Unexpected process end and database lock with .NET Core WebApi and Entity Framework Core.

Arjan van Bekkum - June 8, 2020

Developing a WebApi with Async database communication within containers can show unexpected process ending and lock when not with Entity Framework Core 3.1 and .NET Core 3.1

Deploying a Microsoft High Performance Cluster on AWS using Infrastructure as Code

Arjan van Bekkum - May 16, 2020

When running a HPC on AWS you want to use CloudFormation templates to create any instance needed to run the HPC cluster. HPC needs a SQL Server, Headnode(s) and ComputeNodes, we will create template and script for all the components needed to run an High Performance Cluster on Amazon Web Services

Create an Organization level feed in Azure Artifacts

Jesse Houwing - May 11, 2020

A while ago the Azure DevOps team has removed the option to create "Organization level feeds" in Azure Artifacts. This move matches many previous efforts to isolate "projects" in Azure DevOps to make things less confusing and easier to migrate. The official guidance is to create Project level feeds, unless you know what you're doing. And to discourage users, you need to create a new feed using the REST API instead.

Reconnect Volumes On AWS EC2 instances

Arjan van Bekkum - April 30, 2020

When working with data disks on EC2 instances (or virtual machines) you do not want the restore the data when creating a new instance. This blog is about reconnecting the already available volumes in AWS with instances running on Windows.

How to use EntityFramework Core tooling with .NET Standard libraries

Rob Bos - April 29, 2020

What do you do when you find something interesting and not as clear as you expected it to be? You blog about it! Read how to use EntityFramework Core tooling with .NET Standard from Rob

97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know

Jesse Houwing - April 28, 2020

Gunther shepherded a big group of Scrum practitioners from all across the globe to work together on this collection of 97 stories about Scrum. And I'm proud he included me in his herd together with not just fellow Scrum practitioners, but friends I made across the globe through the Scrum community worldwide and especially the Scrum.org trainer community and the nlScrum Dutch Scrum Meetup.

Fixing SonarCloud code coverage condition count with multiple .NET Core test projects

Reinier van Maanen - April 23, 2020

SonarSource made a great improvement, it will now show conditional coverage of your tests. Unfortunately, when using the pipeline as described in my previous blogpost, SonarCloud reports way too many conditions. For instance, a simple "if(condition)" would result in 10 possible conditions which clearly is incorrect but easy to fix.

What to do when your build hangs on the Hosted Pool…

Jesse Houwing - April 21, 2020

Both GitHub actions and Azure Pipelines offer the ability tor un your CI pipeline in the cloud. These agents are provisioned in Azure and fully maintained by Microsoft. These hosted runners are cost effective, require no maintenance and are basically free to use in many cases. But what to do when your build just freezes and stops responding?

Azure DevOps: Update release variables across stages

Rob Bos - April 17, 2020

Rob couldn't find how he previously update a variable in one deployment stage, and use it in another while using Azure DevOps. This posts describes how you can do this.

Enable your custom background on Microsoft Teams

Jesse Houwing - April 14, 2020

Microsoft just shipped an update for Microsoft Teams. It has the option to insert one of a set of predefined images. And a hidden one to add your own!

Many funny agile movies

Jesse Houwing - March 29, 2020

Some people just happen to learn more from short movie clips. And they can be a great way to bring some humor in.

Finding Package Feeds consuming most data in Azure DevOps Server

Jesse Houwing - March 29, 2020

The Collection database of a client saw some explosive growth and I was asked to figure out where the storage had gone to. You'll find a few SQL statements floating around that can help you with these types of questions, but these don't list the Package Feed data usage. After some spelunking in the my local server installation I cobbled together the following statement to dig a little bit deeper.

Update Azure CLI Extensions

Rob Bos - January 27, 2020

Short and sweet post on how to update an Azure CLI extension. Finding that information was scattered around the internet, so Rob documented it here for you.

Fixing Azure Repos Policy Settings Issues

Rob Bos - January 27, 2020

Rob ran into an issue where he could not change Azure Repositories Policy settings, even while his account was in the the Project Administrator group. Somehow he could set the policy, but not change it later on! This posts explains how he got here and how he finally found out why this happened.

Building a Testable and Extensible REST Client for Azure DevOps as an Abstraction

Manuel Riezebosch - January 13, 2020

A testable and extensible REST client to interact with the Azure DevOps REST API. By testable, I mean something easy to mock and extensible that we can add additional requests later on without changing the clients’ interface.

Using Dependency Injection, Managed Identity and Key vault in a.NET 4.7.2 application.

Arjan van Bekkum - December 31, 2019

Adding the Microsoft Dependency Injection extension and Azure Key vault to a .NET 4.7.2 application.

In Scrum Focus on what was “Done” during Sprint Review

Jesse Houwing - November 11, 2019

As Scrum Trainer I get to meet a lot of teams and hear of many different ways to do Scrum. Most are valid ways, yet some seem more aligned with the values of Scrum or the purpose of the specific Scrum Element.

