Any now and then you have to make some major changes to the ARM templates of the project you’re working from. While this isn’t hard to do, it can become quite a time-intensive if you have to wait for the build/deployment server to pick up the changes and the actual deployment itself.
A faster way to test your changes is by using PowerShell or the Azure CLI to deploy your templates and see what happens.
Read more →I started working on some internal web applications for a customer. For these types of applications, it makes a lot of sense to use Azure Active Directory to authenticate users and use their AAD groups/roles to authorize them on specific pages.
I wanted to authorize users by the AAD groups they are placed in. Some users can access Production data, while others are only allowed to access data from the Test environment, all based on the groups they are in.
Read more →A couple of weeks ago I was busy creating some proof of concept applications using Blazor, which was still labeled preview at the time.
To get all of this deployed and working in an Azure App Service, I needed the preview .NET Core runtime installed. An App Service is a PaaS offering, which means you don’t have any influence on what version of the software gets installed on the underlying system.
Read more →With the new Windows Terminal available I’ve been searching on how to upgrade my console experience. I see a lot of people improving their terminal to show important information, like which Git branch you are working on, which Azure subscription, the actual location on disk, etc.
A couple of months ago I came across Brad Wilson his post on the matter and I like the way his terminal looks. His post, is rather straightforward, but there was some information missing.
Read more →A couple of weeks ago I’ve passed both the AZ-300 and AZ-301 exams. You’re required to pass both of these exams in to get the Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification. After posting a tweet I got a lot of responses asking if I had any pointers on what to learn. Instead of responding to each person individually it makes more sense to share what I’ve used to study and hopefully it’s helpful to others also.
Read more →If you’ve read my earlier post on authentication of actions invoked in a Microsoft Teams MessageCard, you’ve probably seen the only useful information we get in the user’s token is the Object Id (oid).
{ "iat": 1560799130, "ver": "STI.ExternalAccessToken.V1", "appid": "48afc8dc-f6d2-4c5f-bca7-069acd9cc086", "sub": "bc6c3ca0-5acd-4cd4-b54c-f9c83925e7e3", "appidacr": "2", "acr": "0", "tid": "4b1fa0f3-862b-4951-a3a8-df1c72935c79", "oid": "b26c3c10-5fad-4cd3-b54c-f9283922e7e2", "iss": "https://substrate.office.com/sts/", "aud": "https://serverlessdevops.azurewebsites.net", "exp": 1560800030, "nbf": 1560799130 } While this is nice, it doesn’t really tell us much.
Read more →Being able to create Message Cards or Actionable Messages in Microsoft Teams via a Logic App or an Azure Function is great. Especially if you can use this to invoke logic on your API and update the message in the Teams channel.
However, you don’t want everyone to invoke a management API endpoint you’ve exposed to ‘do stuff’ in your cloud environment. Normally, you’d want to authenticate if the user pressing the button (read: invoking the endpoint).
Read more →In my latest post, I’ve shown you how you can use Azure Functions in your Microsoft Teams flow to handle errors in your environment. This stuff works great in a couple of projects I’ve worked on, but what would be even more awesome is to reply to a message in Teams when an action has completed after a button is pressed.
Well, replying & modifying the original message with a status update is quite possible and I’ll show you how in this post.
Read more →So, a couple of weeks back I wrote about leveraging the power of Logic Apps to retrieve Alerts from within your Azure ecosystem and send them to Microsoft Teams. This works great and a fellow Azure MVP, Tom Kerkhove, has enhanced the Logic Apps Template when handling Azure Monitor events.I’m starting to become a pretty big van of Logic Apps, but there are some (obvious) downsides to it.
First, they live inside your Azure Portal.
Read more →Stuff I like from this year’s Build conference
.NET Core 3 Preview 4 can be downloaded right now. This new preview brings the Chart control to .NET Core & some WPF improvements. What I like most is the versioning change and the Tiered Compilation. I’m still reading up on this second thing, but it sounds awesome a major reason to upgrade to the latest & greatest! Some more information on TC can be found on a Microsoft blog post dedicated to it: https://devblogs.
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