Fixing issues with BHOLD SP1 FIM Integration MSI installation

17th of May, 2013 / / No Comments

For those struggling to get their BHOLD SP1 demo working in a Windows 2008 R2 64-bit environment, I’ve recently run into two critical errors I thought I would blog about as they took me and my colleague Stefan Buchman some hair pulling time to work through. As this is a bleeding edge release, there isn’t much in the way of public information about others running into these errors so I thought I’d blog their fixes in case others were struggling.… [Keep reading] “Fixing issues with BHOLD SP1 FIM Integration MSI installation”

Using SkyDrive (or OneDrive) for Source Code

14th of January, 2013 / / 5 Comments

I don’t keep anything on my laptop and haven’t done for some time. Of course there is the very simple problem of losing a device or a hard disk, but now, with the advent of multiple virtual machines and physical devices, I find myself working on a large number of different machines that may or may not be on my physical laptop. That means I need a home for source code that is available from many machines and backed up somewhere safe.… [Keep reading] “Using SkyDrive (or OneDrive) for Source Code”

A Better Dynamic TableServiceEntity

30th of September, 2012 / / 3 Comments

When working with Azure Table Storage the recommended class to use is the provided TableServiceEntity class. This abstract class is designed to be inherited from in the data class which then requires the implementation of PartitionKey, RowKey and the addition of the attribute DataServiceKey which tells the underlying persistence system which properties map to those mandatory Azure Table Storage columns; like this:

[DataServiceKey(“PartitionKey”, “RowKey”)]
public class DomainClass : TableServiceEntity
{
   public DomainClass(): base(“PartitionKey”, “1”)
   {
   }
   public string PropertyOne { get; set; }
   public string PropertyTwo { get; set; }
} 

There are plenty of blogs on the .NET… [Keep reading] “A Better Dynamic TableServiceEntity”

Windows Azure Virtual Machine Domain Provisioning with PowerShell

27th of July, 2012 / / 5 Comments

Windows Azure Virtual Machines preview allows persistent Virtual Machines which retain the same private addresses on reboot. This means that Active Directory can easily run in Azure without worry of the Domain Controller IP changing. This also means that Virtual Machines running in Azure that can be joined to your on-premise Active Directory using a site-to-site IPsec VPN. The Azure VMs then act like a branch network with full connectivity. I covered setting up TMG 2010 as a VPN endpoint (instead of using Cisco or Juniper hardware devices) for Windows Azure Virtual Network in a previous post.… [Keep reading] “Windows Azure Virtual Machine Domain Provisioning with PowerShell”

Publish Content to the Azure CDN with URLRewrite

23rd of May, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers that will cache and serve content from edge nodes closer to the user’s browser. By utilising this functionality websites can offload much of their static content delivery to those servers saving valuable web processing and bandwidth for core business related activities and giving the user a better online experience.

A CDN should be considered for delivering content for Internet workloads that exhibit:

  • Static or slow changing content
  • Content shared by many users
  • Geographically dispersed users
  • Ad-hoc or irregular usage (and therefore don’t get the benefit of the browser cache)
  • Expensive or saturated bandwidth connections

One or more of these characteristics is an indicator that a CDN may be a worthwhile investment, but the investment need not be a large one.… [Keep reading] “Publish Content to the Azure CDN with URLRewrite”