How to deploy a .NET Core web application to Azure using GitHub Actions

Rob Bos - October 26, 2019

In this post Rob shows you how you can use GitHub actions to deploy a .NET Core web application to an Azure App Service.

Deploy Windows Service using Azure DevOps

Rob Bos - October 24, 2019

Ever needed to deploy a Windows Service onto a machine with Azure DevOps? It turns out this is really easy!

How to deal with test-debt

- October 17, 2019

A lack of automated tests slows a team down and makes it more complicated to release software. Especially, when you’re just getting started with continuous delivery, there is few test-automation, if any at all. Fixing it all in one go is too much work. So, how do you deal with that?

Parallelizing a long Stryker Run in Azure DevOps

Rob Bos - October 11, 2019

In this post, Rob details how he used parallelization on a long Stryker Run in Azure DevOps by using different jobs in a build definition. That way multiple agents can be used for executing multiple mutation runs at the same time.

Augmented Reality with javascript

Arjan van Bekkum - October 8, 2019

This blog is about how to use AR.js in a website and showing some cool features of Augmented Reality.

Running Stryker on a large .NET / core solution

Rob Bos - October 7, 2019

Stryker cannot run for an entire solution with multiple test projects, so we need to help it a little and run each project by itself and then join the results. This post explains how to do this and shares the code on GitHub

SonarQube analysis on a Java project – fixing error ‘Project was never analyzed’

Rob Bos - October 7, 2019

Fixing issues on a new SonarQube analysis for a Java project - fixing error 'Project was never analyzed'

Exploring some C# 8 features in a practical example

Manuel Riezebosch - October 4, 2019

I was at the talk of Mads Torgensen (lead designer C#) at #TechoramaNL, and he inspired me to try out some new features.

How to combine Behavior Driven Development and Scrum

- September 26, 2019

Going to production more often means less time to make sure new features don’t cause any trouble. Validating everything manually in a short amount of time seems impossible and prone to errors. Moving from waterfall to Scrum requires another approach: Functional tests that validate the software does what it’s supposed to do, automatically. That requires the process to change, too:

Preventing errors when installing .NET Core Tools in a Continuous Integration Pipeline

Rob Bos - September 25, 2019

Installing .NET Core tools in Azure Pipelines (or locally, or any CI pipeline) and preventing errors when the tool is already installed...

Using Stryker for .NET code in Azure DevOps

Rob Bos - September 4, 2019

Running .NET Core tools in Azure DevOps

Rob Bos - September 3, 2019

Running .NET Core tools in Azure DevOps

Configure Visual Studio to use a different Git Credential Manager for Windows

Jesse Houwing - August 23, 2019

Visual Studio ships with the Git credential Manager for Windows (GCMW) as part of its Team Explorer feature. This nifty little helper allows you to authenticate to Azure Repos among other git providers using your normal username and password and optional 2FA and it will handle the Personal Access Token + Renewal for you. There are cases when you need a specific (usually newer) version of the GCMW.

Using Azure AD (V1.0) tokens in your web API with policies.

Arjan van Bekkum - August 23, 2019

How to use Azure AD tokens with Azure AD groups and turn them into policies in your .NET Core web API to get a more fine-grained security model. This post uses Azure AD V1.0.

Configuring standard policies for all repositories in Azure Repos

Jesse Houwing - August 21, 2019

By default you can only configure policies on specific branches in Azure Repos. You access the policies through the Branch's [...] menu and set the policy from there. But if you're using a strict naming pattern for your branches (e.g. when using Release Flow or GitHub Flow), you may want to set a policy for all future Release Branches, or all Feature branches. Wouldn't it be nice if you could write these policies into law, that way you don't have to set them for every future branch.

Collaboration Superpowers: All about remote pair programming and mobbing

Jesse Houwing & Lisette Sutherland - August 19, 2019

Lisette Sutherland - August 19, 2019

Lisette Sutherland is a long-time remote worker with lots of experience and host of the Collaboration Superpowers Podcast. From the US, working from The Netherlands she is living the remote life. Lisette and I met (in person) at the nlscrum Meetup in Amsterdam, where she presented and where we talked about remote pairing and mobbing afterwards. In this episode of the Collaboration Superpowers Podcast, we talk about the benefits and challenges of pairing and mobbing remotely and highlights the importance of having the right attitude and tools to make it work well.

How to run a .NET Core application in Azure DevOps

Rob Bos - August 17, 2019

The default .NET Core tasks in Azure DevOps will not let you run a compiled assembly. Read this post on how to still run them.

Azure DevOps Marketplace News – Or Imposter Syndrome for developers?

Rob Bos - August 16, 2019

In this post Rob shares the process creating AzDOMarketNews and give an insight into the development process to maybe help someone overcoming #ImposterSyndrome. The tool uses everything from #GitHub, #AzureStorage to #AzureDevOps to run the scheduled releases!

