Premier Developer

InnerSource with Azure DevOps

Premier DeveloperApril 4, 2020Apr 4, 202004/4/20

Azure DevOps provides features that enable your organization and teams adopt modern software engineering practices, such as InnerSource using features like forks and pull requests. Thus, enabling and encouraging code sharing and reuse thereby reducing engineering costs, facilitating faster time to market, and additional feature enablement.

5 Reasons Why Engaging with Your End Users Improves Your Code

Premier DeveloperMarch 30, 2020Mar 30, 202003/30/20

One of the biggest mistakes I see in any project is the development team failing to get outside feedback. Whether project teams wait until the very end of a project to reach our or they don’t get feedback at all, these teams are missing out on one of the best sources of information to help build a better solution.

Using Azure DevOps Artifacts as Upstream from another Organization

Premier DeveloperMarch 25, 2020Mar 25, 202003/25/20

In this post, App Dev Manager Chris Westbrook explores scenarios for Azure Artifacts upstream sources.

GitHub with Azure DevOps

Premier DeveloperMarch 23, 2020Mar 23, 202003/23/20

With GitHub and Azure DevOps you have a powerful combination of tools to help you develop world class applications where you are an open source or enterprise developer.

Azure DevOps Cross-Organization Reporting and Analysis using Power BI

Premier DeveloperMarch 12, 2020Mar 12, 202003/12/20

In this post, App Dev Manager Andy Moore shows how to create cross-organizational reports for Azure DevOps with Power BI.

When using Azure DevOps to manage teams, backlogs, work items and bugs there are tools available for quick reporting and understanding of the current state of the project.

Sprint Zero Considered Harmful!

Premier DeveloperFebruary 21, 2020Feb 21, 202002/21/20

Successfully delivering valuable functionality in the first sprint or three can be difficult, and for some, simply impossible. But the lessons learned from the attempt are invaluable! Taking an early hit, failing in the short term is unimportant if it improves the chance of success in the long run.

How to Maximize the Value of Your Planning Session

Premier DeveloperFebruary 20, 2020Feb 20, 202002/20/20

Asking these questions during sprint planning is a great way to start a conversation that will both achieve the principles of collaboration and engagement, and ensure a greater understanding of the value that the product is expected to deliver to its users.

Intro to GitHub Actions

Premier DeveloperDecember 19, 2019Dec 19, 201912/19/19

GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want.

DevOps Handbook review

Premier DeveloperDecember 17, 2019Dec 17, 201912/17/19

The DevOps Handbook describes the aspects of working toward a satisfying result for a customer while handling apparently conflicting goals within the organization. The book explains through case studies how companies have resolved the apparent contradictions, aligning everyone’s goals can bring about greater rewards and process improvements.

Creating and refining your automated testing strategy

Premier DeveloperNovember 1, 2019Nov 1, 201911/1/19

We all know that automated testing is a key component of a successful DevOps practice. However, it’s also common for organizations to underestimate the change effort required to create a complete testing strategy. In this blog post we are going to demonstrate the advantages of creating a clear automated testing strategy, in three simple steps

Angular How-to: Add Application Insights to an Angular SPA

Premier DeveloperMarch 29, 2020Mar 29, 202003/29/20

Application Insights is an Azure service for monitoring web applications. It includes analytics tools to help you understand application usage and to diagnose issues with the goal of continuously improving performance and usability.

Angular How-to: Page load times using Application Insights

Premier DeveloperJuly 22, 2019Jul 22, 201907/22/19

Find out how to integrate Application Insights into your Angular SPA and track custom metrics such as Page Views and Load Time. You will also learn how instrument Angular apps with Application Insights with some best practice guidance.

How To Update Visual Studio 2019 Asp.Net Core Angular Project

Premier DeveloperApril 24, 2019Apr 24, 201904/24/19

The updated Angular project template in Visual Studio 2019 (and 2017 before that) provides a convenient starting point for ASP.NET Core apps using Angular and the Angular CLI to implement a rich, client-side user interface (UI). The template is equivalent to creating an ASP.NET Core project to act as an API backend and an Angular CLI project to act as a UI.

Angular How-to: Hide Logic from Users by Moving it out of the Browser and into Azure Functions

Premier DeveloperApril 17, 2019Apr 17, 201904/17/19

A common question from developers building Single Page Applications is how to hide proprietary calculations or other logic from end users. The answer is always to move that logic out of the JavaScript running in the browser and onto a server, which leads to building and hosting an API service. However, in the new world of serverless computing, there is a simpler option. Azure Functions is a compute service that enables you to run code on-demand without the hassle of building an entire application or managing any infrastructure.

Angular How-to: Implement Feature Flags

Premier DeveloperNovember 12, 2018Nov 12, 201811/12/18

In an agile development environment, there may be partially completed features or features with external dependencies that are not ready. Instead of relying on multiple code branches, instead you may opt for deploying code with a feature turned off. Later, that feature should be turned on via a configuration or database change. This post provides sample code that you can use to implement feature flags in your Angular app.

Using ADAL.js with Angular4+

Premier DeveloperOctober 24, 2018Oct 24, 201810/24/18

This is an update post to a previous article published in April 2017 explaining how to wrap ADAL.js with Angular2+. The previous article is no longer relevant given the changes to the Angular framework. This new post explains a reimplementation which uses the PathLocationStrategy and Angular features such as HttpInterceptor and InjectionToken.

Angular How-to: Implement Role-based security

Premier DeveloperMarch 7, 2018Mar 7, 201803/7/18

Laurie Atkinson, Premier Developer Consultant, shows us how to customize the behavior of an Angular app based on the user’s permissions. This includes page navigation, hiding and disabling of UI elements, and generation of menus.

Applications often include requirements to customize their appearance and behavior based on the user’s role or permission.

Angular How-to: Editable Config Files

Premier DeveloperMarch 1, 2018Mar 1, 201803/1/18

This post provides the steps and code samples for using a JSON configuration file, which can be customized for multiple environments.

Tips for Running an Angular app in IIS

Premier DeveloperJune 14, 2017Jun 14, 201706/14/17

Laurie Atkinson, Premier Developer Senior Consultant, A few tweaks are necessary to take an Angular app and move it to IIS. Here is a list of changes required to get everything running smoothly.

Using the Angular-CLI to generate an Angular SPA is an excellent way to scaffold out a well-organized application.

Add Application Insights to an Angular SPA

Premier DeveloperMay 11, 2017May 11, 201705/11/17

Laurie Atkinson, Senior Premier Developer Consultant, outlines the steps and pieces you need to add logging and telemetry to an Angular SPA using Application Insights.
*There was an updated follow-up to this article on 3/29/20–  Be sure and see Angular How-to: Add Application Insights to an Angular SPA.

The danger of TaskCompletionSource class

Sergey TepliakovOctober 1, 2018Oct 1, 201810/1/18

... when used with async/await.
TaskCompletionSource class is a very useful facility if you want to control the lifetime of a task manually. I share a canonical example when TaskCompletionSource is used for converting the event-based asynchronous code to the Task-based pattern.

Combining iterator blocks and async methods in C#

Sergey TepliakovSeptember 5, 2018Sep 5, 201809/5/18

One of the best traits of a well-designed system is composability. Large systems are complex and hierarchical and one of the best ways to fight accidental complexity is to compose a system from smaller components. You write and test each component independently then you glue them together to achieve a higher-level behavior.

One user scenario to rule them all

Sergey TepliakovFebruary 14, 2018Feb 14, 201802/14/18

The async series

Dissecting the async methods in C#.
Extending the async methods in C#.
The performance characteristics of the async methods in C#.
One user scenario to rule them all.

Almost every non-trivial behavior of the async methods in C# can be explained based on one user scenario: migration of the existing synchronous code to asynchronous should be as simple as possible.

TaskSchedulers and semaphores

Andrew ArnottFebruary 6, 2016Feb 6, 201602/6/16

When you write multi-threaded code, it’s important to be aware of whether the code in other libraries you call into is also thread-safe. By my observation, most code written is not thread-safe. So if you’re writing thread-safe code, kudos to you.

Completing the Redundancy Story of API Manager

Premier DeveloperNovember 9, 2018Nov 9, 201811/9/18

In a previous post I discussed an approach to handling backend redundancy using Azure API Manager (APIM). In this post I want to discuss the various options for providing a high-availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) to your services exposed by API Manager.

AZURE BASTION – SECURE ACCESS to AZURE VMS

Premier DeveloperApril 12, 2020Apr 12, 202004/12/20

Azure Bastion is a new fully platform-managed PaaS service. It provides secure and seamless RDP/SSH connectivity to your virtual machines directly in the Azure portal over SSL.

B2C Identity Experience Framework – getting started

Premier DeveloperApril 11, 2020Apr 11, 202004/11/20

This sample configures an existing B2C tenant for use with Identity Experience Framework custom policies. It performs all tasks defined in the getting started document except creating a Facebook signing key required by some starter policies.

Customizing Azure DevOps with Extensions

Premier DeveloperApril 9, 2020Apr 9, 202004/9/20

Before embarking on building your own extension, I would endorse looking through the Marketplace for a solution, when I last looked there were over 1250 extensions available to add to your system.

Integrate Azure API Management with Okta

Premier DeveloperApril 8, 2020Apr 8, 202004/8/20

In this post, App Dev Manager Chris Hanna explains how to integrate Okta with Azure API Management for authentication.

Integrating Support cases into your DevOps process with the Azure Support API

Premier DeveloperApril 6, 2020Apr 6, 202004/6/20

So you have a fairly mature DevOps model in-place but you are missing the ability to integrate Azure Support issues into your processes. Well, that is no longer the case as we have released to the public our Azure Support Ticket REST API.

[Service Fabric] Using the Azure Files Volume driver with multiple volumes

Premier DeveloperApril 5, 2020Apr 5, 202004/5/20

I was recently working with a customer who has an application running in a Windows container and that application outputs log files into different folders inside of the container. Their log extraction process was to manually remote desktop into the node, then go into the container to get the logs out.

AKS Series–Monitor AKS Cluster with Prometheus – Basic Monitoring – Part 2

Premier DeveloperApril 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20

Premier Developer Consultant Monu Bambroo explores how to use Prometheus Server on AKS for enhanced monitoring and deeper insights.

Implement App Insights Telemetry Processor in Azure Functions

Premier DeveloperApril 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20

Telemetry Processor is a plug-ins that can be ingested in your application to customize how telemetry can be processed before it’s sent to the Application Insights service such as filtering out telemetry, replace or discard a telemetry item, etc.

