Gareth Emslie's Blog

Getting an id token from the Azure Bot Service when leveraging Bot Authentication in Microsoft Teams

The Azure Bot Service can be used together with the Bot Framework SDK to augment your applications with enhanced user experiences by introducing conversational AI. One popular use case for this technology is building a Bot for Microsoft Teams, in this post we will focus on Bot Authentication and how

Azure

Leveraging partner solutions for monitoring enterprise workloads on Azure

Azure has its own native observability stack in the form of Azure Monitor, according to the official documentation some of the things that you can do with Azure Monitor include: Detect and diagnose issues across applications and dependencies with Application Insights. Correlate infrastructure issues with VM insights and Container insights.

Azure Pipelines

Running validation builds for a GitHub Pull Request using Azure Pipelines offline webhooks & GitHub Checks Rest API

This blog post is part of a series of posts covering the Challenges adopting the Azure DevOps SaaS offering in highly regulated industries. The first post covered the connectivity challenges experienced by some the enterprises which I have worked with. In subsequent posts we then went on to explore some

azure monitor

Custom Log-based Alerting using Azure Data Explorer and Log Analytics Data Export

Azure Monitor is a powerful service which allows developer and operations teams to gain crucial insights into the health of their solutions which are deployed to the Azure Cloud, some of the core capabilities provided by Azure Monitor are: Infrastructure Monitoring (Virtual Machines, Containers & other Azure resources).Application Performance

azure application insights

Azure Application Insights Private Availability testing for Highly Regulated Enterprises

Azure Application Insights is a fundamental service for DevOps teams, the service is part of the overall Azure Monitor stack provided by Azure. The Application Insights service provides several extremely useful capabilities for instrumenting & monitoring your application workloads. When adopting any cloud service in a highly regulated enterprise there

Azure Active Directory

Empowering developer teams to manage their own Azure RBAC permissions in highly regulated industries

Many highly regulated enterprises are looking to leverage the public cloud for the many benefits that it provides. Some examples are to increase agility of their developer teams, improve compliance and security & reduce costs. Unfortunately, what usually happens is that their developer teams end up with partial autonomy, for

microsoft edge

Distributing Custom Microsoft Edge (Chromium) Extensions in a Highly Regulated Enterprise

Microsoft decided to base the latest version of Microsoft Edge on Chromium, this results in a much more standards-based browsing experience where Microsoft can innovate in other areas like UI etc. Chromium brings with it an excellent extensibility model for customers and 3rd parties to extend the browsing experience, these

azure functions

Profiling Azure Functions JavaScript code during local development

Azure Application Insights provides some excellent profiling functionality when targeting .NET and running your production workloads in Azure. As far as I'm aware Azure Application Insights does not currently provide support for profiling NodeJS workloads in an equivalent manner. When it comes to local development, we need to rely on

Azure DevTest Labs

Leveraging the Windows Virtual Desktop Broker to Broker Remote Desktop connections to Azure DevTest Lab Virtual Machines

In this post I want to look at how we can combine two of Azure's Desktop services: Windows Virtual DesktopAzure DevTest LabsLet's look at each of these services in a little more detail and look at what the Architecture typically looks like when organizations deploy these services. Windows Virtual DesktopWindows

Azure DevOps

Engineering Compliant Azure Shared Image Gallery Images and sharing them across multiple Azure Active Directory Tenants

The Azure Shared Image Gallery service is an excellent service for globally distributing images for use in Azure across your organization. There are several ways which you can use to build & publish these images to your Azure Shared Image Gallery. Azure Image Builder (PREVIEW) - the service is built

Azure Active Directory

Simulating Azure Active Directory Application Authentication flows using PowerShell - openid connect and form_post

It can be useful to simulate or test the various Azure Active Directory Authentication flows, in this post I outline the steps which you can follow to test out any flows where you have set the response_mode to form_post. I am aware that we could also leverage Postman

azure files

Uploading large files to an Azure File Share using a shell script and standard linux commands

I recently looked at how I could perform an upload of a file to an Azure File Share with a limited set of tools. Realistically there are several ways we could achieve this, for example if we were able to install additional tools we could leverage azcopy. In my scenario

azure cli

Intercepting Azure CLI HTTP traffic leveraging Fiddler

Its sometimes helpful to look at the HTTP Requests generated by the Azure CLI to understand how to replicate certain scenarios when it's not clear from documentation. Usually capturing HTTP traffic using Fiddler "Just works" as the system proxy is updated to point to "http://127.0.

