Azure Logic App – Evaluating IF condition with the help of JSON expression by passing null

17th of October, 2017 / / 3 Comments

Introduction

Yes, you read the title right, this blog is about evaluating IF condition. You might be wondering what about IF, even novice developer with no experience knows about it.
Allow me to explain a specific scenario that helps us understand it’s behavior in Logic Apps, it might blow your mind.
Some of us come from years of development experience, and at times we like to skill up ourselves to various other technologies, which leaves us with a mindset based on our past development experience and programming habits, which we gained over the years.… [Keep reading] “Azure Logic App – Evaluating IF condition with the help of JSON expression by passing null”

Adding Bot to Microsoft Teams

11th of October, 2017 / / No Comments

If you are following up on my previous blog posts about Bots and integrating LUIS with them, you are almost done with building bots and already had some fun with it. Now it’s time to bring them to life and let internal or external users interact with Bot via some sort of front end channel accessible by them. If you haven’t read my previous posts on the subject yet, please give them a read at Creating a Bot and Creating a LUIS app before reading further.… [Keep reading] “Adding Bot to Microsoft Teams”

Using a Bot Framework to build LUIS enabled Bots

23rd of September, 2017 / / No Comments

History

In this post, we are going to build a bot using Microsoft Bot framework and add intelligence to it to extract meanings from the conversation with users utilising Microsoft cognitive service named LUIS. The last post discussed details about LUIS, give it a read before you continue on reading. This post assumes you have a basic understanding of Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) and Bot Framework, further details can be read about them at LUIS and Bot Framework.… [Keep reading] “Using a Bot Framework to build LUIS enabled Bots”

How LUIS can help BOTs in understanding natural language

15th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

Since bots are evolving, you need a mechanism to better understand what user wants from his/her language and take actions or respond to user queries appropriately. In the days of increasing automation, bots can certainly help provided they are backed by tools to understand user language both naturally and contextually.
Azure Cognitive Services has an API that can help to identify what user wants, extracts concepts and entities from a sentence (user input) using an intelligent service name Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS).… [Keep reading] “How LUIS can help BOTs in understanding natural language”

Quickly creating and using an Azure Key Vault with PowerShell

14th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

A couple of weeks back I was messing around with the Azure Key Vault looking to centralise a bunch of credentials for my ever-growing list of Azure Functions that are automating numerous tasks. What I found was getting an Azure Key Vault setup and getting credentials in and out was a little more cumbersome than what I thought it should be. At that same point via Twitter this tweet appeared in my timeline from a retweet.… [Keep reading] “Quickly creating and using an Azure Key Vault with PowerShell”

Building websites with Ionic Framework, Angular and Microsoft Azure App Services

4th of September, 2017 / / 5 Comments

The Ionic Framework (https://ionicframework.com/) is an angular 4 based framework that is designed to build beautiful applications quickly and easily that can be targeted to native platforms as well as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs).  In this blog post, I’ll walk through the steps to start your own Ionic PWA hosted on Azure App Services, which will then serve your application.

What is Microsoft Azure App Services?

Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform that allows you to host server workloads that you’d previously host locally in a data centre or on a server somewhere to be hosted in an environment where massive scale and availability becomes available at an hourly rate.… [Keep reading] “Building websites with Ionic Framework, Angular and Microsoft Azure App Services”

Getting started with Azure Cloud Shell

16th of July, 2017 / / 2 Comments

A few weeks back I noticed that I now had the option for the Azure Cloud Shell in the Azure Portal.

What is Azure Cloud Shell?

Essentially rather than having the Azure CLI installed on your local workstation, you can now initiate it from the Portal and you have automatically assigned (initiated as part of the setup) 5Gbytes of storage associated with it. So you can now create, manage and delete Azure resources using a centrally hosted CLI session.… [Keep reading] “Getting started with Azure Cloud Shell”

The quickest way to create new VMs in Azure from existing VM snapshots, mostly with PowerShell

9th of June, 2017 / / 11 Comments

There’s probably multiple ways to do this, both right and wrong, but, here’s a process that I’ve been using for a while that I’ve recently tweaked to take advantage of new Azure Managed Disks.

Sidebar – standard managed disk warning

Before I go on though, I wanted to issue a quick warning about the differences between standard unmanaged and managed disks. Microsoft will be pushing you to you Managed Disks more and more. Yes, its a great feature that makes the management of VM disks simpler.

… [Keep reading] “The quickest way to create new VMs in Azure from existing VM snapshots, mostly with PowerShell”

How to build and deploy an Azure NodeJS WebApp using Visual Studio Code

5th of June, 2017 / / No Comments 
Update April 2019  The presentation in this post 
updates the later section of this post whereby you 
can easily publish your app to Azure without needing 
to do all the manual FTP steps.

Introduction

This week I had the need to build a small web application with a reasonably simple front end that will later be integrated inside a Portal. The web application isn’t going to be high use and didn’t necessitate deployment of infrastructure (VM’s).… [Keep reading] “How to build and deploy an Azure NodeJS WebApp using Visual Studio Code”

How to create and auto update route tables in Azure for your local Azure datacentre with Azure Automation, bypassing firewall appliances

24th of May, 2017 / / 2 Comments

When deploying an “edge” or “perimeter” network in Azure, by way of a peered edge VNET or an edge subnet, you’ll likely want to deploy virtual firewall appliances of some kind to manage and control that ingress and egress traffic. This comes at a cost though. That cost being that Azure services are generally accessed via public IP addresses or hosts, even within Azure. The most common of those and one that has come up recently is Azure Blob storage.… [Keep reading] “How to create and auto update route tables in Azure for your local Azure datacentre with Azure Automation, bypassing firewall appliances”