What a massive year it's been for Microsoft's Azure public cloud platform. Let's take a look!

Microsoft Azure: 2014 Year in Review

Starting Tuesday November 18 Microsoft started rolling out Office 365 Video to customers who have opted in to the First Release programme (if you haven't you will need to wait a little longer!)

Getting Started with Office 365 Video

For those of you who didn't get a chance to come along to my presentation on Azure API Management at TechEd...

Use Azure Management API SDK in an Entity Framework custom database initializer

TechEd 2014: Azure API Management Talk now available.

I've been busy through October writing...

An Octoberfest of blog posts

I'm coming in hot with Microsoft Ignite 2025 session recommendations! As usual I've spent some time reviewing the session catalog to find what I think will be most interesting. Check out the post for more details!

My recommended Microsoft Ignite 2025 sessions

When I moved my blog from Wordpress to a template based on Next.js, I knew that I'd be have to pick up some maintenance tasks that I had previously delegated to the Wordpress platform. One of those tasks was going to be ensuring my codebase was up to date with the latest security patches and updates for Node.js. See how I used GitHub Copilot to help me with this task.

Reducing bike-shedding using GitHub Copilot

Microsoft Build is one of the key events in my annual calendar, so I couldn't miss the chance to share the Build 2025 sessions I think developers won't want to miss.

Best Microsoft Build 2025 sessions for developers

Ignite is back for 2024, and I've taken the time to review the session catalog to pull out the gems for developers in ANZ. Check out the post for more details!

Best Microsoft Ignite 2024 sessions for ANZ developers

I was recently invited to present at the Microsoft Reactor on what you should consider when taking your Generative AI apps from proof-of-concept to production. This post goes into a bit more detail and provides useful links for content from the talk.

Taking your AI application from concept to production

Since 2021 the software development industry has increasingly been headed in a direction where AI-assisted software development is the norm. Many developers already build solutions using assistants such as GitHub Copilot in their code editor of choice. GitHub is extending their vision with GitHub Copilot Workspace, currently in limited technical preview. I've been lucky enough to gain access to the tech preview, so in this post I am going to review its current capability.

GitHub Copilot Workspace - First Impressions

If 2023 was the year of 'AI for the developer' at Microsoft Build, it's safe to say that 2024 continues that theme, though with more focus on practical delivery of secure, scalable solutions.

Best Microsoft Build 2024 sessions for ANZ developers

GitHub recently released their GitHub Copilot Metrics API in public beta which means it is now available for anyone who has licensed GitHub Copilot Business so they can report on usage and gain insights into the impact of Copilot adoption. I wanted to deploy this against a real organisation, so here are the steps I went through to get it working as a hosted site on an Azure Static Web App instance.

Deploy GitHub Copilot metrics dashboard to Azure Static Web Apps

If you've been following me for a while you'll know I'm a huge fan of markdown, GitHub and simplifying the life of developers. In this post I am going to show you how you use the tools you already use and love along with some open source magic that has a long history to build a documentation publishing workflow. All without needing to install Word or use Windows, even if you want to publish a Word document!

Publishing documentation with Markdown, LaTeX, Pandoc and GitHub Actions

Appropriate data handling is an important part of any software system design. Often times we overlook the risks involved with the visibility and accessibility of data passing through our solutions and don't even think about how secure data handling applies to telemetry and logging. In this post I am going to explore how you can use Azure Logic Apps in-built input/output obfuscation capabilities to limit the exposure of data in operational logging and how you can check that the settings are configured.

Using and validating secure data settings in Azure Logic Apps

Regardless of where your git repositories are hosted, there is always a need to have visbility over what's going on in them. While services like GitHub provide metrics APIs, there are some limitations around those metrics APIs, particularly for busy or large repositories. In this post I'm going to look at how you can use Azure Data Explorer to analyse the commit history for a git repository.

Analysing git commit history using Azure Data Explorer

When you provide an open input prompt it's only a matter of time before someone with type or create something inappropriate. In this post we'll look at how you can use features in Azure OpenAI Service to minimise inappropriate use of your chatbots.

Building safer chatbots with Azure OpenAI Service

As always, Ignite covers a lot of non-developer content, so there's not a huge amount of content to dig into, but I think I've found the developer gold in amongst the lot.