Azure Pipelines

Options for storing Azure Pipelines YAML files

This blog post is part of a series of posts covering the Challenges adopting the Azure DevOps SaaS offering in highly regulated industries. The first post covered the connectivity challenges experienced by some the enterprises which I have worked with. In subsequent posts we then went on to explore some

Highly Regulated

Triggering Azure Pipelines with an offline artefact repository

This blog post is part of a series of posts covering the challenges adopting the Azure DevOps SaaS offering in highly regulated industries. The second post covered how we can leverage Azure Pipelines with an offline source repository. Make sure you go through the first two posts in this series

Azure Pipelines

Triggering Azure Pipelines with an offline source repository

This blog post is part of a series of posts covering the Challenges adopting the Azure DevOps SaaS offering in highly regulated industries. The first post covered some of the connectivity challenges experienced by some the enterprises which I have worked with, and some high-level options for mitigating these challenges.

Azure DevOps

Challenges adopting the Azure DevOps SaaS offering in highly regulated industries - Connectivity

In highly regulated industries I see that some enterprises experience challenges when adopting the Software as a Service offering of Azure DevOps. The benefits of leveraging a SaaS product are many but in this blog series I would like to address the challenges, some of which are: Requires mindset change

app service

How I am running my Ghost blog on Azure

I recently had to migrate off of a managed Wordpress blogging platform, after some research I discovered Ghost. I didn't want to use a shared platform as I wanted more control of my blog, I also didn't want to build from source or spend a large amount of effort on

Azure DevOps

Performance issues when using PowerShell to download files during AzureDevops/ TFS pipeline execution

If you are using the PowerShell task together with Invoke-WebRequest or Invoke-RestMethod during your build/release on Azure DevOps or TFS you may not be getting the performance you expect. We recently experienced such an issue where downloading larger files(~40Mb) during the execution of a build on TFS was

ASP .NET Core

Out of process hosting of ASP .NET Core with IIS, do AppPool resource limits apply?

In IIS we can impose resource limits on the Application Pool hosting our Web Applications, in this scenario we are typically hosting in-process i.e. ASP .NET, but do these limits still apply when we host a ASP .NET Core 2.0 application? CPU Limit Memory Limit [ [ Currently we host

Azure

Azure Container Instances Rock!

I was recently updating an old website, I decided to move the old ASP .NET Web Forms code base over to latest and greatest ASP .NET Core 2.0 and Razor Pages. It wasn't a large code base but it did contain some Flash and Silverlight, which given declining client

Azure

Deploying Kubernetes with Azure

I’m loving everything related to containers at the moment, in Azure we have a number of ways that we can deploy our container work loads: Azure Container Instances Azure App Service Azure Container Service(AKS/ACS) Azure ServiceFabric Each brings with it its own benefits and challenges some of

windows

Windows Embedded Compact 7 Development on Windows 10

Although the following scenario works keep in mind that it is not necessarily supported by Microsoft, use the information at own risk. It’s important to note that official Support for Visual Studio 2008 ends April 10th 2018. Recently I spent time looking into this scenario, a colleague pointed me

sharepoint

SharePoint PeoplePicker Filtering Active Directory accounts by using LDAP queries and custom attributes returns no results

Problem : I am using the stsadm property "peoplepicker-searchadcustomfilter" to set a custom search filter but the people picker returns no results, even though I am sure that the user exists. I am using a Custom Active Directory Attribute in my filter is there anything special I have to