Mock your APIs in Azure API Management and speed up development

Premier DeveloperApril 2, 2020Apr 2, 202004/2/20

With microservice architecture being as popular as it is today, being able to Mock your services makes it easy to get all your developers coding right away. We no longer have to wait for backend services to be completely developed or spend time coding throw away responses to provide our calling applications.

Leverage ServicesHub for All of Your Training Needs!

Premier DeveloperApril 1, 2020Apr 1, 202004/1/20

ServicesHub, which replaces the legacy Premier Portal is the central tool for interaction with Unified Support. The ServicesHub is partitioned into four child sections beneath the Home page: “Support”, “IT Health”, “Learning”, and “Resources”.

Sharing gRPC ProtoBuf contracts using a REST endpoint

Premier DeveloperMarch 18, 2020Mar 18, 202003/18/20

One of the challenges of implementing gRPC services is distributing the required ProtoBuf contracts and updates to clients. Delivering the contracts using a URL can make the services easier to use and discover. Learn how you can use ASP.NET Core static files middleware to distribute your proto files.

Collecting and Analyzing Dumps with .Net Core on Linux

Premier DeveloperJanuary 21, 2020Jan 21, 202001/21/20

In this post, App Dev Manager Andrew Kanieski discuss options for collecting and analyzing dump files of your .NET Core apps running on Linux.

Understanding how to port your ASP.NET web apps to ASP.NET Core

Premier DeveloperJanuary 20, 2020Jan 20, 202001/20/20

There are several reasons that developers and architects may consider moving to ASP.NET Core. In this post, learn all the considerations when planning an upgrade from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core.

Integrating Blazor Components into existing Asp.Net Core MVC apps

Premier DeveloperJanuary 17, 2020Jan 17, 202001/17/20

In this post, Premier Consultant Wael Kdouh explains how to run Blazor Components in existing ASP.NET Core MVC apps.

Go from a C# Developer’s Perspective

Premier DeveloperSeptember 27, 2019Sep 27, 201909/27/19

As a cloud developer, I increasingly encounter projects that involves Go. Azure services such as AKS, Blockchain, Terraform, and supporting technologies such as Helm are all heavily Go. In addition, Go is a first-class citizen on Azure as all core PaaS SDKs offer Go libraries. In this post, let's compare Go and C# key concepts.

Workshop Spotlight: Modern Authentication and Authorization

Premier DeveloperSeptember 20, 2019Sep 20, 201909/20/19

Building applications operating in the internet environment requires understanding of options available for performing authentication and authorization. These options include, both a variety of protocols such as OAuth2 and WS-Federation, as well as tools and toolkits such as Azure AD, AD FS and ADAL.

Update My Blog Via Email with Azure Functions

Premier DeveloperSeptember 6, 2019Sep 6, 201909/6/19

In this post, App Dev Manager Isaac Levin showcase the versatility of Azure Function with a solution that updates his Blog via Email.

I have blogged about the changes I made to streamline my site architecture and continue to work on ways to improve it.

Introduction to ML.NET with Permutation Feature Importance

Premier DeveloperAugust 23, 2019Aug 23, 201908/23/19

ML.NET enables developers to implement machine learning tasks like classification, regression, clustering, and recommendation ... etc. In this post, I will show you how to get started with ML.NET implementing permutation feature importance for employee attrition.

gRPC + ASP.NET Core as a Migration Path for WCFs in .NET Core

Premier DeveloperAugust 21, 2019Aug 21, 201908/21/19

The intended audience for this blog post is one who wants to migrate from the full .Net Framework to .NET Core and has a large library of WCFs, now considered technical debt. This post will attempt to at least partially answer the question: How difficult will it be to migrate my current code base of WCFs to gRPC in .NET Core?

Versioning REST APIs in Azure Serverless

Premier DeveloperJuly 24, 2019Jul 24, 201907/24/19

In this post, you will see practical examples on how to version Logic Apps and Function Apps for breaking and non-breaking changes with common API versioning schemes and related techniques such as API gateway pattern.

Combining iterator blocks and async methods in C#

Sergey TepliakovSeptember 5, 2018Sep 5, 201809/5/18

One of the best traits of a well-designed system is composability. Large systems are complex and hierarchical and one of the best ways to fight accidental complexity is to compose a system from smaller components. You write and test each component independently then you glue them together to achieve a higher-level behavior.

Making the Transition: The key differences between university and working in the industry

Premier DeveloperJanuary 7, 2020Jan 7, 202001/7/20

Premier Developer Consultants, Ashley Shorter & Tamar Zamba, describe the experiences, challenges, and lessons of going from undergrad to Microsoft Consultant.

Meetup RECAP – Automated Testing for Excel Workbooks

Premier DeveloperOctober 16, 2019Oct 16, 201910/16/19

Check out the innovative ways to use Python with Excel from a recent community Meetup event in NYC.

Is the latest technology the key to your team’s success, or is there something else?

Premier DeveloperJune 15, 2019Jun 15, 201906/15/19

We experienced many different emotions with what seemed like a daunting task. What made it less daunting, the facilitators reminded us, was that we are not alone - we are team - so, leverage each other.

Hour of Code and Minecraft for All Ages

Premier DeveloperMay 23, 2019May 23, 201905/23/19

Learn how to organize and run your own successful Hour of Code learning events.

My Experience Starting a FIRST LEGO League Jr. Team

Premier DeveloperApril 10, 2019Apr 10, 201904/10/19

Programs, like FIRST, are important because they are creating the next generation of leaders and doers. Through the programs, the kids learn to work together to make the world a better place. If I can make a difference with just one kid, then I feel I have accomplished my goal of helping shape our future leaders make the world a better place.

Understanding different GC modes with Concurrency Visualizer

Sergey TepliakovJanuary 5, 2017Jan 5, 201701/5/17

In this post I’m going to visualize what exactly happens during Garbage Collection (GC) and how different GC modes can significantly affect application performance.
I assume that the reader is familiar with garbage collection basics. If this isn’t the case I encourage you to spend 15 minutes to fill this gap,

Dissecting the ActionBlock: a Short Story About a Nasty Deadlock

Sergey TepliakovDecember 20, 2016Dec 20, 201612/20/16

I think almost every project in the real world uses some form of producer-consumer queue. The idea behind this problem is very simple. Application needs to decouple consumers of some data from the logic that processes it. Consider, for instance, the thread pool from the CLR: application can schedule some work using ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem and the thread pool will do its best to maximize application throughput by using optimal number of threads that will process the input data.

Machine Learning – Lessons from our POC

Premier DeveloperApril 10, 2020Apr 10, 202004/10/20

Using multiple algorithms and tuning the algorithms to find the optimum value for each parameter also improves the accuracy of the model. However, it is not necessary that higher accuracy models always give the accurate results, as sometimes, the improvement in model’s accuracy can be due to over-fitting too.

Azure API for FHIR

Premier DeveloperJanuary 15, 2020Jan 15, 202001/15/20

Azure API for FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) enables rapid exchange of data through FHIR APIs, backed by a managed Platform-as-a Service (PaaS) offering in the cloud. It makes it easier for anyone working with health data to ingest, manage, and persist Protected Health Information PHI in the cloud.

Secure Access to Azure SQL Servers for Power BI

Premier DeveloperJanuary 14, 2020Jan 14, 202001/14/20

How do you refresh Power BI datasets in the Power BI service from Azure SQL server resources while restricting traffic to specific resources? Learn how using the On-Premises Data Gateway and SQL endpoints can help you tighten security.

DBA’s thoughts about monitoring SQL Server in Azure

Premier DeveloperDecember 30, 2019Dec 30, 201912/30/19

Monitoring our systems is key to a healthy, predictable, and stable environment. Learn how Azure Monitor helps simplify monitoring of Azure solutions including data platforms such as Azure SQL.

DACPAC always changes previously replicated tables on the target

Premier DeveloperDecember 29, 2019Dec 29, 201912/29/19

Learn how to prevent the DACPAC from rebuilding all objects that once participated in transactional replication and have no changes in development.

Meetup RECAP – Automated Testing for Excel Workbooks

Premier DeveloperOctober 16, 2019Oct 16, 201910/16/19

Check out the innovative ways to use Python with Excel from a recent community Meetup event in NYC.

Dynamics 365 Implementation Pt. 3 – Postman

Premier DeveloperMay 31, 2019May 31, 201905/31/19

With tools such as Postman, you can easily send HTTP requests to your APIs. This technique can help test the fields that are being added to the integration message to see if they pass or fail. This helps in the efforts to test if the integration message being sent will successfully get posted in Dynamics 365.

Understanding how Microsoft Azure keeps your data safe

Premier DeveloperMay 28, 2019May 28, 201905/28/19

When it comes to data, there is never a thing as too much security. With identify theft and breaches becoming a daily occurrence, ensuring sensitive information is protected is essential to business. Microsoft Azure has been designed from the ground-up to be one of the most secure places to store your information. Let me prove it!

Dynamics 365 Implementation Pt. 2 – Data Migration Process

Premier DeveloperMay 27, 2019May 27, 201905/27/19

Throughout a typical Dynamics project, various environments are setup to prevent the existing environments from being affected by the changes being pushed to an environment. This is the model most firms follow when they have mastered the release sequence in their CI/CD.

AKS Series – Use Azure Storage Option as Persistent Volumes in AKS

Premier DeveloperApril 19, 2019Apr 19, 201904/19/19

One of the best practices with containers is not to persist data inside the containers for long term as containers are ephermal. These containers can be removed and rebuilt very often and may require storage that persists across pods beyond the application lifecycle. In this blog post, we will learn about how to create Persistent Volumes in AKS with Azure Files.

AKS Series–Monitor AKS Cluster with Prometheus – Basic Monitoring – Part 2

Premier DeveloperApril 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20

Premier Developer Consultant Monu Bambroo explores how to use Prometheus Server on AKS for enhanced monitoring and deeper insights.

Application Insights – Use case for TelemetryClient flush calls

Premier DeveloperMarch 31, 2020Mar 31, 202003/31/20

Ideally, the right usage pattern for Flush method is when the application encountered something unexpected, shutting down and needs to upload exception before crashing.

Modernize your legacy Windows desktop apps with ease using Xaml Islands

Premier DeveloperMarch 31, 2020Mar 31, 202003/31/20

Xaml Islands enables developers to enhance the look, feel and functionality of legacy Win32 C++ or WPF apps using UWP controls without having to do a complete rewrite. Xaml islands also offers the ability to leverage new UI controls on specific parts of the app so you can modernize at your own pace.