Using Azure DevOps Server to deploy Oracle Objects

Arjan van Bekkum - July 24, 2019

How to deploy your Oracle objects using just powershell and Azure DevOps. By using the Oracle client you will be able to deploy objects and scripts without having to install an extension from the marketplace.

Using Chrome Personas to split identities

Rob Bos - July 13, 2019

Post about using Chrome Personas to split identities instead of loggin in and out everywhere in the same Chrome window. This feature is also available in other browsers. Read about the basic concepts and reasons why this is helpful.

Using the Azure CLI from PowerShell, with error handling

Rob Bos - July 12, 2019

Rob blogged about using the Azure CLI from PowerShell with error handling. That way he could use it properly in Azure DevOps.

GDBC link summary of community blogposts

Rob Bos - July 10, 2019

A blogpost containing a link summary of all the blogposts written by the community of Global DevOps Bootcamp. There is so much content available, written by members of the GDBC team and by both organizers and attendees, that Rob gathered it in this overview.

Setting default repository permissions on your Azure DevOps Organization

Jesse Houwing - July 10, 2019

In Azure Repos there are a lot of places where you can set security: At the Branch level (develop, master) At the Branches level (default for all branches) At the Tag level At the Tags level (default for all tags) At the Repository level (PartsUnlimited-GDBC) At the Git Repositories level (for all repositories in a project)

Getting started with test-automation in your current project

- June 24, 2019

Releasing more often is easier said than done. The release frequency of a product depends on the time it takes to test it. Changing a line of code is easy. Testing that change is a lot more difficult. And it’s usually a bad idea to release untested software. Implementing test automation in an existing codebase can take serious effort. It does not only change the code, but it also changes the way of working. So where to get started?

The 5 unit testing guidelines

- June 24, 2019

A unit test is a small automated check. It checks a tiny bit of software. Unit tests can be written relatively easily and they run in a matter of milliseconds. In reality, unit tests are often far from small. They’re often hard to maintain and it’s hard to understand what the code that’s being tested was supposed to do when a test fails. As a result, unit testing becomes a costly exercise that slows down the team and the test-results doesn’t really prove much. These 5 guidelines help writing proper unit tests.

GDBC: Azure learnings from running at scale

Rob Bos - June 23, 2019

Rob blogged about the intricate issues he encountered while provisioning the resources for Global DevOps Bootcamp. Running a deployment at the scale of the event meant hitting interesting limits in Azure and Azure DevOps. The scale that he needed? 1350 of, well everything? Azure Active Directory Groups and Users, Service Principals, Resource groups, SQL databases, App Service Plans with services, Application Insights. Read more about it here.

Before you know, it is in production

Rob Bos - June 19, 2019

Rob meets people who keep skimping or skipping over actions with a remark of: it is just a test project. He knows that it is only a matter of time before it actually IS in production. To demonstrate this process, he wrote this blogpost about how this happened to him.

GDBC: 48 hours in the life of a team member

Rob Bos - June 18, 2019

After being a team member again for GDBC, Rob describes how his 48 hours of running the infrastructure for the event. Read more about his experiences in this post.

Installing SonarQube on Azure App Service

Rob Bos - April 29, 2019

In this blog, Rob explains how to setup a SonarQube server running on an Azure App Service. Setting SonarQube up like this is much easier than running it on a virtual Machine!

A simple, effective test automation strategy

- April 12, 2019

DevOps teams automate everything. When you’re getting started with test automation, it’s important to wonder why someone would want to automate tests. And what is testing, anyway? This article describes what testing is and what parts of that process can be automated. Fortunately, there’s no way test automation will eliminate manual testing; it will just make that process more efficient.

Container Lake

Loek Duys - March 27, 2019

Running containers at scale is hard, it requires an orchestrator which you need to manage, and often it requires (virtual) machines that also need to be maintained.

Read Azure docs always in en-us instead of local language

Pascal Naber - March 26, 2019

Pascal explains how to always read the Azure docs in en-us instead of the local language

Webservice Plan Scaling in Azure Machine Learning Studio

Rob Bos - February 27, 2019

I recently found that I had a web service plan running for my Machine Learning Studio (MLS) workspace in Azure. I was hosting some test webservices on it from a research session earlier on. The web service plan was not doing anything for me, but I did incur some costs running it. Since the default tier it picks during is already an S1, this can build up if you are paying the subscription yourself.

Run your unit tests in parallel with NUnit

Sander Aernouts - February 18, 2019

In short your test should have a unique instance or clean copy of whatever it depends on to make sure it can truly run in parallel. This applies to any dependency whether is it a mock or substitute, a file, a directory, or a database.

Observing distributed application health using Azure Application Insights & Azure Log Analytics

Geert van der Cruijsen - February 4, 2019

Most people who use Azure Application insights to monitor their applications will not look at it until something is wrong and only then will they look for what exceptions are thrown to see what is going on.

