Azure AD/Active Directory User Security Evaluation Reporter

During December 2018 – February 2019 Microsoft have run an online Microsoft Graph Security Hackathon on Devpost.

The criteria of the hackathon was;

  • Build or update a functioning Microsoft Graph-powered solution that leverages the Microsoft Graph Security API

Following the announcement of the Hackathon I was encouraged by Kloud management to enter. During the busy month of December I started to formulate a concept for entry in the Hackathon taking learnings from the hackathon I entered in 2018.… [Keep reading] “Azure AD/Active Directory User Security Evaluation Reporter”

Building a Serverless Application in AWS using React and Claudiajs

With the introduction of Function as a Service capabilities in Azure (Web Functions) and AWS (Lambda) it has become possible to build applications which don’t use any servers in the cloud.  This has many advantages from an operational perspective

  • No server management
  • Flexible scaling
  • High availability
  • No idle capacity

In addition to this we can easily leverage all of the components that the cloud computing providers have built to improve the way we process and manage data.   … [Keep reading] “Building a Serverless Application in AWS using React and Claudiajs”

A quick start guide for Deploying and Configuring Node-RED as an Azure WebApp

Introduction

I’ve been experimenting and messing around with IoT devices for well over 10 years. Back then it wasn’t called IoT, and it was very much a build it and write it yourself approach.
Fast forward to 2017 and you can buy a microprocessor for a couple of dollars that includes WiFi. Environmental sensors are available for another couple of dollars and we can start to publish environmental telemetry without having to build circuitry and develop code.… [Keep reading] “A quick start guide for Deploying and Configuring Node-RED as an Azure WebApp”

Display Microsoft Identity Manager Sync Engine Statistics in the MIM Portal

Introduction

In the Microsoft / Forefront Identity Manager Synchronization Service Manager under Tools we have a Statistics Report. This gives a break down of each of the Management Agents and the Connectors on each MA.
I had a recent requirement to expose this information for a customer but I didn’t want them to have to connect to the Synchronization Server (and be given the permissions to allow them to). So I looked into another way of providing a subset of this information in the MIM Portal itself.  … [Keep reading] “Display Microsoft Identity Manager Sync Engine Statistics in the MIM Portal”

Integration of Microsoft Identity Manager with Azure Platform-as-a-Service Services

Overview

This isn’t an out of the box solution. This is a bespoke solution that takes a number of elements and puts them together in a unique way. I’m not expecting anyone to implement this specific solution (but you’re more than welcome to) but to take inspiration from it to implement solutions relevant to your environment(s). This post supports a presentation I did to The MIM Team User Group on 14 June 2017.
This post describes a solution that;

  • Leverages an Azure WebApp (NodeJS) to present a simple website.
[Keep reading] “Integration of Microsoft Identity Manager with Azure Platform-as-a-Service Services”

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

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 configure a Graphical PowerShell Dev/Admin/Support User Interface for Azure/Office365/Microsoft Identity Manager

During the development of an identity management solution I find myself with multiple PowerShell/RDP sessions connected to multiple environments using different credentials often to obtain trivial data/information. It is easy to trip yourself up as well with remote powershell sessions to differing environments. If only there was a simple UI that could front-end a set of PowerShell modules and make those simple queries quick and painless. Likewise to allow support staff to execute a canned set of queries without providing them elevated permissions.… [Keep reading] “How to configure a Graphical PowerShell Dev/Admin/Support User Interface for Azure/Office365/Microsoft Identity Manager”

Gracefully managing Gulp process hierarchy on Windows

Process Tree

When developing client side JavaScript, one thing that really comes in handy is the ability to create fully functional stubs that can mimic real server APIs. This decouples project development dependencies and allows different team members to work in parallel against an agreed API contract.

To allow people to have an isolated environment to work on and get immediate feedback on their changes, I leverage the Gulp.js + Node.js duo.

“Gulp.js is a task runner that runs on Node.js [Keep reading] “Gracefully managing Gulp process hierarchy on Windows”

Creating a simple nodejs API on AWS (including nginx)

On a recent project I was part of a team developing an AngularJS website with a C# ASP.NET backend API hosted in Azure.  It was a great project as I got to work with a bunch of new tools, but it got me wondering on how simple it could be to use a Javascript API instead.  That way the entire development stack would be written in Javascript.

And so a personal project was born.  To create a simple JS API and get it running in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Creating a simple nodejs API on AWS (including nginx)”