5 Reasons Why Engaging with Your End Users Improves Your Code

Premier DeveloperMarch 30, 2020Mar 30, 202003/30/20

One of the biggest mistakes I see in any project is the development team failing to get outside feedback. Whether project teams wait until the very end of a project to reach our or they don’t get feedback at all, these teams are missing out on one of the best sources of information to help build a better solution.

From 0 to continuously delivered microservices applications – part 2

Premier DeveloperMarch 25, 2020Mar 25, 202003/25/20

In part 1 of this blog post series, I talked about one of the most critical “technologies” that people leverage to create microservices, and that is containers. In this post we will discover, the most used product to create and run containers and that is Docker.

Evolutionary Change to Cloud Computing

Premier DeveloperMarch 24, 2020Mar 24, 202003/24/20

As the cloud visionary, your job is to keep your band of pioneers dogmatically cloud native. You will be able to back off the dogma after a while, but one of the best ways to get out of an old groove and in to a new one is to use a well-defined methodology.

Microsoft Teams for Developers – 5 Ways to fortify your dev team while working remotely

Premier DeveloperMarch 22, 2020Mar 22, 202003/22/20

Working effectively as remote teams has never been more critical. Remote work brings significant challenges to development teams, especially as more and more organizations place a premium on working remotely.

Sharing gRPC ProtoBuf contracts using a REST endpoint

Premier DeveloperMarch 18, 2020Mar 18, 202003/18/20

One of the challenges of implementing gRPC services is distributing the required ProtoBuf contracts and updates to clients. Delivering the contracts using a URL can make the services easier to use and discover. Learn how you can use ASP.NET Core static files middleware to distribute your proto files.

In-Memory OLTP Best Practices – Part 1

Premier DeveloperMarch 11, 2020Mar 11, 202003/11/20

In this multi-part series, App Dev Manager Jon Guerin and Premier Consultant Daniel Taylor (@dbabulldog) lays out some best practices around setting up and using In-Memory OLTP.

Technical Debt – The Anti-DevOps Culture

Premier DeveloperMarch 5, 2020Mar 5, 202003/5/20

Technical Debt can be defined as as “the concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) and faster solution now instead of a using a better approach that would take longer”

10 Reasons to Avoid DevOps

Premier DeveloperApril 13, 2020Apr 13, 202004/13/20

In this post, Premier DevOps Consultant Assaf Stone touches on 10 realities you must consider before implementing a DevOps transformation.

Customizing Azure DevOps with Extensions

Premier DeveloperApril 9, 2020Apr 9, 202004/9/20

Before embarking on building your own extension, I would endorse looking through the Marketplace for a solution, when I last looked there were over 1250 extensions available to add to your system.

Integrating Support cases into your DevOps process with the Azure Support API

Premier DeveloperApril 6, 2020Apr 6, 202004/6/20

So you have a fairly mature DevOps model in-place but you are missing the ability to integrate Azure Support issues into your processes. Well, that is no longer the case as we have released to the public our Azure Support Ticket REST API.

InnerSource with Azure DevOps

Premier DeveloperApril 4, 2020Apr 4, 202004/4/20

Azure DevOps provides features that enable your organization and teams adopt modern software engineering practices, such as InnerSource using features like forks and pull requests. Thus, enabling and encouraging code sharing and reuse thereby reducing engineering costs, facilitating faster time to market, and additional feature enablement.

Improving Angular CI Build Time Using Azure DevOps “Cache Task”

Premier DeveloperMarch 26, 2020Mar 26, 202003/26/20

As demonstrated above I was able to drop the build time from 5m 10s to 2m 34s which is roughly a 50% reduction in build time. This is a significant saving especially when you factor in the fact that you will run the build several times a day. This can quickly add up to hours of saved build time each day.

Using Azure DevOps Artifacts as Upstream from another Organization

Premier DeveloperMarch 25, 2020Mar 25, 202003/25/20

In this post, App Dev Manager Chris Westbrook explores scenarios for Azure Artifacts upstream sources.

GitHub with Azure DevOps

Premier DeveloperMarch 23, 2020Mar 23, 202003/23/20

With GitHub and Azure DevOps you have a powerful combination of tools to help you develop world class applications where you are an open source or enterprise developer.

DevOps for low code Business Applications

Premier DeveloperMarch 19, 2020Mar 19, 202003/19/20

The tech industry has made great progress over the last few years building low code environments such as Power Platform. Overall, the robust features can bring great value to business quickly with world class integrations, wide array of user interface templates and outstanding mobile functionality.

Converting Classic Azure DevOps Pipelines to YAML

Premier DeveloperMarch 16, 2020Mar 16, 202003/16/20

YAML based Pipelines are a great new feature to Azure DevOps that enables you to configure your CI/CD strategy as code, where, the Pipeline definition lives alongside and together with your code. This enables your DevOps teams to take advantage of pull requests, code reviews, history, branching, templates and much more.

DevOps Dojo de Microsoft Services

Premier DeveloperMarch 6, 2020Mar 6, 202003/6/20

Le DevOps Dojo: Ceinture blanche contient huit modules, chacun aligné sur les concepts clés DevOps tels que l’intégration continue, la sécurité continue, la planification continue et autres.

Avoiding struct and readonly reference performance pitfalls with ErrorProne.NET

Sergey TepliakovMay 3, 2018May 3, 201805/3/18

As you may know from my previous posts “The ‘in’-modifier and the readonly structs in C#” and “Performance traps of ref locals and ref returns in C#”, structs are trickier then you might think. Mutability aside, the behavior of readonly and non-readonly structs in “readonly”

Microsoft Build Kickoff 2019

Premier DeveloperMay 2, 2019May 2, 201905/2/19

Microsoft Build is set to kick off next week from May 6-8. As a developer, this is not an event you want to miss. Build sets the stage for what is to come from Microsoft in the months ahead-- announcements, strategy, and technology innovation that will shift the landscape.

Looking back at Build 2017–Going “All In” on Microsoft Azure

Premier DeveloperSeptember 28, 2017Sep 28, 201709/28/17

In this post, Senior App Dev Managers, Latha Natarajan and Sujith Nair reflect on some of the improvements and announcements from Build 2017 that made it even easier to enable your cloud transformation.  If you have been meaning to review the buzz from build,

Premier Developer @ Microsoft Build 2017

Premier DeveloperMay 12, 2017May 12, 201705/12/17

ADM’s Bill Bevan, Marty Donovan, Russ Clark, Joseph Flanigen, joined Garrett Jacobs (Services Market Strategy Director) representing Premier Developer @ BUILD 2017.

With another exciting Microsoft Build conference coming to a close, we’re inspired for the future, working with our partners on innovative solutions impacting the world.

Build sets the stage for developers in 2017

Premier DeveloperMay 11, 2017May 11, 201705/11/17

Developers from around the world came together this week as our Build Conference kicked off in Seattle. It’s always an inspiring time to hear new product announcements and seeing many new technologies in action for the first time. Build is sensory overload to anyone who loves technology,

UK Dev Briefing Day

Premier DeveloperAugust 4, 2016Aug 4, 201608/4/16

In this post, Senior Application Development Manager, Neal Champion shares an overview of the UK Dev Briefing Day.  This annual event typically runs in the spring of each year, covering up-to-date presentations on the latest tools and development capabilities for the Microsoft platform. 

Watch the BUILD 2016 Live Stream

Premier DeveloperMarch 29, 2016Mar 29, 201603/29/16

Microsoft continues to focus on enabling developers to do amazing work as businesses and industries transform in support of the shift to a cloud-first, mobile-first world. At Build 2016 we will present the latest tools and technologies and how they can help today’s developers be their most creative and productive.

Hololens Development Edition and Upcoming Roadshows (US)

Premier DeveloperOctober 14, 2015Oct 14, 201510/14/15

Microsoft HoloLens devices will begin shipping in the first quarter of 2016. Apply now to help develop the future of holographic computing.
Hololens Development Edition (Apply Here)
Prerequisites

You are a developer in the United States (including Puerto Rico) or Canada where the Development Edition will first be available.

You simply have to watch the Microsoft Windows 10 devices event

Premier DeveloperOctober 8, 2015Oct 8, 201510/8/15

This week marked one of the most amazing demonstrations of Microsoft’s vision for Windows 10 and connected devices.  There has simply never been a more exciting time to be a developer. 
Watch the event here!

Microsoft Ignite Starts Today!

Premier DeveloperMay 4, 2015May 4, 201505/4/15

Whether you’re a senior decision maker, IT professional or enterprise developer, you’ll be inspired by our vision of where technology is headed. Tailor your learning experience in this one-of-a-kind conference designed to fuel your business and give you a glimpse into the future.

BUILD 2015: Day 1 and Keynote Highlights

Premier DeveloperApril 29, 2015Apr 29, 201504/29/15

It may take some time to process all of the game changing announcements that came out of the BUILD keynote today. If you missed it, be sure and check out the on-demand recording here.
Satya framed up the road forward to build an intelligent cloud,

Garbage collection and variable lifetime tracking

Sergey TepliakovMay 9, 2017May 9, 201705/9/17

Here is a seemingly simple question for you: Is it possible that the CLR will call a finalizer for an instance when an instance method is still running? In other words, is it possible in the following case to see ‘Finalizing instance.’ before ‘Finished doing something.’?

Understanding different GC modes with Concurrency Visualizer

Sergey TepliakovJanuary 5, 2017Jan 5, 201701/5/17

In this post I’m going to visualize what exactly happens during Garbage Collection (GC) and how different GC modes can significantly affect application performance.
I assume that the reader is familiar with garbage collection basics. If this isn’t the case I encourage you to spend 15 minutes to fill this gap,

BUILD 2015: Day 1 and Keynote Highlights

Premier DeveloperApril 29, 2015Apr 29, 201504/29/15

It may take some time to process all of the game changing announcements that came out of the BUILD keynote today. If you missed it, be sure and check out the on-demand recording here.
Satya framed up the road forward to build an intelligent cloud,

Windows 10: The Next Chapter…with Holograms!

