You might have noticed I’ve been doing quite a bit of stuff with ARM templates as of late. ARM templates are THE way to go if you want to deploy your Azure environment in a professional and repeatable fashion. Most of the time these templates get deployed in your Release pipeline to the Test, Acceptance or Production environment. Of course, I’ve set this up for all of my professional projects along with my side projects. The thing is, when using the Hosted VS2017 build agent, it can take a while to complete both the Build and Release job via VSTS Azure DevOps.

Being a reformed SharePoint developer, I’m quite used to waiting on the job. However, waiting all night to check if you didn’t create a booboo inside your ARM template is something which became quite boring, quite fast.So what else can you do?

Well, you can do some PowerShell!
The Azure PowerShell cmdlets offer quite a lot of useful commands in order to manage your Azure environment.One of them is called New-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment.

According to the documentation, this command will “Adds an Azure deployment to a resource group.”. Exactly what I want to do, most of the time.So, how to call it? Well, you only have to specify the name of your deployment, which resource group you want to deploy to and of course the ARM template itself, along with the parameters file.

It has become increasingly important to have your site secured via some kind of certificate. Even your Google ranking is affected by it.

The main problem with SSL/TLS certificates is the fact most of them cost money. Now, I don’t have any problem with paying some money for something like a certificate, but it will cost quite a lot if I want to set this up for all of my sites & domains. In theory it’s possible to create a self-signed certificate and publish your site with it, but that’s not a very good idea as there’s no one who trusts your self-signed certificate besides yourself.

Luckily Mozilla is helping us, poor content-creators, out with their service called Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt is a rather new Certificate Authority which is offering a free, open and automated service to create certificates. Their Getting Started guide contains some details on how to set this up for your website or hosting provider.

This is all fun and games, but when hosting your site(s) in the Azure App Service ecosystem you can’t do much with the steps defined in the Getting Started guide. At least, I couldn’t make any sense off it.

There’s a developer who has been so kind to create a so called Site extension for an Azure App Service called Azure Let’s Encrypt. It comes in two flavors for both x86 and x64 systems. Depending on which platform you have deployed your site to, you need to activate one corresponding this platform.

As of late, there are a couple of Store apps which just won’t install on any of my Windows 10 machines (One Commander and Open Live Writer in case you are interested).

The message shown is:

The error code is 0x80073CF9, in case you need it.

If you do a search on the error number you’ll find numerous posts and articles explaining on how this error might be solved. As it happens, the error also occurs on Windows Phone/Mobile systems.

One of the suggestions I came across is re-installing the Store app.

Uninstalling a Modern App is quite easy with tools like CCleaner. If you don’t have tools like this, it’s also possible to do this via the PowerShell Remove-AppxPackage cmdlet of course.

However, once uninstalled, how will you install the Store, without having a Store.
A System Restore might help, but I didn’t have any usable restore points.

An easier solution is to re-install the Store app via PowerShell. With the following command you will see all the applications which still reside on your system.

Get-AppxPackage -allusers | Select Name, PackageFullName

One of these should have a name similar to Microsoft.WindowsStore.
You can re-install this app by using the Add-AppxPackage cmdlet.

I’ve just started setting up some continuous deployment for my personal websites. All of the sites are hosted within Azure App Services and the sources are located on either GitHub or BitBucket. By having the source code located on a public accessible repository (be it private or public), it’s rather easy to connect Azure to these locations.

On my day-job I come across a lot of web- and desktop applications which also need continuous integration and deployment steps in order for them to go live. For some of these projects I’ve used Octopus Deploy and currently looking towards Azure Release Management. These are all great systems, but they offer quite a lot of overhead for my personal sites. Currently my, most important, personal sites are so called static websites using MiniBlog (this site) and Hugo (for keto.jan-v.nl). Some of the other websites I have aren’t set up with a continuous deployment path yet.

I don’t really want to set up an Octopus Deploy server or a path in Azure Release Management for these two sites. Lucky for me, the Azure team has come up with some great addition in order to provide some custom deployment steps of your Azure App Service. In order to set this up, you need to enable the automatic deployments via the Deployment Options blade in the Azure portal.

When doing modern web development you will probably have to start using NPM sooner, rather than later. Not a big deal of course, since it’s a great addition to the frontend development environment.

However, most NPM packages have quite a bit of dependencies to other packages. All of these dependencies get pulled towards your system also. Still not a big problem as you want a working solution.

The problem arises when you are on a Windows environment, there are a lot of dependencies and you want to delete a project folder on your system. You will stumble across the fact that Windows has a rather low limit on how long a path can be. When all dependencies are loaded, you will probably have some paths which are too long for Windows to handle properly.

This will give you quite a bit of a problem as you can’t delete the folder(s) anymore. One way of solving this is by using PowerShell. By executing the following script you will be able to delete the NPM modules in your project.

ls node_modules | foreach {
	echo $("Deleting module..." + $_.Name)
	& npm rm $_.Name
}

This will iterate through the node_modules folder and remove each module inside it.

For our automated deployments we have several Azure Organizational accounts in place. These are created within the Azure Active Directory.

