projects.… [Keep reading] “Let’s Hack It: Securing data on the mobile, the what, why, and how”

Announcing KeyChain.NET: a unified API for using KeyChain on many platforms

6th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Storing and accessing private keys and passwords can be a tricky task. How far do you need to go to protect your (and the user’s) data? This is where KeyChain on iOS comes in handy. It allows you to store keys in a (arguably) secure database. This has seen great improvements since iOS 8 and iOS devices (since iPhone 5S) equipped with a special A7 chip designed particularly for holding your keys. More on iOS KeyChain can be found on Apple’s website here.… [Keep reading] “Announcing KeyChain.NET: a unified API for using KeyChain on many platforms”

Reachability.Net: A unified API for reachability (network connectivity) on Xamarin Android and iOS

4th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Do you need to check for an active internet connection in your mobile app? Don’t we all do it often and on many platforms (and for almost all apps)? I found myself implementing it on iOS and Android and then pulling my implementation to almost all the mobile apps that I write. This is not efficient, and can be done better, right? 🙂

As a result I have created a library called Reachabiliy.Net which can be found as a nuget package for everything related to network connectivity.… [Keep reading] “Reachability.Net: A unified API for reachability (network connectivity) on Xamarin Android and iOS”

Microsoft Windows IoT and the Intel Galileo

4th of December, 2014 / / 4 Comments

You might have seen one of these headlines a while back: ‘Microsoft Windows now running on Intel Galileo development board’, ‘Microsoft giving away free Windows 8.1 for IoT developers’. Now before we all get too excited, let’s have a closer look beyond these headlines and see what we’re actually getting!

Intel Galileo

With a zillion devices being connected to the Internet by the year 2020 a lot of hardware manufacturers want to have a piece of this big pie, and Intel got into the game by releasing two different development boards / processors: the Intel Galileo and more recently the Intel Edison.… [Keep reading] “Microsoft Windows IoT and the Intel Galileo”