Gareth Emslie's Blog

Azure Active Directory

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.

Azure

Leveraging partner solutions for monitoring enterprise workloads on Azure

Azure has its own native observability stack in the form of Azure Monitor, allowing customers to detect and diagnose issues as they occur.

Azure Pipelines

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

In this post we will leverage offline webhooks to trigger PR validation builds in Azure Pipelines for a Pull Request created in GitHub Enterprise.

azure monitor

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

Azure Monitor is a multi-tenant service which serves thousands of organizations and therefore processing times will vary depending on multiple factors outside of the organizations' control.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Azure Virtual Desktop and Azure DevTest Labs.

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 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.

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.

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.

Azure Pipelines

Options for storing Azure Pipelines YAML files

So where can we store our YAML Pipeline files? If we take a look at the Azure Pipeline creation experience we are provided a number of options which can be seen below.

Highly Regulated

Triggering Azure Pipelines with an offline artefact repository

In this post we will build on top of what we learned in the previous posts to enable enterprises to kick off their Continuous Delivery process based on changes to a Nexus Repository Manager v3 Repository.

Azure Pipelines

Triggering Azure Pipelines with an offline source repository

The Azure Pipeline team are planning to introduce a Web Hook Trigger Resource to enable us to trigger our YAML Pipelines based on a simple call to the Webhook's HTTP Endpoint.

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.

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.

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.

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, do these limits still apply when we host a ASP .NET Core 2.0 application

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

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

windows

Windows Embedded Compact 7 Development on Windows 10

y goal was to run my WEC 7 images in the latest and greatest Windows Hypervisor i.e. Hyper-V. Keep in mind Virtual PC works fine in a Windows 7 Hyper-V guest VM and up until now this is how I have done my development & testing

sharepoint

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

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.