Know your Azure Subscription Quota and Usage (Wriju Ghosh) - Because waiting until it breaks is probably not the option you are looking for... It's a good idea to know your quotas first.
MVC vs Razor Pages - A quick comparison (Jon Hilton) - Interesting post that compares two architecture. However, all the unit-test and mocking/ dependency injection were not included...Nevertheless it worth reading f you hare new in .Net Core development.
Making an Azure static website EVEN MORE secure (Julian M Bucknall) - This post is like a pleasant journey in the security word. You will probably learn a lot, just like the author did (and myself obviously)
Data
Azure Cosmos DB training webinars - Cosmo DB is gaining in popularity. It's time to boost your skill check this webinar/ on-demand training.
Capturing Power BI queries using DAX Studio (Marco Russo) - Great post that gets us started on ways to find optimization for our Power Bi. Not enough people know about DaxStudio, have a look it's free!
Making Time(Bob Clagett) -I really enjoyed reading that book. I've been watching Bob's YouTube Channel for a while. ANd was happy to ear about his new book. In Making Time, a little bit like in his videos, Bob explains how he build stuff... but this time instead of a furniture or a room, it's a new career/ business. A short book (88 pages) but a lot of fun.
Last week, it was the 25 edition of the MVP Summit. An event, where Microsoft invites all his MVP to get to Seattle and spend some time with the products teams and learn on the latest news and best practices.
This year was particularly inspiriting by the Microsoft roadmap, of course, but even more by all the amazing people a got the chance to meet and discuss with. I'm all pump-up, and I have tons of ideas and projects… more to come.
I already miss you…
Cloud
Deploy Docker containers fast to Microsoft Azure (Michelangelo van Dam) - This is an excellent tutorial to get started with Docker and also to see what's possible with Azure Container Instance service (ACI).
The Modern Dev Team (Rob Conery) - What a great post. Maybe it's only me getting old ;) but I think we all have these thoughts one day or the other.
Cloud
A great developer experience for Ansible (Corey Sanders) - This post announces the integration of Austin in the cloud shell and visual studio. It somewhere we can learn more about it. I didn't know about it, but I really want t use in my next DevOps tasks.
Azure Functions Proxies (Eric Williams) - Azure Functions are a very useful thing to have in your toolbox. With the addition of Proxies, it becomes a must read a few ways to use them in this post.
Jenkins on Azure: from zero to hero (Pui Chee Chan) - Jenkins is an extremely popular build server. This post list all the features pre-package for you when you deploy it in Azure in a few click.Pretty awesome.
My Favorite SQL Prompt Features (MarlonRibunal) - If you never try SqlPrompt and you write SQL in your day to day, stop read this, and go downloading it, or at least read this post that gives you a glimpse of it's feature.
Virtual machines (VM) are used in most solutions nowadays as a [ProcessName] server, temporary machine to run tests or make demos, and sometimes even as a development machine. One of the great benefits of the cloud is that you only pay for what you use. So unlike the old server, that you keep paying for, you won pay virtual machine's CPU for when you turned off! In this post, I explain how to do it with your existing machines and also what to do with all the future one that you will be creating.
From the Azure portal (portal.azure.com), select the Virtual Machine (VM) that you which to edit. Then look at the option panel, on the left, for Auto-Shutdown in the Operations section. You should have something that looks like this:
At any time you can enable and disable that functionality, it won’t affect the running VM.
Now, to activate it click on the Enabled. Then Select the time you would like to see the VM shutdown. Be sure to select the good time zone, by default it’s UTC. You can adjust the at for UTC of change the time zone, both options are valid.
Now you could decide to enable the notification. That could be useful if you may want to postpone the shutdown for one or two hours, or integrate the shutdown to another process like backup, cleaning…
To activate the notification option just click on the enabled, and enter the email address. If you want to attach the shutdown to a Logic App or an Azure Functions use the webhook. Here an example of notification email, see the Postpone options link.
What if you have many VMs running
Let's say you have already twenty (or more) VMs running, you could have executed a PowerShell script like:
Update - 2018-03-14 Well, today this is only possible for VM part of a DevTest Labs. Not for "regular" VM. However, I'm sure that day will come pretty quick.Does that mean that you need to go in all your VMs and set it manually? No. You can use an Azure Automation that will stop a list of VM on a regular schedule. A big advantage of this solution is that you can be more creative since it offers a lot more flexibility. You could identify the VM to shutdown base on some TAGS, you could have a different schedule base on the week vs weekend. You could even have a task to start VMs in the morning... More to come on that topic in a future post... If you want to read about how to get started to Azure Automation click here.
Multiple VMs that already exist, no problem
Obviously, if you have multiple virtual machines that already exist it is not very efficient to change their configuration one by one via the portal. Here is a small script to change the configuration of a large amount of VM in one shot.
The variable $selectedVMs contains all the VMS that we wish to edit. In this sample, I only get VMs contained in the RessourceGroup cloud5mins, but there are no limits to what you can do. You could select all VMs with a specific OS, tags, location, name, etc.
The variable $ScheduledShutdownResourceId will be the identity for the configuration for the auto-shutdown we wish to inject. Note that the provider is microsoft.devtestlab.