Setting up Azure Monitor to trigger your Azure Function

Rob Bos - January 21, 2019

In this post, Rob shows you how to set up Azure Monitor to trigger your Azure Function on changes in your Azure Subscriptions. With that function you can now act on any changes to your resources!

Missing Azure Functions Logs

Rob Bos - January 15, 2019

After testing with an Azure Function that had a cron expression on the timer trigger to run 'once every two hours', based on the example from the Microsoft documentation I noticed that some logs for the runs weren't there! Read the entire blogpost.

Stop using ARM templates! Use the Azure CLI instead

Pascal Naber - November 12, 2018

Are you still applying the best and easiest way to provision resources in Azure using ARM templates? In this blogpost Pascal's shares his experiences and shows you a really good alternative.

Physical and Digital tools for Scrum Masters and their teams

Jesse Houwing - October 29, 2018

Read Jesse's blog about physical and digital tools for the agile workspace. Tools that help developers, coaches and trainers to survive in the toughest environments.

Azure Functions Connection Monitoring

Rob Bos - October 29, 2018

Searching to monitor the connection limit on AzureFunctions? You are not the only one! Find out where to look by reading Rob's blogpost.

SonarQube setup for Azure DevOps

Rob Bos - October 22, 2018

Rob documented some common gotcha's while installing a new SonarQube server and using it from an Azure DevOps build, after running into and fixing them for a customer.

How to create an Event Grid Subscription to an Azure Function V2

- October 17, 2018

In this blogpost Marco shows how to create an Event Grid subscription to an Azure Function with an Event Grid Trigger in the V2 Runtime.

Python on Azure Functions – Round 2

Reinier van Maanen - October 15, 2018

A couple of months ago Python support for Azure Functions wasn't up to par with C# support. A lot can happen in a couple of months, so Reinier gave it another try to see if things matured...

Distribute your blessed ARM templates with Universal Packages in Azure DevOps

René van Osnabrugge - October 11, 2018

There is a fine-grained balance between full autonomy of a team and arranging things on a more central level. When Rene is doing his shifting to Rugged DevOps presentation, he talks about the use of blessed libraries, scripts and templates. There are many situations where you can copy and paste a script or ARM template between Git repositories to obtain the same functionality. Read the full story on Rene's blog.

Running Azure DevOps agents inside your virtual network using ACI

Chris van Sluijsveld - October 9, 2018

At Ignite 2018 Microsoft announced virtual network integration for Azure Container Instances. It is currently possible to use a ACI based Azure DevOps agent to deploy into your private network. This post explains the extra things you have to do to make this possible.

Sending Delivery information to VictorOps from Azure DevOps releases using Bash

Michiel van Oudheusden - September 27, 2018

When you are using an Incident Management alerting tool like Pagerduty or VictorOps, it might be beneficial to notice when your deployment system is performing an action. Like doing a release to your environment. Pretty useful to correlate with an incident coming in. VictorOps has an integration called Delivery Insights. Basically a specific endpoint where third-party tooling can send a specific payload to so it can record a release. VictorOps has GitHub integration, but their Azure DevOps (VSTS) integration is lacking. Luckily we can do this ourself.

Use Carter to create a simple HTTP API in ASPNET Core

Michiel van Oudheusden - September 26, 2018

Creating an HTTP API can be done in multiple ways, but if you are a .NET developer, you most likely will use the ASP.NET Web API framework. In previous versions, this was not always that obvious to use. The MVC framework and the Web API framework were actually two different systems. For example; action filters for one framework did not work for the other framework. With newer versions, this difference was solved by having one integrated system. However, there are other frameworks that allow you to do similar things. It is all a matter of taste what works best for you, your team and the project. In this post, Michiel will show you Carter.

Microsoft DevOps FastTrack & Azure DevOps Migrations

Jasper Gilhuis - September 24, 2018

Recently Jasper completed a very nice project which finished with a migration weekend bringing several TFS collections towards Azure DevOps. In this blogpost Jasper shares his experiences with running the DevOps FastTrack Program as well as his approach on migrating from TFS to Azure DevOps.

Azure DevOps Pipeline for GitHub Open Source Projects

Rob Bos - September 10, 2018

Microsoft just announced new Azure DevOps pipelines for GitHub Open Source projects, so Rob had to test them out. Read about it here.

Where to start with DevOps Metrics?

René van Osnabrugge - September 6, 2018

In this post Rene talks about monitoring and metrics. Becoming a autonomous DevOps team, means also that you as a team are responsible to build and run the application. Building an application and running an application are two completely different things, and require different metrics. This post gives some guidance which is, and will never be, complete, but merely meant as a starting point.

Azure error setting up export from Activity Log to Event Hub

Rob Bos - September 5, 2018

Fixing errors while setting up an export from Azure Activity Log to an Event Hub.

