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 from Microsoft of course but I stumbled across a LinkedIn post from David Summers today where he shared his own additional set of stencils for Azure.…

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. You should also take a look at the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework (which was just recently updated). When you start using Management Groups you might want to change the display name of the root management group or do other changes to the hierarchy.…

Local time for programmatically created Azure Dashboards

When you begin to operationalize your deployments and want to add monitoring one of the things you might do is to create shared dashboards as part of your deployment. A shared dashboard is basically the same as a non-shared dashboard except it is a full Azure resource, lives in a resource group and can be created through ARM.…

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.…

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.…