Next, we create a collection of properties in $Properties. status the one that active or deactivate the auto-shutdonw. targetResourceId is the resourceID of the VM we target.
The only things left is to specify the time and timezone.
If you prefer, I also have a video version that explains all the steps.
How to shutdown automatically all your existing VMs
End Update
Let's create a VM with the auto-shutdown pre-configured with ARM
Of course, a much more efficient way to set the auto-shutdown is at the creation time by adding a new resource of type Microsoft.DevTestLab/schedules to your template. This option was previously only accessible for DevTestLab, but recently was made available to any VMs.
Here an example of the variables that could be added to your template.
And here an example of Microsoft.DevTestLab/schedules resource. One of these should be added for every VM you wish to auto-shutdown. Because your script is for one server, however, only one instance is required.
Exploring the Azure IoT Arduino Cloud DevKit (Scott Hanselman) - This is an excellent post to know where to star with arduino and make your mind of what to expect in terms of effort vs result.
How to Scale Your API Design Process with OpenAPI (Ryan Pinkham) - This post introduces SwaggerHubs. I didn't know about this tool, it looks really good. As a heavy Azure user cannot miss some similitude with Api Managment. I will definitely give it a try.
Styling Social Media Icon Lists in CSS (Mark Heath) - Yeah right, we can read CSS and probably hack some stuff... But it's excellent to learn how to do simple things the good way. And this post shows exactly that.
Power BI Desktop January Feature Summary (Amanda Cofsky) - It looks like some team did not take a lot of time-off during the Holidays... So many great new functionalities; it's a fantastic way to start the year.
I recently started a French YouTube channel. Quickly, I got a message asking to add English sub-title, and got also a suggestion to leverage Azure Logic App and some Cognitive Services to help me in that task. I really liked the idea, so I gave it a shot. I recorded myself and in twenty minutes I was done. Even though, it was not the success I was hoping for, the application works perfectly. It's just that speaking in French with a lot of English technical word was a little bite too hard for the Video Indexer. However, If you are speaking only one language in your video that solution would work perfectly. In this post, I will show you how to create that Logic App with Azure Video Indexer and Cognitive Services.
The Idea
Once a video is dropped in an OneDrive folder (or any file system accessible from Azure), a Logic App will get triggered and uploads the file to the Azure Video Indexer, generate a Video Text Tracks (VTT) file, and save this new file in another folder. A second Logic App will get started and use the Translator Text API from Azure Cognitive Service to translate the VTT file, and save it into the final folder.
The Generation
Before getting started, you will need to create your Video Indexer API. To do this, login to the Video Indexer developer portal, and subscribe at the Video Indexer APIs - Production in the Product tab. You should then get your API keys.
To get more detail on the subscription refer to the documentation. To know the names, parameters, code sample to all the methods available in your new API, click on APIs tab.
Now let's create our first Logic App. I always prefer to start with a blank template, but take what fits you. Any Online file system's trigger will do, in this case I'm using the When a file is created from OneDrive. I got some issue with the trigger. It was not always getting fired by a new file. I tried the When a file is modified trigger, but it didn't solve the problem. If you think, you know what I was doing wrong feel free to leave a comment :).
First reel action is to upload the file to the Azure Video Indexer. We can to that ery easily by using the method Upload video and and index, passing the name and content from the trigger.
Of course, the longer is the video the longer will be the process, so we will need to wait. A way to do that is by adding a waiting loop. Will use the method Get processing state from the Video Indexer and loop until the status is processed. To slow down your loop just add a wait action and set it at tree or five minutes.
When the file is completely processed, it will be time to retrieve the VTT file. This is done in two simple step. First, we will get the URL by calling the method Get the transcript URL, then with a simple HTTP GET we will download the file. The last thing we will need to do will be to save it in a folder where our second Logic App will be watching for new drop.
In the visual designer, the Logic App should look to this.
The Translation
The second Logic App is very short. Once again, it will get triggered by a new file trigger in our OneDrive Folder. Then it will be time to call our Translator Text API from Azure Cognitive Service. That's to the great Logic App interface it's very intuitive to fill all the parameter for our call. Once we got the translation, we need to save it into our final destination.
The Logic App should look like this.
Conclusion
It was much easier than I expected. I really like implementing those integration projects with Logic App. It's so easy to "plug" all those APIs together with this interface. And yes like I mentioned in the introduction the result was not "great". I run test with video purely in English (even with my accent) or only in French (no mix) and the result was really good. So I think the problem is really the fact that I mix French and English. I could improve the Indexer by spending time providing files so the service could understand better my "Franglish". However, in twenty minutes, I'm really impressed by the way, in turned out. If you have idea on how to improve this solution, or if you have some questions, feel free to leave a comment. You can also watch my French YouTube video.
Take a Break with Azure Functions (Justin Clareburt (MSFT)) (Justin Clareburt) - I know the Holidays are passed, but it's always time to learn Azure Function. Do yourself a favor the next rainy or super cold weekend... Follow this "program".