Premier DeveloperJanuary 21, 2015Jan 21, 201501/21/15

The live Windows 10 Briefing today was full of new information about innovative and groundbreaking technology aligned with the Windows 10 release.  Many of these announcements covered the seamless user experience across devices to make computing “more human”.  Spotlights included Windows 10 speech support and personal assistance via Cortona,

Misty Robotics and Azure

Premier DeveloperJanuary 15, 2020Jan 15, 202001/15/20

Social bots on the way. Now that we’ve voice commanded everything in our house, the natural next step is to give it a face, a response, a smile. When I demo’d Misty to our FIRST Robotics team, they immediately fell in love – it’s so cute, you just wanna pitch the cheeks.

Install IoT Edge on the Jetson TX2 running JetPack version 4.2

Premier DeveloperJune 14, 2019Jun 14, 201906/14/19

JetPack 4.2 includes an Ubuntu 18.04 environment and updates to CUDA, Tensorflow, and Open CV. One of the best changes is support for Python 3 in the version of Open CV provided. In JetPack 3.3 a build of Open CV was necessary to support Python 3, and this was not a trivial undertaking.

Designing IoT Applications for Failure: Cloud Design Patterns that leverage the Retry Pattern

Premier DeveloperApril 5, 2019Apr 5, 201904/5/19

The inherent nature of the cloud is that there can be momentary loss of network connectivity, temporary loss of service, and timeouts that can occur for a variety of reasons. By designing your application to handle these types of events gracefully, you can improve availability and minimize impact from transient events.

Getting Started with Windows 10 IoT Core & Raspberry Pi 3B+

Premier DeveloperMarch 12, 2019Mar 12, 201903/12/19

In this post, App Dev Manager, Robert Schumann shows how to get started with Windows 10 IoT Core with Raspberry Bi 3 B+.

Jumping right in, let’s get a few matters out of the way upfront.

This article specifically uses the Raspberry Pi 3 model B+

If you’re not sure what model of Pi you’re running then review how-to details here: https://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2012/09/checking-your-raspberry-pi-board-version/

Topics covered should take about 30 minutes to complete provided everything you need is readily available.

Remote Monitoring of IoT Devices Using Azure and HoloLens

Premier DeveloperDecember 21, 2018Dec 21, 201812/21/18

This is going to be an IoT solution, which receives data from connected devices, stores the data and makes it available for consumption by a holographic or mobile application. So, you will first learn to set up the backend infrastructure--where you will have a device--which connects with a Cloud Gateway. Data received by the Cloud Gateway is stored within persistent storage, and finally, this data will be made available to a Holographic or Mobile app through Web APIs.

Easy as Pi IoT on Windows 10 and Azure IoT Central!

Premier DeveloperNovember 7, 2018Nov 7, 201811/7/18

Have you ever tried building an IoT solution on an embedded device like a Raspberry Pi with an ARM processor? What languages did you have to use? What if that device had to send data to the cloud for dashboarding and alerting? How would you build the dashboard and manage alerts for authorized users?

How Azure IoT helped me buy a new house – Part 4 – Azure IoT Hub

Premier DeveloperJune 4, 2018Jun 4, 201806/4/18

In the fourth post of his series, Premier Developer Consultant Steve St Jean expands on how Azure IoT helped him buy a new home. He goes into detail about how to configure within the Azure IoT Hub.

In the first part of this series,

How Azure IoT helped me buy a new house – Part 3 – ESP8266 Code

Premier DeveloperJune 1, 2018Jun 1, 201806/1/18

In the third post of his series, Premier Developer Consultant Steve St Jean expands on how Azure IoT helped him buy a new home. He goes into detail about writing the code for the sensor rig to send telemetry data to Azure IoT Hub.

How Azure IoT helped me buy a new house – Part 2 – Electronics

Premier DeveloperMay 29, 2018May 29, 201805/29/18

In the second post of his series, Premier Developer Consultant Steve St Jean expands on how Azure IoT helped him buy a new home. He goes into detail about developing the IoT sensor rig.

In the first part of this series,

How Azure IoT helped me buy a new house – Part 1

Premier DeveloperMay 17, 2018May 17, 201805/17/18

Premier Developer Consultant, Steve St Jean, shares a personal story on how he used Azure IoT to figure out a solution to a problem that many of us face – high electric bills. In the series, Steve shares the process and code that he used to implement this solution.

AKS Series–Monitor AKS Cluster with Prometheus – Basic Monitoring – Part 2

Premier DeveloperApril 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20

Premier Developer Consultant Monu Bambroo explores how to use Prometheus Server on AKS for enhanced monitoring and deeper insights.

AKS Series – Monitoring Application(s) inside AKS with Prometheus and Azure Monitor

Premier DeveloperJanuary 3, 2020Jan 3, 202001/3/20

AKS to bring rapid development, deployment, scale and monitoring for your applications with confidence. Prometheus is a leading open source monitoring solution. Learn how to integrate Prometheus with AKS for your application monitoring needs.

A Survey of Kubernetes Features in Azure

Premier DeveloperSeptember 25, 2019Sep 25, 201909/25/19

Using Azure services like AKS, Azure Container Instances and Azure Dev Spaces makes setting up a cluster and testing your containers relatively simple.

Astuces pour réussir votre certification CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer)

Premier DeveloperSeptember 18, 2019Sep 18, 201909/18/19

Dans cet article, Nous vous proposons des astuces pour réussir votre certification de développeur Kubernetes (CKAD – Certified Kubernetes Application Developer).

Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) Exam Tips

Premier DeveloperAugust 13, 2019Aug 13, 201908/13/19

In this post, we'll offer guidance on preparing for the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) exam.

AKS Series– Using Azure Dev Spaces with Visual Studio Kubernetes Tooling

Premier DeveloperApril 22, 2019Apr 22, 201904/22/19

Azure Kubernetes Service brings a world class managed kubernetes service to the cloud. Customers can now leverage the power of Kubernetes platform without having to worry about managing the control plane. As a result of that, customers are now able to embark on the containerization journey with confidence. In this blog post, we will see how Visual Studio makes it easy to collaborate with AKS using Azure Dev Spaces.

AKS Series – Use Azure Storage Option as Persistent Volumes in AKS

Premier DeveloperApril 19, 2019Apr 19, 201904/19/19

One of the best practices with containers is not to persist data inside the containers for long term as containers are ephermal. These containers can be removed and rebuilt very often and may require storage that persists across pods beyond the application lifecycle. In this blog post, we will learn about how to create Persistent Volumes in AKS with Azure Files.

Bypassing authentication for the local Kubernetes Cluster Dashboard

Premier DeveloperMarch 28, 2019Mar 28, 201903/28/19

It’s no secret that you can run a local version of Kubernetes on Docker Desktop for Windows, however, getting the Dashboard installed and configured correctly can be challenging. The problem is that the default installation requires you to manage an admin user and copy that user's bearer token into the portal to login.

Why you should consider VS Code for your Kubernetes/Docker work – Part 2

Premier DeveloperFebruary 22, 2019Feb 22, 201902/22/19

In this follow up article, we will cover how it can help to deploy Container images stored into Azure Container Registry (ACR). We will also cover the kubectl explain integration which is helpful to understand the structure of YAML files used to describe Kubernetes API objects.

Why you should consider VS Code for your Kubernetes/Docker work

Premier DeveloperDecember 26, 2018Dec 26, 201812/26/18

VS Code can really be the platform of choice to benefit from the best features. Furthermore, its cross platform support allow users to have the same customer experience on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac OS).

AKS Series–Monitor AKS Cluster with Prometheus – Basic Monitoring – Part 2

Premier DeveloperApril 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20

Premier Developer Consultant Monu Bambroo explores how to use Prometheus Server on AKS for enhanced monitoring and deeper insights.

From 0 to continuously delivered microservices applications – part 2

Premier DeveloperMarch 25, 2020Mar 25, 202003/25/20

In part 1 of this blog post series, I talked about one of the most critical “technologies” that people leverage to create microservices, and that is containers. In this post we will discover, the most used product to create and run containers and that is Docker.

Dapr in a microservices architecture

Premier DeveloperMarch 4, 2020Mar 4, 202003/4/20

Dapr is an event driven runtime that helps to build stateless and stateful microservice applications, with a diversity of languages and frameworks.

Windows Server 2003 Migration (Part 1) – coping when reality interferes with the plan.

Premier DeveloperSeptember 25, 2015Sep 25, 201509/25/15

In Part 1 of this 5 part series, Senior Application Development Manager, Chuck Goodspeed, shares insights and lessons from a large Windows Server 2003 migration.

July of 2015, Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 came to an end.
By this point of time,

Machine Learning – Lessons from our POC

Premier DeveloperApril 10, 2020Apr 10, 202004/10/20

Using multiple algorithms and tuning the algorithms to find the optimum value for each parameter also improves the accuracy of the model. However, it is not necessary that higher accuracy models always give the accurate results, as sometimes, the improvement in model’s accuracy can be due to over-fitting too.

AI, ML & Data Science – Explained

Premier DeveloperOctober 4, 2019Oct 4, 201910/4/19

Where would you find all three (AI, ML and DS) at work? The most common place today is in autonomous driving vehicles. All three disciplines work together to help train an algorithm to recognize obstacles (MS), then to provide real-time actions (AI) to the vehicle, all based on large amounts of information that data science (DS) can analyze.

Introduction to ML.NET with Permutation Feature Importance

Premier DeveloperAugust 23, 2019Aug 23, 201908/23/19

ML.NET enables developers to implement machine learning tasks like classification, regression, clustering, and recommendation ... etc. In this post, I will show you how to get started with ML.NET implementing permutation feature importance for employee attrition.

Exploring Feature Weights using R and Azure Machine Learning Studio

Premier DeveloperMarch 1, 2019Mar 1, 201903/1/19

I find that machine learning experiment’s results are always interesting and somewhat unexpected in certain cases. On this comparison, the feature ranking results of PFI are often different from the feature selection statistics that are utilized before a model is created. This is useful in many cases, especially when training “black-box” models where it is difficult to explain how the model characterizes the relationship between the features and the target variable.

Preventing Single Sign On (SSO) Redirects From Opening a New Window Inside a Progressive Web Application (PWA)

Premier DeveloperDecember 7, 2018Dec 7, 201812/7/18

I was recently working on a PWA application that utilizes SSO and one odd behavior that I noticed right off the bat was the fact that the SSO redirects forces the application to open a new window inside the browser instead of carrying the redirect inside the application shell. This is problematic as it defies the whole purpose of a PWA which attempts to make a web application feel native.

Building cross-platform Xamarin.Forms apps in VSTS

Monu BambrooAugust 23, 2016Aug 23, 201608/23/16

In a recent post from his blog, Premier Developer Consultant Jim Blizzard shows how to navigate past some of the issues when setting up VSTS builds for a multi-project Xamarin.Forms solution.

