If you use Management groups to manage Azure at scale you may get hit with a bug in the Azure portal, that I discovered today. If you rename the Root Tenant Group the portal stops showing any previously create management groups. Their assignment are still active and you can still manage them using PowerShell or CLI but the portal will start show the out-of-the-box experience.

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.

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.Web/sites/config resource type can be used. Alas, when I use that property the connection strings are not configured on the App Service.

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.BadImageFormatExeption.

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. The default is set to something like this:

One of the major tasks since starting at HorseAnalytics has been to streamline our development efforts. Centralize the codebase on Azure Repos, refactor the code so that it can not only be built on Windows but also on other platforms like Mac OS.

In my first days at HorseAnalytics, one of the first tasks was to review the codebase and streamline the build and release process. That meant to move all repositories over to Azure DevOps so that we can use the pipelines to build and release new versions of our products.

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.

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.

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. But tooling is only half the equation.