Azure Notification Hub race condition

Both development and production environments are deployed in a fully automated fashion using ARM templates. As part of these deployments we also create Notification Hubs and related authorization rules. I noticed today that some of our deployments were failing due to the fact that the Notification Hub resource provider was not able to find a related resource although the necessary dependencies were defined.…

Setting App Service connection strings in ARM

For automatic deployment of test environments we are spinning up App Service instances and want to automatically set connection strings for the database and other services in the same template. According to the Azure Resource Manager documentation the property connectionStrings of the Microsoft.…

Run Visual Studio Test task in 64bit

All of our managed assemblies are build with the any cpu target and we can use both the 32-bit and 64-bit task runner of Azure Pipelines. One of our projects uses a C++ DLL that is either in 32-bit or 64-bit and we need a specific test runner (the 64-bit one to be exact) to not fail with a System.…

Download images with RestSharp

We are using RestSharp for functional testing of our backend services. As part of this process we need to upload images and compare the uploaded bytes against the expected result. RestSharp comes with a default parameter which sets the Accept header.…

Remove data from BACPAC file

Today I needed to create a test database for one of the products I’m working on. In the backend it uses LINQ to SQL against a SQL Azure Database. Exporting the production database and cleaning it up with millions of records in it turned out to be not the most efficient way of creating an empty test database.…

Moving on: Leaving Microsoft

After spending close to eight years in different roles at Microsoft, my time with Microsoft has come to an end. I accepted a new role, starting on May 1st, as Chief Technology Officer with HorseAnalytics an animal tech startup focused on providing a telemetry data platform for horses.…

Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure

Governance is one of the major adoption challenges when it comes to cloud computing. Organizations find themselves “not ready” to consume cloud services whether that perception is more a gut feeling or comes from experience. Microsoft works hard to built a rich toolset to cover many aspects of governance such as Azure Policy, Azure Blueprints, Azure Cost Management and many more.…

Office 365 Security & Compliance Center multi-tenancy (2/2: Process data)

The data available through the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center contains data for all entities stored in that particular Office 365 / Azure Active Directory tenant. Many customers have different business entities that work with the same tenant but have roles within their subordinate companies that needs to access or ingest the compliance pertaining to their entity.…