GDBC DevOps pipelines in VSTS

Rob Bos - September 3, 2018

In this post, Rob describes how he helped the Global DevOps Bootcamp team with automating build and release pipelines to process the challenge definitions. This cut down on errors in the challenges by providing the GDBC team with feedback about the definitions and then running the templates into production, fully automated.

Combining Azure Service Fabric and Service Bus

Loek Duys - September 2, 2018

To integrate Service Fabric into an existing application landscape, it often makes sense to introduce a queuing mechanism. Read more in Loek's latest blogpost.

Retrieving AppSettings for an App Service with the Fluent SDK

Rob Bos - August 30, 2018

Want to retrieve the AppSettings for an App Service, Function App, Logic App with the Fluent SDK? That's not that forthcoming as you might think! Find out more about this here.

Hosting services in .NET Core console application

- August 25, 2018

Building .NET Core console applications with IHost and HostBuild to take advantage of IHostedService, graceful shutdown, dependency injection, logging, configuration and more.

Canonical URLs in an HTTP API

Michiel van Oudheusden - August 23, 2018

Make sure your endpoints have a canonical URI structure when you are building an HTTP API. How? Read Michiel new blogpost and find out.

Using a self signed certificate on a SonarQube server with VSTS/TFS

Rob Bos - August 23, 2018

Resolving issues with the self-signed certificate in the default ARM template of a SonarQube server while using VSTS/TFS.

VSTS Personal Access Token for an Agent: Revoke after use

Rob Bos - August 22, 2018

Rob shows the best practice of revoking a PAT after using it for setting up an agent.

HttpClient and HttpClientFactory in ASP.NET 2.1

- August 20, 2018

Use the new HttpClientFactory to create HttpClient objects in ASP.NET Core. Learn how to create both Named and Typed HttpClient instances.

Azure Key Vault recover keys, secrets and certificates

- August 15, 2018

When working with Azure Key Vaults, you can still run into the human factor. Peter explains how you can avoid that someone hard deletes your keys.

How to make internal members visible to other assemblies with the new CSPROJ format

Sander Aernouts - August 13, 2018

You probably want to expose your Internals to a test project. In the new CSPROJ-format you no longer have an AssemblyInfo.cs. Sander explains what's the new way to do this.

Getting the latest VSTS Agent Download URL for your account

Jasper Gilhuis - August 10, 2018

Sometimes you need to manually or by script download the latest VSTS agent. But how to get this nice pre-configured package for your Account? Jasper faced this challenge and wrote a script

Automatically generating API clients on build with NSwag

Sander Aernouts - August 6, 2018

Generating API clients while building your solution? It sounds like magic, but Sander explains that its not that complicated.

Injecting a Scoped service into IHostedService

- August 3, 2018

Peter explains you how to get your background processes running in the right way using ASP.NET Core.

Chocolatey Server in Azure

Rob Bos - August 1, 2018

Setting up a Chocolatey Server takes a few steps. Rob guides you through it.

Kubernetes and Visual Studio Code, an ideal combination

Michiel van Oudheusden - July 30, 2018

Michiel loves the productivity he gains from Visual Studio Code when he manages his Kubernetes cluster. You can find the details in this blogpost.

Run maintenance jobs on Azure SQL

- July 26, 2018

Maintenance on your SQL Azure is important to maintain the health of your database. Peter gives a heads-up.

Provision a VSTS Agent using an ARM Linux Custom Script Extension

Jasper Gilhuis - July 24, 2018

Running a VSTS agent on Linux using ARM is dead simple according to Jasper!

Adding a Team Administrator through the VSTS Rest API

Jasper Gilhuis - July 11, 2018

Jasper created a script containing all the methods and supportive functions.

VSTS Rest API – Hard to find methods

René van Osnabrugge - July 10, 2018

Rene is using the VSTS Rest API quite a lot. "The documentation is great, but not everything is documented or hard to find." In his blogpost, he provides some snippets which you can use to get even more out of the VSTS Rest API.

Automatic notification of the latest AKS version in Azure with an Azure Logic app and an Azure Function

Pascal Naber - July 5, 2018

In this blogpost Pascal explains how to create a serverless solution with Azure Functions and Logic Apps to get notified about new versions of AKS

Durable Functions – The Anatomy of Function Naming

Marc Duiker - June 25, 2018

Naming is crucial to make Function development on Azure easy. But naming isn't easy! Learn in this blogpost the recommended practices.

Global DevOps Bootcamp – Provisioning the workitems

Michiel van Oudheusden - June 25, 2018

As part of the Global DevOps Bootcamp preparations, Michiel provisioned thousands of VSTS accounts with Work Items. You can find his experience report here.

Access XML SOAP services in .NET Core and client certificates (SSL)

- June 25, 2018

Secure connections to SOAP services isn't trivial in .NET Core. Peter explains in detail how you make it happen.

Access dashboard on AKS with RBAC enabled

Pascal Naber - June 18, 2018

After visiting the Dashboard of Kubernetes in AKS you will get warnings because the user visiting the dashboard does not have enough rights. This blogpost tells you how to solve this.