The other day I wanted to create a DevOps CI / CD pipeline for a simple Xamarin.Forms app that I’d created.

Global resources in Xamarin Forms! No App.xaml? Create one!

Monu BambrooJuly 23, 2016Jul 23, 201607/23/16

In a recent post from his blog, Premier Developer Consultant Joe Healy shows us how to create global resources in Xamarin Forms.

Xaml developers moving to Xamarin Forms are hoping to take some of their good habits from the Windows (WPF/Silverlight/UWP) dev world with them (probably a few of their bad ones as well but we don’t want to talk about those). 

Maximize code on the Mobile Platform of your choice

Premier DeveloperApril 22, 2016Apr 22, 201604/22/16

In this blog post, Application Development Managers, Derrick Sharpe and Justin Wendlandt, highlight the many options to maximize development productivity across a range of mobile platforms, including Windows 10, Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and more.

Contrary to popular belief, the Windows Phone application development landscape is not dead. 

Visual Studio 2015 RTM and Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 Released!

Premier DeveloperJuly 20, 2015Jul 20, 201507/20/15

Today, we are happy to announce availability of Visual Studio 2013/TFS 2013 Update 5 and the release of Visual Studio 2015 RTM. This Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of Visual Studio 2015 includes many new features and updates, such as tools for Universal Windows app development,

Routing in Blazor Apps

Premier DeveloperMarch 30, 2020Mar 30, 202003/30/20

Based on the current implementation, Blazor Router makes routing much easier to implement and developer hardly need to maintain routing as the application evolves. Bugs due to misconfiguration of routing might become a thing of the past.

Push an ASP.NET Core API Container to Azure Container Registry Part 2 of 2

Premier DeveloperMarch 28, 2020Mar 28, 202003/28/20

ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform, open-source framework for building modern , cloud-based, connected applications. With ASP.NET core you can build web apps, API APS, Microservices, mobile backends, and IoT apps.

Hosting and ASP.NET Core API in a Container Part 1 of 2 – Building the Container

Premier DeveloperMarch 28, 2020Mar 28, 202003/28/20

ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform, open-source framework for building modern , cloud-based, connected applications. With ASP.NET core you can build web apps, API APS, Microservices, Mobile backends, and IoT apps.

.NET Platforms Feature Comparison

Premier DeveloperMarch 20, 2020Mar 20, 202003/20/20

There are situations where people would like to have a comprehensive view of the feature comparison. Instead of digging into every feature across all three platform, I compiled a list of name spaces in each platform and put them side by side so you can easily see the differences.

Sharing gRPC ProtoBuf contracts using a REST endpoint

Premier DeveloperMarch 18, 2020Mar 18, 202003/18/20

One of the challenges of implementing gRPC services is distributing the required ProtoBuf contracts and updates to clients. Delivering the contracts using a URL can make the services easier to use and discover. Learn how you can use ASP.NET Core static files middleware to distribute your proto files.

Leverage QnA Maker Search within a Client Application

Premier DeveloperFebruary 7, 2020Feb 7, 202002/7/20

QnA Maker is an Azure Cognitive Service that enables you to ask questions and get answers from a knowledgebase built from your own documentation. In this post, learn how to integrate a QnA Maker knowledgebase into a client application.

Accessing Azure Resource Consumption Data Using .NET

Premier DeveloperJanuary 29, 2020Jan 29, 202001/29/20

I thought it would be helpful to show you how you can access your Azure resource consumption data via .NET. Having access to this data at the code level can allow ways to do other things if a budget limit is reached for a particular resource.

Collecting and Analyzing Dumps with .Net Core on Linux

Premier DeveloperJanuary 21, 2020Jan 21, 202001/21/20

In this post, App Dev Manager Andrew Kanieski discuss options for collecting and analyzing dump files of your .NET Core apps running on Linux.

Understanding how to port your ASP.NET web apps to ASP.NET Core

Premier DeveloperJanuary 20, 2020Jan 20, 202001/20/20

There are several reasons that developers and architects may consider moving to ASP.NET Core. In this post, learn all the considerations when planning an upgrade from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core.

Hosting a Containerized Client Side Blazor Application On Azure

Premier DeveloperJanuary 9, 2020Jan 9, 202001/9/20

In this post, Premier Consultant Wael Kdouh explains how to containerize a client-side Blazor application for Azure deployment.

The danger of TaskCompletionSource class

Sergey TepliakovOctober 1, 2018Oct 1, 201810/1/18

... when used with async/await.
TaskCompletionSource class is a very useful facility if you want to control the lifetime of a task manually. I share a canonical example when TaskCompletionSource is used for converting the event-based asynchronous code to the Task-based pattern.

Performance implications of default struct equality in C#

Sergey TepliakovJuly 17, 2018Jul 17, 201807/17/18

If you’re familiar with C#, then you most likely heard that you should always override Equals and GetHashCode for custom structs for performance reasons. To better understand the importance and the rationale behind this advice we’re going to look at the default behavior to see why and where the performance hit comes from.

The performance characteristics of async methods in C#

Sergey TepliakovJanuary 25, 2018Jan 25, 201801/25/18

The async series

Dissecting the async methods in C#.
Extending the async methods in C#.
The performance characteristics of the async methods in C#.
One user scenario to rule them all.

In the last two blog posts we’ve covered the internals of async methods in C# and then we looked at the extensibility points the C# compiler provides to adjust the behavior of async methods.

Extending the async methods in C#

Sergey TepliakovJanuary 11, 2018Jan 11, 201801/11/18

The async series

Dissecting the async methods in C#.
Extending the async methods in C#.
The performance characteristics of the async methods in C#.
One user scenario to rule them all.

In the previous blog post we discussed how the C# compiler transforms asynchronous methods.

Managed object internals, Part 4. Fields layout

Sergey TepliakovSeptember 21, 2017Sep 21, 201709/21/17

In the recent blog posts we’ve discussed invisible part of the object layout in the CLR:

Managed object internals, Part 1. The Layout
Managed object internals, Part 2. Object header layout and the cost of locking
Managed object internals, Part 3.

Managed object internals, Part 3. The layout of a managed array

Sergey TepliakovSeptember 12, 2017Sep 12, 201709/12/17

Arrays are one of the basic building blocks of every applications. Even if you do not use arrays directly every day you definitely use them indirectly as part of almost any library.
C# has arrays from the very beginning and back in the day that was the only “generic”-like and type safe data structure available.

Managed object internals, Part 2. Object header layout and the cost of locking

Sergey TepliakovSeptember 6, 2017Sep 6, 201709/6/17

Working on my current project I’ve faced a very interesting situation. For each object of a given type, I had to create a monotonically growing identifier with few caveats: 1) the solution should work in multithreaded environment 2) the number of objects is fairly large,

Managed object internals, Part 1. The layout

Sergey TepliakovMay 26, 2017May 26, 201705/26/17

The layout of a managed object is pretty simple: a managed object contains instance data, a pointer to a meta-data (a.k.a. method table pointer) and a bag of internal information also known as an object header.

The first time I’ve read about it,

To box or not to Box? That is the question!

Sergey TepliakovMay 17, 2017May 17, 201705/17/17

Discussions on reddit, hacker news.
Recently I’ve noticed that the Equal method from our ValueTuple (*) struct generates significant memory traffic (~1Gb). That was a bit of a surprise to me. This struct is well designed and was used pretty heavily in many performance critical scenarios.

Garbage collection and variable lifetime tracking

Sergey TepliakovMay 9, 2017May 9, 201705/9/17

Here is a seemingly simple question for you: Is it possible that the CLR will call a finalizer for an instance when an instance method is still running? In other words, is it possible in the following case to see ‘Finalizing instance.’ before ‘Finished doing something.’?

Enabling Remote Learning with Office 365 Education

Premier DeveloperApril 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20

In this post, I will go through the broad strokes of setting up Office 365 Education. The starting point is the Office 365 A1 trial sign up page.

Tracking Santa with Azure

Premier DeveloperJanuary 4, 2020Jan 4, 202001/4/20

Learn how Azure PaaS powers NORAD’s Santa Tracker allowing for 51 million Page Views with an average response time of 100MS across the globe.

Run Powerful Interactive Analytics Queries against Azure Service Fabric’s Internal Traces and Diagnostic Data

Premier DeveloperDecember 31, 2019Dec 31, 201912/31/19

Collect Service Fabric traces and diagnostic data with CollectServiceFabricData - a tool used by the Azure Service Fabric Support team to help diagnose and troubleshoot issues. Learn how to configure your cluster today and start using CollectServiceFabricData.

Azure VM and Disk Throttling

Premier DeveloperNovember 5, 2019Nov 5, 201911/5/19

Using Log Analytics to efficiently monitor Azure virtual machine disk throttling.

Insights to Application Awareness and Understanding

Premier DeveloperMay 16, 2019May 16, 201905/16/19

Application Insights is an Azure-hosted service which provides for in-depth application monitoring, whether running in the cloud or on-premise. It provides powerful tools for monitoring, analysis, and diagnosis, with capabilities such as live metrics streaming, tracking response times and failure rates, and much more.

Private CDN for hosting data on SharePoint for improving performance

Premier DeveloperApril 19, 2019Apr 19, 201904/19/19

When we target performance issues with SharePoint, the focus is generally on database related queries and all the requests that are being made to critical assets for the site like images, JavaScript files, CSS etc. A quick response time for these resources are vital for your page to function optimally.

Gathering real-time Perfmon Counters in a cluster

Premier DeveloperMarch 6, 2019Mar 6, 201903/6/19

Performance (aka. Perfmon) Counters are critical to understanding the health of and diagnosing issues on Windows. In recent performance and scalability testing of a solution built on top of Azure Service Fabric, we collected Perfmon Counters across 15 VMs and sent them to Log Analytics. This was very helpful; however, there were times when we wanted them to be real time.

Calculating server capacity and planning for future user growth

Premier DeveloperMarch 1, 2019Mar 1, 201903/1/19

Do I need to add more servers if my user load grows by 10% each month for the next 12 months? That is a hard question to answer. Unless you have an Application Platform Management solution, it is hard to correlate function calls to CPU time and response times.

