Winterdom

Azure SQL now supports setting up Transparent Data Encryption while bringing your key encryption keys. This is easy to setup in the Azure Portal, but I wanted to try setting this up in an automated manner, preferably leveraging ARM templates as much as possible. This turned out to be a...

In a previous post, I discussed how to authenticate to an Azure SQL database from a Web Application (running in Azure App Service) using an Azure Active Directory Service Principal. For this I used a certificate stored in Key Vault to authenticate the principal and obtain a token I could...

In a previous post, I presented a PowerShell script to create a new Service Principal in Azure Active Directory, using a self-signed certificate generated directly in Azure Key Vault for authentication. Now, let’s try using it for somethig useful. All the code and samples for this article can be found...

It is often useful to create Azure Active Directory Service Principal objects for authenticating applications and automating tasks in Azure. While you can authenticate a Service Principal using a password (client secret), it might be better to use an X509 certificate as an alternative. You still need to find a...

A few days ago, I wrote about using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to deploy Azure Event Grid. That sample showed how to create a new Event Grid Topic resource. This basically gives you an URL you can publish custom events to and have them routed to one or more...

Azure Event Grid was announced a couple of days ago for building event-driven architecture. While the initial preview is a bit limited in the number of supported event publishers, it has tons of promise and I was immediately intrigued by the possibilities! Being a fan of Azure Resource Manager templates,...

I was setting up a simple demo on Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) today and ran into an oddity.The sample project I was using had a mixture of MSTest and XUnit-based tests. This would run just fine in Visual Studio, but after setting up a hosted build in VSTS, I...

I’ve been meaning to give a try to the PowerShell Core 6.0 builds on Linux recently. The PowerShell team offers some nice pre-built Docker images you can use to test it, so that’s great. I thought that would be a simple, but cool scenario to try out the new Azure...

I recently had the opportunity to discuss with a customer one cool feature in Application Insights: Release Annotations. As the article above shows, you can easily create Release Annotations using Visual Studio Team Services release pipelines. In this post, I’d like to provide an alternative way to implement release annotations...

Today I pushed to the Visual Studio Gallery version v3.6 of my Viasfora Visual Studio Extension. This version includes a few minor bugfixes, and some new features, such as: Export/Import settings Export/Import color themes Support for JavaScript template literals If you run into any issues, or have any feature suggestion,...