Best Microsoft Ignite 2023 sessions for ANZ developers

Publication of APIs, particularly for consumer applications, requires some next-level attention to protecting your service. In this post I am going to look at you can use Azure API Management to help protect new or existing RESTful APIs that receive and process JSON objects.

Protect JSON REST APIs with Azure API Management

They say there's no place like home, so in this post I'm going to take a look at Microsoft's new home for developers on Windows - Dev Home!

Microsoft Dev Home - First Thoughts

In this post I introduce the ideas of design-time validation and unit testing for Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) developed using Bicep. Perfect if you're new to IaC and from an Ops background!

Pushing Azure Infrastructure-as-Code quality left with Bicep

I've really been enjoying editing using just markdown, but I had one outstanding item I was missing - how to easily preview the blog as I go without needing to push to a preview on Vercel?

Using Dev Containers to build a transportable blog writing environment

In this post I will cover some of the issues you might come across when deploying and configuring a private App Service Environment (ASE) and how to resolve them.

Troubleshooting Private App Service Environments and App Deployments

Trying to assign a Service Principal to an RBAC role in Azure and receiveing the error 'Principals of type Application cannot validly be used in role assignments.'? Read on to find out how to fix it!

Working with Service Principals in Azure, Bicep and Azure DevOps

I'm back with my list of the best developer sessions from Microsoft's annual developer conference - Build. Check out how you can attend remotely and cram a bunch of learning into two half days!

Best Microsoft Build 2023 sessions for ANZ developers

Everyone is looking for creative ways to use OpenAI's GPT models to boost their productivity. In this post I take a look at how you can use the Davinci GPT3 model to generate test data for your Salesforce development environment.

Populating Salesforce environments with test data using OpenAI GPT3 and Azure Logic Apps

Let's discuss how you can go about the introduction of generative AI services such as Copilot into your software development process.

Practical adoption of generative AI as part of your software development lifecycle

I've been blogging for over ten years, and have mostly been happy using Wordpress.com. Along the way I've had plenty of people suggesting I host my blog in other ways. In this post, I explore why and how I've finally rebuilt my blog!

How I moved my blog from Wordpress to a static site on Next.js

On Wednesday, March 8, I spoke at the Sydney Serverless Meetup on how you can quickly build an Azure Function Extension and in what situations you should consider doing so. Here I run through the demo and the code!

Build an Azure Functions Extension in 20 minutes at Sydney Serverless Meetup March 2023

I recently wrote a post on sending Azure retirement announcements via email using the Azure Communication Services Email capabilities. As this feature is in preview there are some SDK gaps, including for Azure Functions. In this post I look at how you can build an extension to fill a gap like this one!

Build your own Azure Functions Binding Extensions

Off the back of my recent post on building an Azure Logic Apps solution for cross-posting on social media I wanted to export what I'd quickly built and make an easily deployable asset in Azure using Bicep. See how you can that in this post.

Fix Logic App Connections Managed Identity errors in Bicep templates

If you're reading this, then I have successfully implemented my plan to build a content cross-posting service using Azure Logic Apps!

Cross-posting blog posts to Mastodon, Twitter and LinkedIn using Azure Logic Apps

I was recently at an event where I had a discussion with someone who mentioned they'd missed the news about the retirement of a feature in Azure that they were making use of in a solution.

Build your own Azure retirements email alerts service using Java, Azure Functions and Communication Services

For the first time in a couple of years, there is an in-person event for Ignite, though for our list here I'm only listing sessions you can attend from the comfort of your home. If you're headed to the in-person event... lucky you!

Microsoft Ignite 2022 - Best Sessions for Australian and New Zealand Developers

You may be sitting there are wondering why are we doing an Azure Logic App to Power Automate Flow migration? In most cases you'd likely be heading the other direction, but I can give you a few pointers why this move makes sense.

Moving from Azure Logic Apps to Power Automate Flow

In this final part of this series of posts covering how to build your own air quality alerting system I will build out the alerting subsystem.

Real-time air quality monitoring and alerting – Part 3 - Bringing it all together!

From Monday 15 August 2022 anyone can now try out Microsoft Dev Box through it entering public preview. It's a service that offers a lot of potential, but during preview there are a few moving pieces you need in place to try it out and maximise your benefit.