Because these accounts are meant for services, we don’t want them to inherit the default password policy for renewing their passwords every X days. Lucky for us, you can configure this via PowerShell. A short how-to is written on MSDN.

The thing that isn’t written (or referenced) over there is how to run the MSOL cmdlets.

I kept getting the messages The term 'Set-MsolUser' is not recognized. By searching a bit on this error I found a thread on the Office365 community forums where someone mentioned the “Microsoft Online Service Module for Windows PowerShell”. This set me off to searching in the right direction. Apparently you need to install a (new/extra) PowerShell module on your system in order to use the MSOL cmdlets. These cmdlets are part of the Office365 and Exchange Online services. A page with download links is provided by Microsoft Support. They provide a link to the Microsoft Online Service Sign-in Assistant for IT Professionals and the Azure Active Directory Module for Windows PowerShell (32-bit and 64-bit).

Once installed, you are finally able to use the MSOL cmdlets. Keep in mind though, you have to connect to the MSOL services first using the connection cmdlet.

While creating the PowerShell scripts for automatic deployment of the project’s Azure environment I discovered there are multiple Azure PowerShell modules.

When you want to manage a single resource, such as storage accounts, websites, databases, virtual machines, and media services, you need the (default) Azure module. However, when you need to manage resource groups, you will need the AzureResourceManager module.

This is useful information if you want to deploy new Azure websites with a specific hosting plan, like Basic or Standard. To create such websites the command Get-AzureResourceGroup is necessary. If you use PowerShell ISE you will notice this command isn’t available. In order to make this command available, run the following:

Switch-AzureMode AzureResourceManager

Doing so will activate the AzureResourceManager module and you will have a couple of different commands available.

If you want to see which commands are available within this module, run this command:

Get-Command -Module AzureResourceManager | Get-Help | Format-Table Name, Synopsis

Switching back to the ’normal’ Azure module is also very easy. You just need to switch back to the different AzureMode again.

Switch-AzureMode -Name AzureServiceManagement

After switching back, all your normal commands are back again.

Keep in mind, if you need both modules, you need to switch between the AzureModes in your script also!

There are quite a couple of Azure cmdlets made available by Microsoft. All of this sweetness can be installed on your system via the Web Platform Installer. After installing these modules you can start managing your Azure subscription in PowerShell scripts.

Most of the stuff for managing your Azure subscription is implemented in these Azure cmdlets. One of the things which isn’t implemented (yet) is managing the Service Busses in your subscription. It is possible to add, delete and get a new Service Bus namespace with the New-AzureSBNamespace, Remove-AzureSBNamespace and Get-AzureSBNamespace cmdlets, but that’s all you get. You will probably understand, this isn’t enough if you want to deploy your complete environment via a PowerShell script.

Luckily for us we have the ability to use all of the .NET libraries and assemblies on your system. When you search online you will probably find some articles describing how to create service bus queues in C# by using the NamespaceManager. I’ve written some PowerShell which uses this class and creates queues in your subscription.

#First, create a new service bus namespace. This doesn't return the newly created object
New-AzureSBNamespace -Name $servicebusNamespace -Location $locationWestEUDataCenter -CreateACSNamespace $true
#Get the newly created service bus namespace, so we can do stuff with the information.
$azureServicebus = Get-AzureSBNamespace -Name $servicebusNamespace

#We need a tokenprovider for proper credentials
$tokenProvider = [Microsoft.ServiceBus.TokenProvider]::CreateSharedSecretTokenProvider("owner", $azureServicebus.DefaultKey)
#The uri of the namespace
$namespaceUri = [Microsoft.ServiceBus.ServiceBusEnvironment]::CreateServiceUri("sb", $servicebusNamespace, "");
#Now we can finally crate a NamespaceManger which has the power to create new queues.
$namespaceManager = New-Object Microsoft.ServiceBus.NamespaceManager $namespaceUri,$tokenProvider

Write-Host "Creating the queues" -ForegroundColor Green -BackgroundColor Black
#Creating the queues should work by now.
$namespaceManager.CreateQueue($nameOfTheServiceBusQueue)

If you want to start over, you can just delete the complete namespace and run the script again. This can be done with the following command.

Om het gebruik van Windows Powershell een beetje te bemoedigen is er een gratis Powershell boek beschikbaar gesteld.

Engineer Mark Fugatt heeft de link beschikbaar gesteld.

https://blogs.technet.com/mfugatt/archive/2007/06/11/free-windows-powershell-book.aspx

Aangezien de links op MS websites vaak veranderen heb ik de download ook maar op m’n eigen webspace gezet. Daar weet ik tenminste zeker dat het er op blijft staan (mits de server niet weer crashed).

Wat ik uit het boek kon halen is dat de nieuwe Powershell enorm gaaf is. Het is natuurlijk niet zo’n luxe UI zoals we zijn gewend, maar je kunt er toch leuke dingen mee doen.

Bij deze dus de handleiding https://www.freezco.com/Downloads/Developer/Windows%20Powershell%20-%20EN.zip