Avoiding struct and readonly reference performance pitfalls with ErrorProne.NET

Sergey TepliakovMay 3, 2018May 3, 201805/3/18

As you may know from my previous posts “The ‘in’-modifier and the readonly structs in C#” and “Performance traps of ref locals and ref returns in C#”, structs are trickier then you might think. Mutability aside, the behavior of readonly and non-readonly structs in “readonly”

Performance traps of ref locals and ref returns in C#

Sergey TepliakovApril 11, 2018Apr 11, 201804/11/18

The C# language from the very first version supported passing arguments by value or by reference. But before C# 7 the C# compiler supported only one way of returning a value from a method (or a property) – returning by value.

The performance characteristics of async methods in C#

Sergey TepliakovJanuary 25, 2018Jan 25, 201801/25/18

The async series

Dissecting the async methods in C#.
Extending the async methods in C#.
The performance characteristics of the async methods in C#.
One user scenario to rule them all.

In the last two blog posts we’ve covered the internals of async methods in C# and then we looked at the extensibility points the C# compiler provides to adjust the behavior of async methods.

Machine Learning – Lessons from our POC

Premier DeveloperApril 10, 2020Apr 10, 202004/10/20

Using multiple algorithms and tuning the algorithms to find the optimum value for each parameter also improves the accuracy of the model. However, it is not necessary that higher accuracy models always give the accurate results, as sometimes, the improvement in model’s accuracy can be due to over-fitting too.

Customizing Azure DevOps with Extensions

Premier DeveloperApril 9, 2020Apr 9, 202004/9/20

Before embarking on building your own extension, I would endorse looking through the Marketplace for a solution, when I last looked there were over 1250 extensions available to add to your system.

AKS Series–Monitor AKS Cluster with Prometheus – Basic Monitoring – Part 2

Premier DeveloperApril 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20

Premier Developer Consultant Monu Bambroo explores how to use Prometheus Server on AKS for enhanced monitoring and deeper insights.

Leverage ServicesHub for All of Your Training Needs!

Premier DeveloperApril 1, 2020Apr 1, 202004/1/20

ServicesHub, which replaces the legacy Premier Portal is the central tool for interaction with Unified Support. The ServicesHub is partitioned into four child sections beneath the Home page: “Support”, “IT Health”, “Learning”, and “Resources”.

Application Insights – Use case for TelemetryClient flush calls

Premier DeveloperMarch 31, 2020Mar 31, 202003/31/20

Ideally, the right usage pattern for Flush method is when the application encountered something unexpected, shutting down and needs to upload exception before crashing.

Routing in Blazor Apps

Premier DeveloperMarch 30, 2020Mar 30, 202003/30/20

Based on the current implementation, Blazor Router makes routing much easier to implement and developer hardly need to maintain routing as the application evolves. Bugs due to misconfiguration of routing might become a thing of the past.

Using Azure DevOps Artifacts as Upstream from another Organization

Premier DeveloperMarch 25, 2020Mar 25, 202003/25/20

In this post, App Dev Manager Chris Westbrook explores scenarios for Azure Artifacts upstream sources.

From 0 to continuously delivered microservices applications – part 2

Premier DeveloperMarch 25, 2020Mar 25, 202003/25/20

In part 1 of this blog post series, I talked about one of the most critical “technologies” that people leverage to create microservices, and that is containers. In this post we will discover, the most used product to create and run containers and that is Docker.

Evolutionary Change to Cloud Computing

Premier DeveloperMarch 24, 2020Mar 24, 202003/24/20

As the cloud visionary, your job is to keep your band of pioneers dogmatically cloud native. You will be able to back off the dogma after a while, but one of the best ways to get out of an old groove and in to a new one is to use a well-defined methodology.

DevOps for low code Business Applications

Premier DeveloperMarch 19, 2020Mar 19, 202003/19/20

The tech industry has made great progress over the last few years building low code environments such as Power Platform. Overall, the robust features can bring great value to business quickly with world class integrations, wide array of user interface templates and outstanding mobile functionality.

Outlook Email Automation with PowerShell

Premier DeveloperNovember 8, 2019Nov 8, 201911/8/19

In this post, App Dev Manager Edward Fry demonstrates how to use Microsoft Outlook Object Library from PowerShell.

Introduction
Time is a precious commodity. For many professionals, there just aren’t enough hours to accomplish all the tasks in a day. Thankfully,

Azure Ultra Disk Storage is here

Premier DeveloperAugust 27, 2019Aug 27, 201908/27/19

With the recent GA announcement of Azure Ultra Disk Storage, customers now have access to Managed Disks for extremely high performance and mission critical workloads. With increased IOPS and throughput, it's important for architects to understand Azure's throttling limits to ensure they design systems optimally.

Using PowerShell to implement a Farm-wide Global Navigation solution from the Managed Metadata Term Store in SharePoint 2013

Premier DeveloperMay 18, 2017May 18, 201705/18/17

In this post, Application Development Managers, Daniel Setlock and John Spinella demonstrate how to export the Managed Metadata Term Store via PowerShell to a SiteMap, and import that SiteMap into a multi-tiered dropdown into the Structured Navigation within SharePoint through a code-less method.

US Developer Ramp-up Series

Premier DeveloperAugust 30, 2015Aug 30, 201508/30/15

The Developer Ramp-Up Series, offered through Premier Support for Developers, is a collection of webcasts created with the goal of teaching developers basic development skills. No prior knowledge is necessary. The current offering includes a collection of webcasts and hands on lab guides/exercises in the areas of PowerShell,

10 Reasons to Avoid DevOps

Premier DeveloperApril 13, 2020Apr 13, 202004/13/20

In this post, Premier DevOps Consultant Assaf Stone touches on 10 realities you must consider before implementing a DevOps transformation.

Machine Learning – Lessons from our POC

Premier DeveloperApril 10, 2020Apr 10, 202004/10/20

Using multiple algorithms and tuning the algorithms to find the optimum value for each parameter also improves the accuracy of the model. However, it is not necessary that higher accuracy models always give the accurate results, as sometimes, the improvement in model’s accuracy can be due to over-fitting too.

Customizing Azure DevOps with Extensions

Premier DeveloperApril 9, 2020Apr 9, 202004/9/20

Before embarking on building your own extension, I would endorse looking through the Marketplace for a solution, when I last looked there were over 1250 extensions available to add to your system.

From 0 to continuously delivered microservices applications – part 2

Premier DeveloperMarch 25, 2020Mar 25, 202003/25/20

In part 1 of this blog post series, I talked about one of the most critical “technologies” that people leverage to create microservices, and that is containers. In this post we will discover, the most used product to create and run containers and that is Docker.

Evolutionary Change to Cloud Computing

Premier DeveloperMarch 24, 2020Mar 24, 202003/24/20

As the cloud visionary, your job is to keep your band of pioneers dogmatically cloud native. You will be able to back off the dogma after a while, but one of the best ways to get out of an old groove and in to a new one is to use a well-defined methodology.

DevOps for low code Business Applications

Premier DeveloperMarch 19, 2020Mar 19, 202003/19/20

The tech industry has made great progress over the last few years building low code environments such as Power Platform. Overall, the robust features can bring great value to business quickly with world class integrations, wide array of user interface templates and outstanding mobile functionality.

Converting Classic Azure DevOps Pipelines to YAML

Premier DeveloperMarch 16, 2020Mar 16, 202003/16/20

YAML based Pipelines are a great new feature to Azure DevOps that enables you to configure your CI/CD strategy as code, where, the Pipeline definition lives alongside and together with your code. This enables your DevOps teams to take advantage of pull requests, code reviews, history, branching, templates and much more.

In-Memory OLTP Best Practices – Part 1

Premier DeveloperMarch 11, 2020Mar 11, 202003/11/20

In this multi-part series, App Dev Manager Jon Guerin and Premier Consultant Daniel Taylor (@dbabulldog) lays out some best practices around setting up and using In-Memory OLTP.

Updating Cosmos DB Documents with Azure Logic Apps

Premier DeveloperMarch 9, 2020Mar 9, 202003/9/20

When creating workflows with Azure Logic Apps, developers are often amazed at the amount of functionality at their fingertips. With a few simple clicks, you can create extremely capable automation, with integrations into multiple systems.

Flawless Demos using Git

Premier DeveloperJanuary 23, 2020Jan 23, 202001/23/20

Premier Consultant Andrew Charbonneau explains how he conducts flawless demos with help of Git.

Quantum Computing: Learn Now and Prepare for the Future

Premier DeveloperMay 26, 2019May 26, 201905/26/19

Microsoft is developing Q#, "the domain-specific programming languages used for expressing quantum algorithms." Ingest as much as you can. There are also a host of resources online from videos to White Papers, including resources on the Microsoft Quantum Computing site.

Quantum Computing for Software Developers – Part I

Premier DeveloperApril 18, 2019Apr 18, 201904/18/19

The underpinnings of quantum computing (QC) is quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, quantum mechanics is very weird and hard to understand. Most articles on QC are of the pop science variety and introductions to QC are usually heavy on mathematics (linear algebra). I want to do something different. I want to explain QC using the language of software development.

Integrate Azure API Management with Okta

Premier DeveloperApril 8, 2020Apr 8, 202004/8/20

In this post, App Dev Manager Chris Hanna explains how to integrate Okta with Azure API Management for authentication.

Microsoft TLS 1.3 Support Reference

Premier DeveloperJanuary 30, 2020Jan 30, 202001/30/20

I created this post in response to questions from one of my customers which may be useful to others regarding Microsoft’s support plans around TLS 1.3 and upcoming releases.

Microsoft Security Code Analysis – a tool that seamlessly empowers customers to enable security controls in your CI/CD pipeline

Premier DeveloperDecember 2, 2019Dec 2, 201912/2/19

We believe that Secure DevOps encompasses both a set of practices and a mindset shift to help customer adopt security principles and practices aligned with the culture shift and integrated with the practices, of DevOps. Secure DevOps practices include and build on those practices that are part of the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle.

Workshop Spotlight: Modern Authentication and Authorization

Premier DeveloperSeptember 20, 2019Sep 20, 201909/20/19

Building applications operating in the internet environment requires understanding of options available for performing authentication and authorization. These options include, both a variety of protocols such as OAuth2 and WS-Federation, as well as tools and toolkits such as Azure AD, AD FS and ADAL.

DevOps and Safety

Premier DeveloperAugust 6, 2019Aug 6, 201908/6/19

Beyond Lean, another important contributor to DevOps is the safety science movement. In this blog, Ron discusses this subject and show how important this is and how it changes the ways we think of the systems we build.

