Setting up a VPN connection to an Azure Virtual Network

One of the reasons for me to create an Azure virtual network is being able to connect to my development machines in the Cloud from anywhere, without exposing them to the public. In order to do so, all machines have to be added to the virtual network. You also have to select the option to set up a point-to-site VPN connection to the virtual network. Setting up a point-to-site VPN connection to an Azure virtual network is documented quite well on the Azure documentation pages. Read more →

Creating an Azure Virtual Network

Nowadays it’s possible to create virtual networks within your Azure subscription. This can be very useful for managing your Azure resources within a specific network or setting up a point-to-site or site-to-site connection to expand your current on-premise network. To me creating a virtual network sounds like a great way to manage my virtual machines and services for development purposes which I’m running within Azure. It will also let me connect to them without exposing stuff to the public internet. Read more →

Using Application Insights in your log4net application

In my previous post I’ve described how to use Application Insights and use it within your new web application. Most of us aren’t working in a greenfield project, so new solutions have to be integrated with the old. The project I’m working on uses log4net for logging messages, exceptions, etc. In order for us to use Application Insights, we had to search for a solution to integrate both. After having done some research on the subject we discovered this wasn’t a big problem. Read more →

Adding Application Insights to your application

Some time ago the Application Insights became available as a preview in the Azure portal. Application Insights helps you monitor the state of an application, server, clients, etc. As said, it’s still in preview, but it’s rather stable and very easy to use and implement in your applications. The documentation is still being worked on, but with all the getting started guides on the Microsoft site you can kick start your project with it in a couple of minutes. Read more →

Splitting and merging with Elastic Scale

Once you have set up your sharding solution with a fully configured Shard Map Manager, modified your data access layer to use Elastic Scale, added fault handling and running your stuff in production, there will be a time when you are in need to split, merge or move shardlets between shards. This is where the Elastic Scale Split Merge tool comes in place. The team has created a nice web application which will enable you to do this kind of management. Read more →