Azure

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

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.

If you're reading this, then I have successfully implemented my plan to build a content cross-posting service 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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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...

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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...

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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

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

I needed to provide an easy way to provision around 30 inter-related services that together constitute the hosting environment for single customer solution.

I am currently working on an next-gen widget dispenser solution that is gradually being rolled out to trial sites across Australia...

Yesterday afternoon while doing some work I ran into an issue in Azure. Initially I thought this issue was due to a bug in my (new) code...

In this post I am going to try and review the Azure Platform-as-a-Service offerings that have Container capabilities and cover what the services can be used for.

Let's take a look at a simple reason why you might have a 200 OK response but not see any backend traffic!

Learn how to deploy an ASP.NET web API by packaging it in a container and using Azure DevOps for the deployment.

I'm excited to have the opportunity to share Azure's powerful Open Source support with more developers in November.

I'm really happy to share that we are bringing the Open Source Roadshows to Auckland and Wellington in November 2017!

I'm really excited about this opportunity to share the power of Azure with the developer and IT Pro community in France.

When you provision a VMSS and you set the "overprovision" flag to "true" the provisioning engine will build more Instances than required...

To truly move to a VMSS approach using a VM image is to remove any local static configuration data we might bake into our solution.

Learn how to start building virtual machine images that can be deployed to VM Scale Sets.

In early August I'll be running a couple of free training days covering how developers who work in the Open Source space can bring their solutions to Microsoft's Azure public cloud.

If you want to move away from those legacy hosting businesses and want a simple method to deploy static or dynamic websites, then this is worth a look.

Here's our challenge today - setup a MySQL environment, including a web-based management UI, with zero local installation on your machine and minimal mouse clicks.

If you're interested to learn more about Microsoft Graph API and how you can leverage it to build compelling solutions in the form of Bots in Microsoft Teams...

Let's take a look back on the journey I've been on with Functions for the past 12 months

If you are attending my session and would like to undertake the exercise here's what you'll need to install locally, along with instructions on working with the code.

In this post I am going to take a quick look at two technologies that are related to high availability of solutions...

One of the neat features of Azure Pipelines Release capability is the ability to deploy to Virtual Machine hosted in Azure...

This blog post is a reference for me (and I guess you too) to understand the invite process and document the experience the invited user has.

In this post I'm going to look at how we can deploy a Web Deploy (or MS Deploy) packaged Web Application to an Azure Web Application and define different deployment environments with varying configurations.

In this blog I am continuing with my series covering useful scenarios for using Azure Functions - this time looking at payments processing.

Prior to Azure Functions announcing their General Availability (GA) I had previously used SendGrid as an output binding in order to send email messages.

Azure Functions is one of those services in Azure that is seeing a massive amount of uptake...

I recently spoke at the Innovation Days 2016 event held in Sydney on Azure AD B2C...

The good news is that if you’re already operating in a cloud environment then you have likely had to deal with many of the fundamental differences between traditional application hosting and architecture and that of cloud platforms.

Like many things in Azure, Azure App Service has a multitude of consumption options available that can sometimes make it hard to determine what option suits your use.

I'll be speaking at the upcoming community-run Global Azure Bootcamp in Sydney.

If you've ever worked in any form of systems administrator role then you will be familiar with process automation...

The introduction of the Azure Resource Manager platform in Azure continues to expose new possibilities for managing your deployed resources.

I've been doing a lot of PowerShell DSC on Azure VMs recently, so I thought I'd share my experience in debugging custom DSC Modules...

A big part of where Microsoft Azure is going is being driven by template-defined environments that leverage the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) for deployment orchestration.

Read how you can improve your security posture for Azure SQL Database.

Read how you can move from the traditional Administrator / Co-Adminstrator setup to leveraging RBAC.

Here's a TL;DR summary on containers and the Windows announcement this week.

Since October 2014 it has been possible to add a public IP address to a virtual machine in Azure...

I'm going to start by saying that I totally missed that the setting of distribution mode on Azure’s Internal Load Balancer (ILB) service is possible.

If like me you've been a keen user of Visual Studio Online since it first came into existence way

Great to be a part of this team, and what a great recognition for everyone's efforts!

Ignite was huge - 22,000+ attendees, 4.5 days and a session catalogue that ran into easily 100+ sessions.

Ever since Microsoft announced their G Series Virtual Machines for Azure I’ve been looking for a good reason to fire one up and kick the tyres.

Traditionally for Google-based identities, ACS utilised OpenID which Google is retiring in favour of an OAuth 2.0 implementation ("OpenID Connect").

In this post we walk through how to use row level security with an existing SQL database.

I enjoyed writing my last post on Azure SQL Database that I thought I'd take a look at another recently added feature - Auditing.

In this post we walk through how to set up dynamic data masking for an existing database.

It's been hard to miss the increasing presence of Docker, particularly if you work in cloud technology.

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

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

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

I've been busy through October writing...

I'm having fun playing with the new Azure Resource Manager Tags feature.  So much so I blogged about it...

In this post I share some of the cool configuration and analytics that Azure API Management provides to API Publishers.

I'll be speaking in Melbourne on 7 October on the topic 'Microsoft Azure API Management: Win Friends and Make Money'.

In doing my prep for my upcoming talk at TechEd Australia I came across this gem from April 2004...

I had some interesting challenges last week in managing Azure SQL Database from inside of Visual Studio 2013.

See how in less than 30 lines of code you can enumerate all virtual machines in a subscription and then power them off.

Learn how to unblock someone who has a personal email address that matches an Azure AD organisational account.

I've been working hard the last couple of weeks getting things ready for my session ...

I am proposing a new metric for use in cloud autoscale. Read on to see why.

See how to build out the history of a Work Item so it displays "Discussion Only" items and excludes all others.

What happens when you remove a user's account from Visual Studio Online? Let's take a look.

Autoscale is one of the facets of the cloud that I see often misunderstood by developers and IT Pros alike, so let's take a look at it in more detail.

How do you keep applications running in Azure? Your Dad wants to know!

It's another session with your Dad, this time looking at messaging and eventing in Microsoft Azure.

Your dad has more questions on big data, so let's get a look at data in Microsoft Azure.

Your dad still has questions, so here's the second in my series of posts looking at Microsoft Azure.

There's a lot to Microsoft Azure. Your Dad would be amazed...

I pulled together some of the best free tech videos I've watched and learned from during the year.

See how you can use cloud-based media services to shorten time-to-market for video-based ideas.

Access the code and watch the demonstration video from my talk at TechEd Australia 2013.

A really quick and easy tip for those starting out doing mobile development with Xamarin...

A really quick and easy tip for those starting out doing iOS development with Xamarin...

Why not generate PowerShell scriptlets from actions completed within the Azure Mangement Portal?

I've been working hard the last couple of weeks getting things ready for my session ...

If you have ever provisioned a SQL Server instance running on Azure IaaS and not used a VPN solution you will find...

In this post we cover how you can utilise Windows Azure Access Control Services (ACS) as a Security Token Service (STS) to centralise and simplify authentication.

A quick link to a blog on connecting a website on Azure PaaS to a database running on an Azure VM.

Unsurprisingly, I think the way Cloud Computing is transforming the IT industry is also leading to easier ways to learn and develop skills about the Cloud.

Here we are at just past the half way mark of 2012 and it's time to ask yourself "do I have any skin in the cloud game?"