Querying against an Azure SQL Database using Azure Automation Part 1

What if you wanted to leverage Azure automation to analyse database entries and send some statistics or even reports on a daily or weekly basis?
Well why would you want to do that?

  • On demand compute:
    • You may not have access to a physical server. Or your computer isn’t powerful enough to handle huge data processing. Or you would definitely do not want to wait in the office for the task to complete before leaving on a Friday evening.
[Keep reading] “Querying against an Azure SQL Database using Azure Automation Part 1”

Auto-redirect ADFS 4.0 home realm discovery based on client IP

As I mentioned in my previous post here that I will explain how to auto-redirect the home realm discovery page to an ADFS namespace (claims provider trust) based on client’s IP so here I am.
Let’s say you have many ADFS servers (claims providers trusts) linked to a central ADFS 4.0 server and you want to auto-redirect the user to a linked ADFS server login page based on user’s IP instead of letting the user to choose a respective ADFS server from the list on the home realm discovery page as explained in the below request flow diagram.… [Keep reading] “Auto-redirect ADFS 4.0 home realm discovery based on client IP”

UPDATED: Identifying Active Directory Users with Pwned Passwords using Microsoft/Forefront Identity Manager

Earlier this week I posted this blog post that showed a working example of using a custom Pwned Password FIM/MIM Management Agent to flag a boolean attribute in the MIM Service to indicate whether a users password is in the pwned password dataset or not. If you haven’t read that post this won’t make a lot of sense, so read that then come back.
The solution when receiving a new password for a user (via Microsoft Password Change Notification Service) was checking against the Have I Been Pwned API.… [Keep reading] “UPDATED: Identifying Active Directory Users with Pwned Passwords using Microsoft/Forefront Identity Manager”

Setting up Always On Availability Groups for SQL Server in Azure

Almost all organisations rely on data, be it in the form of files or databases (SQL, Oracle…). The most challenging aspect of managing data for any organisation is high-availability and disaster recovery. Starting with the release of SQL Server 2012 (Enterprise Edition) Microsoft introduced “Always On Availability Groups”.

This powerful capability ensures your databases are synchronised through one or more replicas (SQL Servers).

While Azure offers an Infrastructure as a Service capability, the mechanisms used to setup many of the requirements for an Always On Availability Group are different to those in a traditional environment.… [Keep reading] “Setting up Always On Availability Groups for SQL Server in Azure”

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

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

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”

How to fix 403 errors when managing Azure SQL Database from Visual Studio

I was recently trying to manage Azure SQL Databases via Visual Studio in a new Azure subscription and was unable to open the SQL Databases node at all and received the following error message.

Screenshot of Visual Studio error dialog.

The text reads:

Error 0: Failed to retrieve all server data for subscription ‘GUID’ due to error ‘Error code: 403 Message: The server failed to authenticate the request. Verify that the certificate is valid and is associated with this subscription.’.

and my Server Explorer window looked like this:

How Server Explorer Looked

I must admit that I don’t often manage my Azure assets via Visual Studio so it had been a while since I’d used this tooling.… [Keep reading] “How to fix 403 errors when managing Azure SQL Database from Visual Studio”