Using OnMicrosoft.com Azure Active Directory Accounts
Your Azure Active Directory account has a special domain name associated with it. Learn how to create users in this domain to manage Azure more effectively.
Enabling Release Annotations in VSTS
Learn how to use VSTS to create release Annotations in Application Insights.
Correctly Sizing Azure Virtual Machines
The fixed nature of the options for sizing virtual machines in Azure can be confusing. Learn how to define the right VM size for your loads.
Handling “Open File – Security Warning”
It seems like a simple enough task. Use an Azure File share to store an executable and use a PowerShell script to execute the application on a new virtual machines. In practice, however, you might find that the executable is quietly failing to run. Running the executable on the server manually, the problem becomes apparent…
DevOps News From Connect(); 2017
The Microsoft Connect(); 2017 online event is nearly over, and so far we’ve heard lots of exciting news from Microsoft about Azure and changes to improve their support for DevOps. In fact, DevOps has been a big part of the theme this year. So let’s recap some of the announcements that have been made… Azure…
Using SSH with Visual Studio Team Services
In April 2016, Visual Studio Team Services introduced support for using SSH to connect to Git repositories. Over the summer of 2017, Microsoft made a number of improvements to reduce latency and improve performance for Git connections. These changes take advantage of Azure Traffic Manager to route the traffic over the Azure Global Network. According…
Looking for top Azure Architects and DevOps Gurus to join our team
Like to help companies build great DevOps practices? Passionate about the cloud and really good at thinking on your feet? Do you want to work with one of the world’s top Microsoft Gold Cloud and Gold DevOps Partners? If this seems exciting, and you want to be among the best of the best, working alongside…
Creating First-Run ARM Templates
Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are a great solution for creating a repeatable environment. Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) makes it easy to manage configurations, avoid dependency issues, and prevent server drift. Using IaC also means that you can recreate the environment as often as necessary to ensure it remains consistent. This gets complicated when…
Installing VSTS Build Agents on macOS
If you’re doing Xamarin, macOS (OS X), or iOS development work you’ve likely discovered that you need a way to automate the build of your code from Visual Studio Team Services. If you’re not familiar with setting up a private build agent macOS, the installation instructions provided by Microsoft can be a bit confusing. This…
Creating Recoverable TFS Backups
One of the things I’ve come to appreciate most about the cloud software-as-a-service solutions is that it can reduce work. Although there’s still a need for IT, some tasks – such as performing backups – are provided by the vendor. If you’ve ever tried to backup a Team Foundation Server by hand, you have can…
Creating a Temporary Visual Studio Environment
Sometimes you will find that you need a cloud environment for working on a project. In some cases, you need the environment to perform a task that would take too long when you run it locally (for example, downloading a large file to transfer to Azure Blob Storage). Perhaps you need a mobile environment to…
DevOps: Connecting VSTS to Azure
DevOps is about increasing efficiency and eliminating barriers. There’s a lot of convenience in deploying directly from Visual Studio Team Services into the Azure cloud. With plugin based build and release pipelines, it’s very easy to quickly configure a release and see the results online. You can quickly configure a release to deploy to Azure;…