Choosing the OAuth2 grant flow

Premier DeveloperJune 17, 2019Jun 17, 201906/17/19

Premier Dev Consultant Marius Rochon explores OAuth2 questions you need to ask and how the answers lead to the selection of the grant.

The OAuth2 specifications define six different grant types (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6749 and https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-device-flow-15). Each provides the most optimal (from the security point of view) way of obtaining access or (for OIDC) id_tokens given the circumstances of the client application.

Understanding ‘Why’ you should take CompTIA’s Security+ Exam for DoD Programs

Premier DeveloperJune 16, 2019Jun 16, 201906/16/19

It is extremely difficult to find individuals with Security+ accreditation. Achieving this accreditation not only helps you but also helps defense contracting companies and the DoD community to fill in those national security related positions with those specialized needs.

Understanding how Microsoft Azure keeps your data safe

Premier DeveloperMay 28, 2019May 28, 201905/28/19

When it comes to data, there is never a thing as too much security. With identify theft and breaches becoming a daily occurrence, ensuring sensitive information is protected is essential to business. Microsoft Azure has been designed from the ground-up to be one of the most secure places to store your information. Let me prove it!

Using Groups in Azure AD B2C

Premier DeveloperMay 24, 2019May 24, 201905/24/19

Accessing Groups claims in Azure AD B2C requires adding some custom code through custom (IEF) policies. This post shows how to configure AD B2C IEF policies to access Groups in JWT Tokens.

Enabling DevOps in A Hybrid Cloud Environment at DoD

Premier DeveloperMay 22, 2019May 22, 201905/22/19

Learn how DoD leverages Azure DevOps to promote code from higher information level (IL) environment from a lower IL environment using Microsoft-Hosted and Self-Hosted Agents.

Connecting A Durable Function to SharePoint Online

Premier DeveloperApril 1, 2020Apr 1, 202004/1/20

We decided on another great Azure Resource, the Azure Durable Function, because we wanted to provide SharePoint a custom status that could be leveraged for a progress bar, we also had the need to build a separate function that had a workflow that could span hours or even days.

Create a Callout in SharePoint

Premier DeveloperMarch 17, 2020Mar 17, 202003/17/20

This post will give an example of creating a callout in SharePoint. The gd-sprest library was recently updated to include the SharePoint Callout Manager helper class, which we will be using for this example.

Get WebPart Information using REST

Premier DeveloperFebruary 17, 2020Feb 17, 202002/17/20

This post will give an example of getting WebPart information for a page, using the REST API. The gd-sprest library will be used for this example.

Connect to SharePoint using NodeJS

Premier DeveloperFebruary 13, 2020Feb 13, 202002/13/20

Premier Field Engineer Gunjan Datta demonstrates how to retrieve data from SharePoint using NodeJS.

Start a SharePoint Workflow using REST

Premier DeveloperJanuary 29, 2020Jan 29, 202001/29/20

This post will give an example of starting a SharePoint workflow using the REST API. The gd-sprest library was recently updated to include the SharePoint Workflow REST API endpoints, which we will be using for this example.

Implement App Insights Telemetry Processor in Azure Functions

Premier DeveloperApril 3, 2020Apr 3, 202004/3/20

Telemetry Processor is a plug-ins that can be ingested in your application to customize how telemetry can be processed before it’s sent to the Application Insights service such as filtering out telemetry, replace or discard a telemetry item, etc.

Application Insights – Use case for TelemetryClient flush calls

Premier DeveloperMarch 31, 2020Mar 31, 202003/31/20

Ideally, the right usage pattern for Flush method is when the application encountered something unexpected, shutting down and needs to upload exception before crashing.

Use Azure Application Insights in Java Spring Boot Projects

Premier DeveloperJanuary 13, 2020Jan 13, 202001/13/20

In this post, Premier Consultant Pete Tian demonstrate how to use Azure Application Insights in Java Spring Projects.

AKS Series – Monitoring Application(s) inside AKS with Prometheus and Azure Monitor

Premier DeveloperJanuary 3, 2020Jan 3, 202001/3/20

AKS to bring rapid development, deployment, scale and monitoring for your applications with confidence. Prometheus is a leading open source monitoring solution. Learn how to integrate Prometheus with AKS for your application monitoring needs.

Run Powerful Interactive Analytics Queries against Azure Service Fabric’s Internal Traces and Diagnostic Data

Premier DeveloperDecember 31, 2019Dec 31, 201912/31/19

Collect Service Fabric traces and diagnostic data with CollectServiceFabricData - a tool used by the Azure Service Fabric Support team to help diagnose and troubleshoot issues. Learn how to configure your cluster today and start using CollectServiceFabricData.

DBA’s thoughts about monitoring SQL Server in Azure

Premier DeveloperDecember 30, 2019Dec 30, 201912/30/19

Monitoring our systems is key to a healthy, predictable, and stable environment. Learn how Azure Monitor helps simplify monitoring of Azure solutions including data platforms such as Azure SQL.

How to Alert on Azure BLOB Access

Premier DeveloperOctober 9, 2019Oct 9, 201910/9/19

In this post, learn how to use Azure Monitor and Log Analytics to determine metrics not available under standard Metrics blade in Azure Portal. In this post, I will show you how to leverage Azure Storage $logs for enhanced reporting.

Insights to Application Awareness and Understanding

Premier DeveloperMay 16, 2019May 16, 201905/16/19

Application Insights is an Azure-hosted service which provides for in-depth application monitoring, whether running in the cloud or on-premise. It provides powerful tools for monitoring, analysis, and diagnosis, with capabilities such as live metrics streaming, tracking response times and failure rates, and much more.

Alerts based on Analytics query using Custom log search

Premier DeveloperJanuary 18, 2019Jan 18, 201901/18/19

One feature was removed in Application Insights called Scheduled Analytics, and now it is replaced with Custom Log Search which allows us to create an Alerts based on data analytics queries.

Microsoft Flow and PowerApps monitoring strategy

Premier DeveloperOctober 10, 2018Oct 10, 201810/10/18

Both Flow and PowerApps are great tools that can be in the hands of business and power users to accelerate the building of automated workflows and business apps across on-premise and the cloud services. It’s easy to see how there could be many such Flows and Apps built, deployed and running within your tenant. It’s a best practice for the IT administrators to devise a monitoring strategy in place that could proactively keep a watch on these Flows, Apps and other related resources and alert and perform remediation actions as necessary.

TaskSchedulers and semaphores

Andrew ArnottFebruary 6, 2016Feb 6, 201602/6/16

When you write multi-threaded code, it’s important to be aware of whether the code in other libraries you call into is also thread-safe. By my observation, most code written is not thread-safe. So if you’re writing thread-safe code, kudos to you.

Dissecting the async methods in C#

Sergey TepliakovNovember 30, 2017Nov 30, 201711/30/17

The async series

Dissecting the async methods in C#.
Extending the async methods in C#.
The performance characteristics of the async methods in C#.
One user scenario to rule them all.

The C# language is great for developer’s productivity and I’m glad for the recent push towards making it more suitable for high-performance applications.

Dissecting the ActionBlock: a Short Story About a Nasty Deadlock

Sergey TepliakovDecember 20, 2016Dec 20, 201612/20/16

I think almost every project in the real world uses some form of producer-consumer queue. The idea behind this problem is very simple. Application needs to decouple consumers of some data from the logic that processes it. Consider, for instance, the thread pool from the CLR: application can schedule some work using ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem and the thread pool will do its best to maximize application throughput by using optimal number of threads that will process the input data.

Leverage ServicesHub for All of Your Training Needs!

Premier DeveloperApril 1, 2020Apr 1, 202004/1/20

ServicesHub, which replaces the legacy Premier Portal is the central tool for interaction with Unified Support. The ServicesHub is partitioned into four child sections beneath the Home page: “Support”, “IT Health”, “Learning”, and “Resources”.

You need to invest in developers

Premier DeveloperOctober 15, 2019Oct 15, 201910/15/19

Investing in your people not only helps build essential, competitive skills but it can also reduce employee churn that will disrupt projects. Show me any highly effective dev team and I’ll show you passionate learners that share knowledge and try new things. These things go hand in hand.

Hour of Code and Minecraft for All Ages

Premier DeveloperMay 23, 2019May 23, 201905/23/19

Learn how to organize and run your own successful Hour of Code learning events.

How to link your MCP profile to a partner organization

Premier DeveloperMarch 22, 2019Mar 22, 201903/22/19

Anyone who has ever passed at least one of the Microsoft certification exams has a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) profile created with an ID (MCID) generated. This profile is now part of the Microsoft Learning platform that allows a person to track all activities related to certification accomplishments, both active and past.

AZ 203 Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure Study Guide

Premier DeveloperFebruary 12, 2019Feb 12, 201902/12/19

As a Microsoft employee who works with customers and a cloud enthusiast, I see it essential to be knowledgeable of how the cloud can bring the best value to the developer. Because of this, I am taking the AZ 203 exam, which is titled “Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure”. This exam was in beta for some time and was recently released proper in January 2019. Developers used to the Microsoft certification world will see this exam as a replacement for 70-532, which is the older iteration of Azure technology geared for developers. Passing this exam will reward developers with the “Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate” certification. Going forward, most Microsoft certifications are moving to a job-role based (great take by Chris Pietschmann at Build Azure) approach, which in my opinion is a good move, as it allows folks to focus on passing exams that contain content that will directly be used on the job.

Upcoming DevOps and Tech Conferences

Premier DeveloperJune 15, 2018Jun 15, 201806/15/18

Are you interested in learning about DevOps and the newest advances in technology? Do you want to challenge your development perspectives and current practices? Read this post from Premier Developer Consultant Brian Blackman to find an upcoming conference for you and your team to attend.

How to Engage Your Audience during Online Deliveries

Premier DeveloperMarch 21, 2018Mar 21, 201803/21/18

Interested in upping your online presentation game? Looking for some tips to engage your audience on Skype calls? Read this post by Premier Developer Consultant Daisy Chaussee to learn how.

Today’s modern, virtual world relies on the ability to deliver content remotely.

Debugging Windows Applications with DebugDiag Workshop

Premier DeveloperJuly 14, 2017Jul 14, 201707/14/17

This post is provided by Senior ADM, Jason Giordano, who spotlights our DebugDiag workshop available to Premier Support customers.

If you have ever engaged Microsoft to assist with an application hang or crash, chances are, DebugDiag was used at some point. 