GDBC: DevOps on the Leaderboard

Rob Bos - June 18, 2018

Reflection about the way we used DevOps for the Global DevOp Bootcamp's leaderboard to check the performance and errors during the global event. We used the same tools as all participants around the world where learning to use.

Using Prometheus in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Sander Aernouts - June 12, 2018

Understanding the Prometheus operator, custom resource definitions and kube-prometheus.

Run scheduled background tasks in ASP.NET Core

Michiel van Oudheusden - June 5, 2018

In the previous blog post called background tasks with ASP.NET Core using the IHostedService Peter described how to use the IHostedInterface for background tasks. In this post, we continue on this subject and add some pointers on how to perform scheduled background tasks.

Deep dive into Windows Server Containers and Docker – Part 3 – Underlying implementation of Hyper-V Containers

- April 18, 2018

Read Cornell's blogpost about Hyper-V containers and how this Hyper-V container virtualization layer works.

Run RabbitMQ using Docker Compose with guest user outside localhost

Michiel van Oudheusden - April 5, 2018

In a recent project, we needed to run RabbitMQ as a replacement for our Azure service bus. The Azure SB works fine, but when we wanted to create a local end to end test environment we did not want to have external dependencies. Read more on Michiel's blog.

DevOps and Telemetry: Supporting systems

Rob Bos - April 5, 2018

In this blogpost, Rob explains options to monitor the underlying parts of a SaaS application. This means logging information about the systems that support the application: servers, database, storage and anything that comes with that.

Override docker-compose port numbers

Michiel van Oudheusden - April 4, 2018

When you are using a docker-compose yaml file, you basically describe how your containers need to run and interact with each other. Part of this are the ports that a container need to use. Read Michiel's blogpost and learn more..

Solve Nginx bad gateway with Identity Server and Asp.Net Core on Kubernetes

Chris van Sluijsveld - April 4, 2018

In this blogpost Chris will explain how to configure Nginx Ingress for Kubernetes when running production workloads.

Retrieve an OAuth client token from Azure AD using Runscope

Michiel van Oudheusden - April 3, 2018

Runscope is a great online tool to validate and test API endpoints. For a recent project, we are using it to mimic traffic from an external system that is supposed to submit XML files to our application. The application, however, requires an authorization token with a valid JWT to authenticate and authorize the caller. As there is a lifetime on those tokens, we need to retrieve a new one each time we start a test. Luckily that is not too difficult in Runscope.

Is your AAD account the same as your Microsoft account?

Jesse Houwing - March 28, 2018

If your AAD account is still the same as your Microsoft Account, then you’ve probably seen this question regularly. You may have wondered why it’s asking and you’ve likely chosen the wrong option more than once. Is fear what’s keeping you from breaking them apart? It shouldn’t, as it turns out this has become a lot simpler. How much simpler? Find out…

Fix error on Azure: “the subscription doesn’t have permissions to register the resource provider”

Geert van der Cruijsen - March 22, 2018

In this blogpost Geert gives you 3 options to solve this Azure error which can help you get going again in building great cool stuff on Azure.

Upgrade ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core 2.0 to 2.1-preview1

- March 21, 2018

In this blogpost Peter shows what he had to change and give some tips on how to upgrade.

DevOps and Telemetry: Insights into your application – Part 1

Rob Bos - March 15, 2018

Telemetry is a very important part in the DevOps journey. Without telemetry it's hard to prove anything. Step one should be to get a solid understanding of (a lot of different aspects of) your application. This series of posts will go through Rob's journey in this aspect of DevOps.

Unit testing in Service Fabric can be difficult

Loek Duys - March 6, 2018

In this blogpost you’ll find a description of some of the solutions provided by the open source library named ‘ServiceFabric.Mocks’

Initialize ASP.NET Core 2 with CreateDefaultBuilder, what differs if you run in Development enviroment

- February 27, 2018

In this blogpost Peter explains the two differences when you run your application in a Development environment.

Locating and bulk editing work items in VSTS

Rob Bos - February 26, 2018

In this post Rob explains how he helped a customer moving a lot of work items from one type to another by using a Microsoft libary to talk to Visual Studio Team Services via the REST APIs.

Run background processes with the IHostedService and learn how to inject your services with dependency injection

- February 22, 2018

In this blog Peter introduces the IHostedService and how to avoid common memory leaks when implementing the hosted service.

Secure or Compliant? That is the question!

René van Osnabrugge - February 2, 2018

Compliance means conforming to a rule, such as a specification, policy, standard or law. Regulatory compliance describes the goal that organizations aspire to achieve in their efforts to ensure that they are aware of and take steps to comply with relevant laws, polices, and regulations.

Persistent Storage and Volumes using Kubernetes on Azure with AKS or Azure Container Service

Pascal Naber - January 26, 2018

Many applications hosted in a Docker container need a volume to store data on or to read from. This blogposts shows the most used possibilities to use persistent storage using Kubernetes on Azure.

