Today, Azure IoT Suite provides two end-to-end IoT solutions; Predictive Maintenance and Remote Monitoring. These solutions can be deployed into your Azure subscription and running in just a few minutes, enabling you to get hands-on with all the services that comprise a typical IoT solution. If you have never seen the solutions in IoT Suite, […]
Read MoreIn my previous post I showed how to use Visual Studio 2015 to author a simple Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template from scratch. In this post, I will discuss a few options for deploying that template. Specifically, I will show how to deploy using Azure PowerShell deploy using Azure Command-line Interface (CLI) deploy using Visual […]
Read MoreUpdated 3/19/2016 Last month I wrote an introduction to Azure Resource Manager (ARM) that talked about how ARM is different from the traditional Azure service management API’s (ASM) for deploying Azure resources. In that post I discussed some benefits of ARM and mentioned tools you can use to author your own ARM templates. In this […]
Read MoreThe Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is the service used to provision resources in your Azure subscription. It was first announced at Build 2014 when the new Azure portal (portal.azure.com) was announced and provides a new set of API’s that are used to provision resources. Prior to ARM, developers and IT professionals used the Azure Service […]
Read MoreThe Azure Active Directory Graph API enables some interesting scenarios that you can implement in your applications by enabling you to query and manipulate directory objects in Azure AD. In the last post I presented you with some common scenarios available via the Azure AD Graph API and showed how you can implement them using […]
Read MoreAt the end of the last post I closed by mentioning how the Azure AD Graph API and the IsMemberOf function could be used to determine a user’s membership in Azure AD Groups. However, as you saw in the last post, the group claims feature recently added to Azure AD made that task extremely simple […]
Read MoreThe Azure Redis Cache is a fully managed dedicated Redis cache that can be used to increase the performance of your cloud applications. It is offered in two tiers: Basic and Standard with each tier offering various features and capacity you can choose from. Figure 1 below shows the two tiers and the choices for […]
Read MoreIn the post titled Developing Native Client Apps for Azure AD I showed how you can use the Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) to build a native client application that calls the CloudAlloc.WebAPI introduced in the post titled Building Web Apps for Azure AD. As part of that post, I demonstrated how the Web API could […]
Read MoreIn my post titled Building Web Apps for Azure AD, I discussed developing two types of applications protected by Azure Active Directory: web applications and web API’s. In that post I approached these applications from the perspective of a developer using Visual Studio 2013 and the project templates provided for creating these types of applications. […]
Read MoreIntroduction In my last post I introduced some basic concepts about Azure Active Directory and ended with a review of the protocols and application endpoints that are used to build applications protected by Azure AD. In this post I will continue by talking about developing Web Applications and Web API’s protected by Azure AD using […]
Read MoreWhat Azure Active Directory is (and is not) Azure Active Directory (aka Azure AD) is a fully managed multi-tenant service from Microsoft that offers identity and access capabilities for applications running in Microsoft Azure and for applications running in an on-premises environment. Its name leads some to make incorrect conclusions about what Azure AD […]
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In my previous post I showed how to create an Azure Website that uses Organizational Accounts for authenticating users in Azure Active Directory. In this post, I’m going to go deeper and explore how Visual Studio, the Azure SDK, and Azure Active Directory collectively make building secure LOB web applications for the enterprise a first […]
Read MoreIf you’re an enterprise developer targeting Microsoft Azure for a new Line-of-Business (LOB) application, then you will most likely be building your application to authenticate users using Azure Active Directory. Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft’s service that provides identity and access capabilities in the cloud. It can be used to authenticate users of cloud […]
Read MoreIn my previous post I talked about using Windows Azure Web Sites and Traffic Manager together to achieve load balancing across web site deployments in different regions. Having Traffic Manager support for Windows Azure Web Sites is a great addition to the Windows Azure platform that was recently announced by Microsoft. In this post, I’m […]
Read MoreLast week Microsoft announced Traffic Manager support for Windows Azure Web Sites. This is a fantastic feature that enables you to deploy your web site to multiple data center regions, resulting in improved availability, performance (for users of your web site), maintenance capabilities, and failover support for your web site. In this post, I’ll demonstrate […]
Read MoreUpdated 3/31/2014 to remove the work-around section for an issue that previously existed for staged publishing but has since been fixed. The content in this post has been updated to reflect the latest experience of staged publishing that is still in preview. With Windows Azure Web Sites you can setup continuous deployment (CD) to publish your […]
Read MoreThe auto scaling feature in Windows Azure is a fantastic feature that enables you to scale your services dynamically based on a set of rules. For example, in the case of Cloud Cervices, if CPU exceeds a defined threshold in your rule, auto scaling will add additional instances to handle the increased load. When CPU […]
Read MoreToday I ran into one of those situations where my cloud service worked just fine running locally in the Windows Azure Emulator but failed when I published to Windows Azure, resulting in this infamous page being rendered in my browser. It’s tempting to jump right into the various techniques for debugging cloud services. Especially the […]
Read MoreIntroduction The Management Portal for Windows Azure provides a nice user experience for many service management operations such as creating cloud services, storage accounts, virtual machines, virtual networks, and so on. If you want to automate such operations, then the Azure PowerShell Cmdlets are a great choice. On the other hand, if PowerShell is not […]
Read MoreIntroduction In my last post, I showed how to host a WCF Service in an Azure Web Role with http and tcp endpoints. In this post, I will wrap things up by showing how to secure these endpoints using a self-signed certificate that can be used for TLS/SSL during development and testing. Before I […]
Read MoreIntroduction Since IIS 7.5, developers have been able to take advantage of the rich hosting environment IIS provides for their WCF services, and do so using non-http protocols, such as net.tcp, net.pipe (for x-process calls), and net.msmq (for queuing). For many, it was this release that removed the ball-and-chain of writing and maintaining a self-hosted […]
Read MoreIn this post, I’m going to cover some basics for using Visual Studio’s Git support with Github repositories. Specifically, I’ll cover Pre-Requisites (getting setup). Forking a Repository Cloning a Repository Committing Changes to a Local Repository Pushing Changes to a Remote Repository Submitting Pull Requests Pre-Requisites I’m going to be use Visual Studio 2013 Preview […]
Read MoreIn this post I will complete the implementation of my MongoDB repository by implementing the Review operations previously defined in my IProductRepository interface. This will also be the post where I visit some of the Create, Update, and Delete API’s of the MongoDB C# Drivers. Everything up to this point has been variations of Read […]
Read MoreThis post continues the journey of implementing a MongoDB repository, this time focusing on the search implementation. Implementing the Product Repository (continued…) I structured my API for search to allow me to pass in the property I want to search on and a search value for that property. The goal here wasn’t to be a […]
Read MoreIn this post I will start creating a Mongolab repository to perform CRUD operations against the MongoDB database I created in Part 2. As a starting point, I will use the solution that I introduced in Part 1, adding a new repository for Mongolab. Get the MongoDB Client Library To start, I’ll need some client […]
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