Tips on getting started with Microsoft Dev Box during public preview

Real-time air quality monitoring and alerting – Part 2 - Training Azure Anomaly Detector

So we are back with another annual developer-focused Build for 2022. While it feels like the last Build was just last week, it wasn't, and there has been a lot of change in the past year!

Microsoft Build 2022 - Session guide for ANZ Developers

Recently my solution for Meetup integration ceased working as Meetup decided to shift their API from REST to GraphQL without providing any advance notice. Find out how to update a REST call to a GraphQL call in this blog.

How to consume GraphQL APIs from Azure Logic Apps

Like any cloud platform, Microsoft Azure is always shipping new features and services regularly. In this post I've pulled out a few highlights from the last few months that I think are worth looking at if you're a developer building serverless solutions.

Sydney Serverless Meetup March 2022 - What's news with Azure Serverless?

Microsoft continues to design and ship new form factors for its Surface range of devices. As part of the start of availability of the Surface Laptop Studio in Australia I was asked to try out one and provide feedback...

Surface Laptop Studio - the ultimate developer portable workstation?

Anyone who was living in Australia during the 2019/2020 summer can't help but remember the massive bushfires we had, and the impact they had on air quality.

Real-time air quality monitoring and alerting with Azure and PurpleAir - Part 1

I am currently working on an IoT gateway project and I thought I would use the new minimal APIs in .NET 6 to build the API for an IoT gateway.

How to avoid JSON deserialisation issues with .NET 6 Web APIs

Setting Helm Chart version and appVersion properties during CI/CD with GitHub Actions

I thought I would find the most intricate AWS example serverless app and use it as the basis for the demo migration to Azure to go along with this blog.

How to port AWS Serverless solutions to Microsoft Azure

Here we are again - it's almost time for the annual Microsoft Ignite conference. This edition is virtual again, so it's a great chance to hear the latest news while being able to sit at home on your sofa!

Microsoft Ignite 2021 - Best Sessions for Aussie Developers

I set out to build a simple automated XBox Series X stock checker that will push an alert to me when stock shows up so that I can action it immediately regardless of where I am.

Build a Serverless Gaming Console Stock Checker with Playwright, Azure Functions and Twilio

Voice assistants have become all the rage, and they provide a great way to access and consume information. A fairly common scenario, and one that most assistants ship with, is reading the latest news headlines.

How to Build and Debug an Alexa Skill with Python and Azure Functions

Recently I reflected on the amount of time it takes for me to prepare slides for a monthly meetup, and decided this probably wasn't a great use of my time which makes it the perfect candidate to automate!

Generate a PowerPoint file using Azure Functions and Python

any developers are interested in learning how to build and run software on cloud platforms, but are wary of the potential for hidden costs and bill shock.

How to build and run a free link tracker using VS Code, Java, GitHub, MongoDB and Azure

It seems like only yesterday we were talking about session for Microsoft Ignite back in March... and here we are looking forward to what's coming up at Microsoft Build which is online...

Microsoft Build May 2021 - Best Sessions for Aussie Developers

In this post I am going to take the next step - take our containerised ASP.NET web application and deploy it to Kubernetes whilst making sure the build and deployment process is centralised and repeatable.

Windows Containers and .NET Framework applications: DevOps with Kubernetes

We previously looked at the basics of what is involved in bringing .NET Framework applications to Windows Containers. In this second post we are going to go a little deeper and look at migrating an application.

Windows Containers and .NET Framework applications: Migration

Well... it's that time again! Microsoft Ignite is back for its early 2021 edition, kicking off March 2nd. I sat down and had a quick scrub through the sessions to find...

Microsoft Ignite March 2021 - Best Sessions for Aussie Developers

In this multi-post series I am going to look at what is required to take existing .NET Framework applications and bring them to Windows Containers.

Windows Containers and .NET Framework applications: The Basics

With Meetup enforcing OAuth for clients consuming their API, let's take a look at how you add OAuth support to a Logic Apps custom connector.

Adding OAuth2 support to your Meetup API Custom Connector for Azure Logic Apps

Azure Availability Zones (AZs) are gradually rolling out around the globe, and a common question I see is what is the difference between the existing Azure Availability Set construct and the new Availability Zone construct? Can they co-exist, does one replace the other... there are lots of questions!