Introduction to ChatOps

- January 24, 2018

ChatOps is a way of combining and centralizing all the tooling for your team into one shared messaging tool. By centralizing access to your systems to one central messaging tool, you increase transparency, collaboration and productivity of you team.

Algorithmic IT Operations for Microsoft Azure

Joey Compeer - December 14, 2017

As you might already know, StackState shines when it comes to providing a unified view of your Information Technology (IT) landscape. The last couple of years we have seen several businesses transition parts of their IT infrastructure to the cloud. However, only parts of the entire IT infrastructure are migrated to the cloud due to various reasons.

Create a sharded MongoDB in Azure Cosmos DB

- December 13, 2017

During his last project Marco was setting up a Release Pipeline in VSTS and one of the steps was to create a Sharded MongoDB in Cosmos DB.

Set Buildnumber from Inline Powershell

- December 12, 2017

Maximize how you use your VSTS build and release pipeline with Inline Powershell tasks. In this blog series ‘Tips and Tricks for Inline Powershell’, Peter will show simple samples on how to get more out of your pipelines. This blog post: Set the buildnumber.

Set progess in Inline Powershell task

- December 12, 2017

Maximize how you use your VSTS build and release pipeline with Inline Powershell tasks. In this blog series ‘Tips and Tricks for Inline Powershell’, Peter will show simple samples on how to get more out of your pipelines. This blog post: Set progress.

Let your Inline Powershell task fail

- December 8, 2017

Maximize how you use your VSTS build and release pipeline with Inline Powershell tasks. In this blog series ‘Tips and Tricks for Inline Powershell’, Peter will show simple samples on how to get more out of your pipelines. This blog post: Let your task fail.

Use VSTS Variables Inline powershell

- December 8, 2017

Maximize how you use your VSTS build and release pipeline with Inline Powershell tasks. In this blog series ‘Tips and Tricks for Inline Powershell’, Peter will show simple samples on how to get more out of your pipelines. This blog post: Use VSTS Variables.

Set custom timeout for code first Migrations Entity Framework (Core 2.0)

- December 5, 2017

Sometimes a migration takes more time then your default timeout of your database connection. In such a case you do want to increase the timeout for the migration to be able to complete, but you do not want to change the timeout for your normal operations.

Add Index with Include Entity Framework (Core 2.0)

- December 4, 2017

When creating indexes with code first migrations in Entity Framework Core 2.0 you can create an index on a table by adding the following to your DbContext:

Handling settings and Environment Variables of your .NET Core 2 application hosted in a Docker container during development and on Kubernetes (Helm to the resque)

Pascal Naber - November 29, 2017

You have developed a microservice in .NET Core 2 and want to host it as a Docker Container in Kubernetes. Your Microservice contains settings, some appsettings or connectionstrings for example. These settings differ over environments. You can treat this configuration for Kubernetes on different ways. This blogpost shows you how to handle settings over environments prepared for Continuous Delivery.

Monitoring Kubernetes with Prometheus and Grafana

Chris van Sluijsveld - November 23, 2017

When running workloads on Kubernetes in Azure you probably want some insights in how your cluster and pods are behaving. In this blogpost Chris will setup Prometheus and Grafana to get a dashboard going. Lets start with deploy the configuration for Prometheus.

Setting up Sonatype Nexus 3 as your Windows Docker Container Registry

René van Osnabrugge - November 23, 2017

A customer of René uses Sonatype Nexus as their artifact repository for all kinds of packages and also for Docker Containers. Since there are a few Microsoft .Net teams are moving towards Docker, the need for Docker containers arose as well.

Azure Functions Tips: Grouping Functions into Function Apps

Marc Duiker - November 22, 2017

Earlier today Marc read a tweet where a developer wasn’t sure when to group several Azure Functions in one Function App. The Azure Function engineers responded swiftly and they’ll extend the official docs with some guidelines in this area soon. Marc thinks this is a really interesting topic so let’s start with a few ideas of his own.

Working with multiple Kubernetes Clusters on Azure Container Service

Pascal Naber - November 22, 2017

When using multiple Kubernetes clusters on Azure Container Service, people execute the az acs kubernetes get-credentials command every time they need to reconnect to a different cluster. This works, but is not needed. You can do it easier.

Debugging packages from your VSTS Package Management Feed with Visual Studio 2017

Jasper Gilhuis - November 6, 2017

In this blogpost Jasper is going to show you how you can debug packages that reside in a Package Management Feed in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS).

Configure Https / TLS / SSL on Kubernetes with Kube-Lego hosted on Azure Container Service

Pascal Naber - October 30, 2017

What if you can configure your infrastucture with a process that requests your SSL Certificates automatic. Not only this, but this process registeres the certificates in your infrastructure also. There is more.