US Workshops, Webcasts, and Tech Talks – Nov/Dec 2016 Update

Premier DeveloperNovember 14, 2016Nov 14, 201611/14/16

Teams struggle to keep up with the latest technology trends, so training and knowledge transfer are important investments to build the expertise required for optimal application and infrastructure.  It’s a great way to proactively stay in front of technical gaps that can manifest in the form of implementation delays,

US Workshops, Webcasts, and Tech Talks – October 2016 Update

Premier DeveloperOctober 14, 2016Oct 14, 201610/14/16

Teams struggle to keep up with the latest technology trends, so training and knowledge transfer are important investments to build the expertise required for optimal application and infrastructure.  It’s a great way to proactively stay in front of technical gaps that can manifest in the form of implementation delays,

Why are Compiled Data Bindings Important in XAML

Premier DeveloperJanuary 13, 2020Jan 13, 202001/13/20

Traditional data binding is expensive. It uses reflection and there are heavy demands on the CPU and on memory. In this post, Premier Consultant Bill Reiss explains how compiled bindings can improve performance in UWP apps.

5 User Centered Development Tactics to Start Using Today!

Premier DeveloperDecember 23, 2019Dec 23, 201912/23/19

With a mission to “empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more”— it’s increasingly important for Microsoft employees to have a conversation about User Centered Design4 (UCD). As developers, we are building products for people to use, so we need to ensure we are putting them at the center of it.

Accessibility at all stages: A Good-for-All SDLC approach

Premier DeveloperAugust 2, 2019Aug 2, 201908/2/19

Accessibility improves usability; considering accessibility reviews early-on and at all stages gives us an opportunity to not only save cycles of design, dev, and QA, but more importantly, it creates a more usable product for everyone.

The Cost of Bad UX Part 2: Improving the UI to Shrink Cost

Premier DeveloperApril 3, 2019Apr 3, 201904/3/19

This example illustrates why building a better UI and caring about how your end users is so valuable. Not only can it improve their experience, but it can also save your business time and money.

The Cost of Bad UX Part 1: Putting a price on look and feel

Premier DeveloperApril 3, 2019Apr 3, 201904/3/19

One thing that I’ve heard more than a few times while working in UX is that you can’t put a price on look and feel. Personally, I want to clear the air right now and say you absolutely can. It’s not hard, but it does require narrowing your focus to a particular workflow.

UX is not UI, but UI is definitely UX

Premier DeveloperJanuary 31, 2019Jan 31, 201901/31/19

When I first joined the Premier team here at Microsoft, a lot of the work I initially did for our customers was just that – advisory front-end design work. After many discussions about how I can provide value to our customers, I started to realize that even though words likes User Experience and User Centered Design are starting to be thrown out more and more in development, very few people have a full grasp of what exactly User Experience is.

.NET Conf 2019

Premier DeveloperSeptember 23, 2019Sep 23, 201909/23/19

.NET Conf 2019, a free, 3-day, virtual developer event

[Service Fabric] Why won’t Visual Studio connect to my cluster?

Premier DeveloperJune 11, 2019Jun 11, 201906/11/19

In this blog post, I’ll discuss something that has frustrated both myself and many others for quite a while, and that is, failure of Visual Studio to connect to an Azure Service Fabric cluster. We’ll be using Visual Studio 2017 as an example.

Installing .NET Core 3.0 preview to work with Visual Studio Code

Premier DeveloperJune 7, 2019Jun 7, 201906/7/19

I need to develop cross platform solutions and am often working in Linux, so I have taken to using Visual Studio Code as my IDE instead of Visual Studio.

Developing a Dockerized Asp.Net Core Application Using Visual Studio Code

Premier DeveloperJune 7, 2019Jun 7, 201906/7/19

Visual Studio Code offers feature parity with Visual Studio 2017/2019 when it comes to developing a containerized Asp.Net Core application. Since VSCode is cross platform, you can develop your next container DotNetCore application on a Linux or Mac while having access to all the great features that Windows users enjoy on VS2017/2019.

Paired Programming & Visual Studio Live Share

Premier DeveloperJanuary 25, 2019Jan 25, 201901/25/19

My first experience matched many of experiences I remember mentioned in the books I read. At first, paired programming was extremely intimidating. I had to pair with an extremely seasoned developer thinking that I was about to be proved that I was not as smart as I thought I was – see Imposter Syndrome. Well, I learned many lessons from this developer by pairing with him. And in the end the developer learned quite a bit from me.

Solving What’s Off About Monolithic Applications

Premier DeveloperOctober 2, 2018Oct 2, 201810/2/18

It's all about the people. The resistance to change is human nature. Leaders and team members alike. Assessing the team is simple. If they can demonstrate an openness to changing how they do things you are on track. If team conversations consist of why things must continue to be done the way they are being done success will be a challenge. But leadership is the real key. Effective change is a collaborative process and management's primary team facing role is keeping the team within the agreed upon boundaries. But of equal importance is securing and managing executive sponsorship. The team is pushing hard against their own instincts for the betterment of the organization. The organization must support them and insulate them from organizational winds that look to disrupt their efforts.

Visualize Code with Visual Studio

Premier DeveloperMay 23, 2018May 23, 201805/23/18

In this post, App Dev Manager Ed Tovsen spotlight the features and benefits of Code Maps in Visual Studio.

Systems architects have long used modeling to design the structure, behavior, and interaction of systems within an organization. Modeling helps to ensure that requirements are clearly defined between users and IT.

Setting up .NET Core Configuration Providers

Premier DeveloperApril 26, 2018Apr 26, 201804/26/18

ASP Core uses the convenient Provider Pattern to load configuration key/value pairs from various sources and expose those to you as a single Configuration object. This allows you to grab a configuration key like ConnectionString with one line of code regardless of where it was sourced from. However, the configuration API is not available by default in .NET Core Console applications.

Real-time Code Quality with SonarLint in Visual Studio

Premier DeveloperApril 17, 2018Apr 17, 201804/17/18

In the second part of her SonarQube series, Premier Developer Consultant Sana Noorani builds on top of SonarQube technology and explains how SonarLint can be added in Visual Studio to track real time code quality.

What is SonarLint?
SonarLint an extension you can add to an IDE such as Visual Studio that can provide developers real-time feedback on the quality of the code.

Unit Testing Your JavaScript Code

Premier DeveloperMarch 27, 2018Mar 27, 201803/27/18

In a recent post from his blog, Premier Developer Consultant Jim Blizzard discusses how to set up Visual Studio 2017 to run JavaScript-based unit tests.

This week, I demonstrated to a client how they could write unit tests in JavaScript to test their JavaScript code by leveraging Karma,

Integrate Azure API Management with Okta

Premier DeveloperApril 8, 2020Apr 8, 202004/8/20

In this post, App Dev Manager Chris Hanna explains how to integrate Okta with Azure API Management for authentication.

Injecting content to every page on a site

Premier DeveloperApril 7, 2020Apr 7, 202004/7/20

I had to come up with a way to magically inject a script on every response, regardless of what technology was used to create the application or web page… believe it or not, this was not only possible but it is quick and simple!

Routing in Blazor Apps

Premier DeveloperMarch 30, 2020Mar 30, 202003/30/20

Based on the current implementation, Blazor Router makes routing much easier to implement and developer hardly need to maintain routing as the application evolves. Bugs due to misconfiguration of routing might become a thing of the past.

Microsoft TLS 1.3 Support Reference

Premier DeveloperJanuary 30, 2020Jan 30, 202001/30/20

I created this post in response to questions from one of my customers which may be useful to others regarding Microsoft’s support plans around TLS 1.3 and upcoming releases.

Understanding how to port your ASP.NET web apps to ASP.NET Core

Premier DeveloperJanuary 20, 2020Jan 20, 202001/20/20

There are several reasons that developers and architects may consider moving to ASP.NET Core. In this post, learn all the considerations when planning an upgrade from ASP.NET to ASP.NET Core.

Integrating Blazor Components into existing Asp.Net Core MVC apps

Premier DeveloperJanuary 17, 2020Jan 17, 202001/17/20

In this post, Premier Consultant Wael Kdouh explains how to run Blazor Components in existing ASP.NET Core MVC apps.

Hosting a Containerized Client Side Blazor Application On Azure

Premier DeveloperJanuary 9, 2020Jan 9, 202001/9/20

In this post, Premier Consultant Wael Kdouh explains how to containerize a client-side Blazor application for Azure deployment.

Tracking Santa with Azure

Premier DeveloperJanuary 4, 2020Jan 4, 202001/4/20

Learn how Azure PaaS powers NORAD’s Santa Tracker allowing for 51 million Page Views with an average response time of 100MS across the globe.

Advanced Error Handling with Power Automate

Premier DeveloperNovember 22, 2019Nov 22, 201911/22/19

Sr Consultant Adam Toth demonstrates how to handle errors properly in Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow), including expected errors from APIs and connectors, and how to deal with throttling conditions (HTTP 429 Responses).

Power Automate’s default response to errors from connectors is pretty simple – exit the workflow right there and record the entire run as a failure.

Configure Azure App Service for 64-bit platform and Node.js

Premier DeveloperAugust 8, 2019Aug 8, 201908/8/19

As a follow-up to my original post explaining how to Deploy Ghost CMS on Azure Web App, learn how to configure Azure Web App Platform and Node.js to run as 64-bit, a prerequisite for the latest Ghost build.

Why are Compiled Data Bindings Important in XAML

Premier DeveloperJanuary 13, 2020Jan 13, 202001/13/20

Traditional data binding is expensive. It uses reflection and there are heavy demands on the CPU and on memory. In this post, Premier Consultant Bill Reiss explains how compiled bindings can improve performance in UWP apps.

On passing the Xamarin Mobile Developer Certification Exam

Premier DeveloperMay 15, 2017May 15, 201705/15/17

This post is from Premier Developer consultant Joe Healy who recently became a Xamarin Certified Mobile Developer.  Congrats Joe!

Microsoft likes us to have some technical certifications.  Personally I enjoy the challenges of the tests.  This year my goals were the Windows 10 UWP Developer exam ( Developing Mobile Apps 70-357 – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam-70-357.aspx )and the Xamarin Certified Developer accreditation ( https://university.xamarin.com/certification ). 

Visual Studio 2015 RTM and Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 Released!

Premier DeveloperJuly 20, 2015Jul 20, 201507/20/15

Today, we are happy to announce availability of Visual Studio 2013/TFS 2013 Update 5 and the release of Visual Studio 2015 RTM. This Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of Visual Studio 2015 includes many new features and updates, such as tools for Universal Windows app development,