Understanding Azure Availability Sets and Availability Zones

For an upcoming demo I developed a small Azure Function written in Python, whose job it is to create a thumbnail image of a JPEG file.

Reading and writing binary files with Python with Azure Functions input and output bindings

The biggest challenge for an event this scale is finding the content you really want to catch up on as a developer. Well, I reviewed the 800+ sessions for you and you'll find my best bets below.

Microsoft Ignite 2020 - Recommended Sessions for Australian Developers

The first ever Serverless Days ANZ event run on Friday September 4 and, boy, what a success it was! In this post I'll go into the online event in a bit more detail and look at some of the stats along with my highlights.

Serverless Days ANZ 2020 Retrospective

In this post I am going to run through how Azure can provide all you need if you wanted to build an "event-in-a-box" service that you can use to host online events. Think of this post as your event platform recipe card!

Building a virtual event platform using Microsoft Azure

Over the last few years I've spent a lot of time focused on the serverless space having built one of the first Azure Functions backends in Australia that runs a consumer mobile app you might have used.

Building manageable, loosely-coupled serverless solutions with Azure Event Grid

I've put together the following list which encompasses the smaller, sometimes interactive sessions that will be on offer. You will be able to catch big keynote moments elsewhere and on-demand so they aren't covered here.

Build 2020 - Recommended Sessions for Australian Developers

A challenge the Azure Sydney User Group has been facing is providing access to presentations, etc, from our meetups so they are easily accessible to members and guests alike.

Free Microsoft Teams for communities: public file sharing

As demand for the Azure Sydney User Group and its content has grown over the last few years, and with the removal of features on Meetup such as file storage, the group organisers have been looking for a way to share content and provide an online location for the community to connect.

Free Microsoft Teams for communities: getting started

As I've spent much of the last eight years running, or being involved with, community events I thought I'd share some tips and insights I've gained over this time on what you need to consider for going online.

Getting your community event online

Let's dig into things a bit more and see how .NET's really in the best shape it's been in for ages!

I'm a .NET developer, do I need to switch languages?

This fortnight's episode of Red Dog for Dev will be the last one for 2019 and is coming in a bit hot as I've got a bunch of stuff on, but wanted to get something up for you all!

Red Dog for Dev Episode Four

Thanks to UK-based Microsoft MVPs Gregor Suttie and Richard Hooper there is a great initiative through December 2019 that is doing 25 days of community-generated content...

Azure Advent Calendar 2019 - Azure Logic Apps

Our quick demo is of building an Azure Logic App to sending notifications when new issues are opened on GitHub.

Red Dog for Dev Episode Three

This fortnight's episode covers announcements coming out of Microsoft Ignite in Orlando that cover Azure API Management, Azure App Service and Azure Container Registry.

Red Dog for Dev Episode Two

Starting today I'm going to be trying something new. Given the fast pace of change with the Azure platform it's often hard to keep up with what's new or interesting.

Red Dog for Dev Episode One!

If you've been a meetup user or admin for the last couple of years then no doubt bots posting dodgy content on your Group's discussion boards...

Using Azure services to deal with spam bots on Meetup

In this post I'm going to look at what I think are the basics you need to know and show you a quick way to start working with Git without needing to install a bunch of tools.

Make working with Git an easier commitment

In 2018 when I joined Microsoft Australia as the Azure Pro Developer Lead in Sydney one of the first things I worked on was building an engagement activity for event attendees at events we were sponsoring.

Building an Azure selfie-and-seek game

For this blog I'm going show you how you can use FFMPEG from an Azure Functino to create a thumbnail image from a video file.

Customised Serverless using Azure Functions, Docker and Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaler (KEDA)

In this post I'll look at how we can use Azure Logic Apps to publish new Meetup event information into Microsoft Teams, using Meetup's REST API as the data source.

Integrate Meetup announcements with Microsoft Teams using Azure Logic Apps and Adaptive Cards

This week I sat my first Microsoft certification exam in ten years. When I posted on Twitter a question as to which exam...

Getting Azure Fundamentals in place: why sit the AZ-900 exam?

If you attended the Global Azure Bootcamp in Sydney on April 27 and you are looking for content a speaker presented to then you should find it here.