ASP.NET Core correct usage of ConfigureAwait with async/await

- October 30, 2017

Lately there was a discussion on when to use ConfigureAwait(true) or ConfigureAwait(false) in ASP.NET Core 2. In the end most of the team, including Peter, had a faulty assumption on how to do this in ASP.NET Core. In this case ASP.NET Core is different from ASP.NET. Good to know if you have to decide on what to use in ASP.NET core.

Configure Ingress on Kubernetes using Azure Container Service

Pascal Naber - October 27, 2017

In this blogpost about running a .NET Core 2 application in Kubernetes which can be found here, Pascal is creating a Service to expose the .NET Core 2 Webapi, so the service gets a public IP address.

Cross process Application Insights with Multi-Role Application Map

- October 16, 2017

In this blog posts Peter will explain how to enable Multi Role Application Maps preview, give you different process names and add dependency tracking into your application.

Automate the deployment of .NET Core 2 Docker containers to Kubernetes with Azure Container Service and Azure Container Registry using VSTS

Pascal Naber - September 21, 2017

Read more about the Continuous Delivery of the .NET Core 2 WebAPI application automated in VSTS.

How we containerized our new WordPress website and continuously deliver it on Azure

Roy Cornelissen - September 14, 2017

When we set out to design and build a new website for Xpirit, we knew that we wanted to use WordPress and run it on Azure, using cloud native building blocks, set up continuous delivery and deploy the whole thing as Docker containers.

Talking to Kubernetes from VSTS

Loek Duys - September 13, 2017

In this blogpost Loek will describe how to start running some containers on a Kubernetes cluster by using VSTS. Loek explains how to execute commands and queries on Kubernetes, by using the CLI and by using Tasks.

Run .NET Core 2 Docker images in Kubernetes using Azure Container Service and Azure Container Registry

Pascal Naber - September 12, 2017

This blogpost shows you the bare minimal steps to run .NET Core 2 Docker images in Kubernetes.

Test Azure deployments in your VSTS Release Pipeline

- September 8, 2017

When deploying Azure Resources you want to know if all resources are deployed as expected.

SSH keys on Windows for Kubernetes with Azure Container Service (ACS)

Pascal Naber - September 6, 2017

Running a Linux VSTS Agent on Azure Container Instances

René van Osnabrugge - August 18, 2017

This new Azure service is very promising. Rene talks about this hosted and managed Container cluster.

Automatically retain a VSTS release

Jasper Gilhuis - July 24, 2017

Retain a release automatically after it has been succesfully enrolled to an environment by utilizing the PowerShell task to minimize the effort.

Setting up Continuous delivery for Azure API management with VSTS

Geert van der Cruijsen - July 24, 2017

In this blogpost Geert explains how you can set up Continuous delivery of your API definitions in Azure API management including the actual API implementation in Azure Web apps using VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services)

Error during CreateContainer: failure in a Windows system call: No hypervisor is present on this system

- July 18, 2017

Cornell explains the reason for this error message and let you know how to solve the issue.

Installing the Python Azure SDK on a Raspberry Pi Zero

Marc Duiker - July 16, 2017

During the summer holiday Marc has been working on a hobby project which involves a Raspberry Pi Zero and a Pi camera module. Part of the solution is uploading the pictures the Pi takes to the cloud, Microsoft Azure to be more specific.

Session videos to watch from Build 2017 for Mobile developers

Geert van der Cruijsen - July 5, 2017

Geert created a list of all things relevant for (Xamarin) mobile developers ranging from the new Xamarin announcements that made the headlines to some other sessions that you might have missed but can be relevant for mobile developers.

Log4Net Troubleshooting

- July 4, 2017

This article explains the basic log4net troubleshooting and most common solutions.

Deploying a Docker Composed Application on Service Fabric

Chris van Sluijsveld - June 14, 2017

In this post, Chris Sluijsveld will explain what you have to do to get this running.

The (r)evolution of cloud computing

Martijn van der Sijde - May 4, 2017

Martijn wrote a comprehensive post about the various flavours and trends in cloud computing. Check it out!

Solve Docker firewall error in Windows

- May 3, 2017

Read how Marco solved an error that prevented volume sharing between Windows and his Docker containers.

Using VSTS Package Management as a private Chocolatey Gallery

René van Osnabrugge - May 2, 2017

Learn from René how to use VSTS Package Management as a private Chocolatey gallery.

14 extensions to enrich your daily VSTS usage

Jasper Gilhuis - May 2, 2017

Jasper posted this list of plugins. In his words: "I find them convenient and they help me to get the most out of VSTS. The list below is primarily focussed on the Work and Code area and not so much on the Build and Release area."

The first Global DevOps Bootcamp

René van Osnabrugge - April 25, 2017

As a fanatic DevOps adept, René wanted to organise a Bootcamp event around DevOps to make people familiar with the subject. And…he is proud to present that on June 17^th, the first Global DevOps Bootcamp will be held at various locations around the globe.