Visio stencils for Azure

Yes. Visio is still a thing. To draw expressive diagrams with the correct visual representation of the underlying services you need to have access to quality stencils. There is the Microsoft Azure Cloud and AI Symbol / Icon Set - SVG [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=41937]…

Fix unspecified errors working with Azure root Management Group

If you have not been working with Management Groups to manage Azure at scale, I recommend to review the documentation [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/management-groups/]. You should also take a look at the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/cloud-adoption/] (which was…

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…

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 [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/templates/microsoft.web/2018-11-01/sites/config#connstringinfo-object]…

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…