Sydney Global Azure Bootcamp 2019 Session Content

For this session I used App Service's inbuilt CD offering, Kudu, which can use webhook triggers on GitHub, Git and Bitbucket repositories...

Running Python Flask apps on Azure App Service

A short update from me on a couple of speaking slots I'm doing in April 2019 that might be of interest if you're in Sydney.

Speaking on Azure PaaS and Serverless in Sydney

For this session I used App Service's inbuilt CD offering, Kudu, which can use webhook triggers on Github, Git and Bitbucket repositories...

Use GitHub Actions to deploy a Python Flask web app to Azure App Service on Linux

In this post, and the associated screencast, I'll take a look at how we can utilise several of the capabilities of Azure Cognitive Services...

Enriching SharePoint Image Libraries with Azure Cognitive Services

Microsoft Ignite | The Tour: Sydney is on February 13 and 14 and presents Australian developers with a massive opportunity to get deep technical guidance on how to build with Microsoft Azure.

Recommended Azure developer sessions at Microsoft Ignite | The Tour: Sydney 2019

You now have the choice to package Python Azure Functions using a pre-built template in Azure DevOps.

Deploy Python-based Azure Functions using Azure DevOps

Today we're going to look at how you can migrate a static website hosted in AWS S3 to Azure's Storage Static Websites.

Migrate a static website from AWS to Azure

Cost Effective Azure Cosmos DB

I've been working a lot with Python over the last few months and one piece of work I've spent quite a lot of time on is interfacing Python solutions with Cosmos DB.

Bulk insert entities into Cosmos DB using Python

I had great fun yesterday presenting at the Sydney Serverless Meetup on the currently in-preview support for Java on Azure Functions.

Azure Functions for Java developers

If you are getting started working with Azure you might come across a few key terms that it's important to have a good understanding of. In this post I'm going to cover what I think are four of the key ones.

Understanding Tenants, Subscriptions, Regions and Geographies in Azure

DDD Sydney, like Perth before it, didn't disappoint in its slick organisation and community-selected content.

DDD Sydney 2018 - Super sold-out Saturday!

This past weekend I was in Perth to attend DDD Perth as part of Microsoft's sponsorship and thought I'd write up my experience.

DDD Perth 2018 - the value of a strong developer community

I'm super excited to let everyone know that from August 2018 I'll be joining Microsoft here in Australia as the Azure Pro Developer Lead.

Empowering Australian Developers to do more with Azure

I have previously deploy AKS in East US using the Azure Cloud Shell so didn't expect to run into any issues. However, I hit a minor snag, which I'm documenting here in case you come across it too.

Fix Provider error in Cloud Shell when using AKS in a new Azure Region

If you run in an environment where you need to track changes to Tags on Resource Groups in Azure then you may find this PowerShell snippet useful as code to drop into a Runbook.

Read Tags from Azure Resource Groups and track using Table Storage

Over the years that I've been talking with public groups on cloud services, and Azure in particular, I will typically have at least one person in every group...

Are Free Tier Cloud Services Worth The Cost?

In this post I'm going to walk through how you can debug JWT-protected APIs where those JWTs are being issued by AAD B2C.

Developer toolkit for working with Azure AD B2C JWT-protected APIs

Ihis post covers an approach you can use to deploy compiled C# Functions using the tooling available in Visual Studio 2017...

Multi-environment deployments for Compiled C# Azure Functions with VSTS Release Management

Over the last few years I've come to rely heavily on Application Insights as the primary Application Performance Management (APM) tool of choice for services I build.

Microsoft Application Insights - APM for Everyone

I am currently transitioning some work to another team in our business. Part of this transition has been to pre-configure various Service Endpoints...

Provide non-admin users with read-only access to Service Endpoints in VSTS

When working with Azure Active Directory B2C you can create what are known as Custom Attributes...

Azure AD B2C Custom Attributes: How to easily find their unique key value

Over the years I have always worked hard to make versioning a foundational piece of every CI / CD solution I've setup...

All Posts

Microsoft Azure: 2014 Year in Review

Getting Started with Office 365 Video

Use Azure Management API SDK in an Entity Framework custom database initializer

TechEd 2014: Azure API Management Talk now available.

An Octoberfest of blog posts