What part of your job can you automate? (Kevin Bah) - With time, all developers accumulate "tools" and these days with all those scripts and API capabilities... It's not a question of how can we do something, but more: where to do it...
How to handle BLANK in DAX measures (Marco Russo) - This great post will helps us to think about if blanks could by part of our data and how to manage them.
Is jQuery still relevant? (Remy Sharp) - I've really appreciated this post that brings numbers to sustain his answer.
Lately, I've been having some trouble when deploying from Visual Studio. First, I didn't care since I didn't have time to investigate and also because most of the time using PowerShell or Azure CLI. However, this issue was not usual of Visual Studio, so I decided to see what was the problem and try to fix it.
The Problem
In a solution, I added a simple Azure Resource Group deployment project just like this one.
Then when I try to right-click and do a Deploy...
I was having this error message:
- The following parameter values will be used for this operation:
- Build started.
- Project "TestARMProject.deployproj" (StageArtifacts target(s)):
- Project "TestARMProject.deployproj" (ContentFilesProjectOutputGroup target(s)):
- Done building project "TestARMProject.deployproj".
- Done building project "TestARMProject.deployproj".
- Build succeeded.
- Launching PowerShell script with the following command:
- 'D:\Dev\local\TestARMProject\TestARMProject\bin\Debug\staging\TestARMProject\Deploy-AzureResourceGroup.ps1' -StorageAccountName '' -ResourceGroupName 'TestARMProject' -ResourceGroupLocation 'eastus' -TemplateFile 'D:\Dev\local\TestARMProject\TestARMProject\bin\Debug\staging\TestARMProject\azuredeploy.json' -TemplateParametersFile 'D:\Dev\local\TestARMProject\TestARMProject\bin\Debug\staging\TestARMProject\azuredeploy.parameters.json' -ArtifactStagingDirectory '.' -DSCSourceFolder '.\DSC'
-
-
- Account : Frank Boucher
- SubscriptionName : My Subscription
- SubscriptionId : xxxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx
- TenantId : xxxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx
- Environment : AzureCloud
-
- VERBOSE: Performing the operation "Replacing resource group ..." on target "".
- VERBOSE: 7:06:33 - Created resource group 'TestARMProject' in location 'eastus'
-
- ResourceGroupName : TestARMProject
- Location : eastus
- ProvisioningState : Succeeded
- Tags :
- TagsTable :
- ResourceId : /subscriptions/xxxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx/resourceGroups/TestARMProject
-
- Get-ChildItem : Cannot find path
- 'D:\Dev\local\TestARMProject\TestARMProject\bin\Debug\staging\TestARMProject\azuredeploy.json' because it does not
- exist.
- At D:\Dev\local\TestARMProject\TestARMProject\bin\Debug\staging\TestARMProject\Deploy-AzureResourceGroup.ps1:108
- char:48
- + ... RmResourceGroupDeployment -Name ((Get-ChildItem $TemplateFile).BaseNa ...
- + ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- + CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (D:\Dev\local\Te...zuredeploy.json:String) [Get-ChildItem], ItemNotFound
- Exception
- + FullyQualifiedErrorId : PathNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.GetChildItemCommand
-
- Deploying template using PowerShell script failed.
- Tell us about your experience at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=691202
Apparently the script is failling with Get-ChildItem because my script is missing?! I looked in the folder D:\Dev\local\TestARMProject\TestARMProject\bin\Debug\staging\TestARMProject, and indeed the files are missing! Fixing this is in fact really simple fortunately.
The Solution
The problem is very simple when Visual Studio is building the project, it doen't copies the script files in the build folder (in this case bin\Debug\Staging\). In fact, Visual Studio is doing exactly as we are telling it. Let see the build command for those files. Right-click and select Properties (or Alt+Enter) while azuredeploy.json is selected.
See the Build Action is set at None change that to Content (for all the scripts). Save and Deploy again.
Can I Have My CPU Back Visual Studio? (Rion Williams) - This is an interesting and easy solution to an annoying problem. Hopefully, a fix is coming soon.
I've been blogging for about ten years with you now on this blog, and it's been a pleasure. More recently I started, quietly, a French blog named: Cloud en Français, feel free to have a look.
Today, I'm super excited to share with you my new project: A YouTube channel with original content published every week... in French! Every Wednesday I will be publishing a five-minute video to answer a problem or a question.
Je blogue depuis une dizaine d'années avec vous sur ce blogue, et c'est toujours un plaisir. Plus récemment j'ai commencé, plus silencieusement, un blogue français nommé: Cloud en Français, n'hésitez pas à jeter un coup d'œil.
Aujourd'hui, je suis super excité de partager avec vous mon nouveau projet: une chaîne YouTube avec du contenu original publié chaque semaine... en français! Chaque mercredi, je vais publier une vidéo d'environ cinq minutes pour répondre à un problème ou une question.
Venez me voir en ligne, abonnez-vous, posez des questions ...
Azure Application Architecture Guide (Mike Wasson) - A free book (pdf only) with all the best of the AzureCAT team? You really don't want to miss that opportunity.
Understanding Azure Event Grid ( Jason Roberts) - Nice little post that introduces event grid, differentiate it from the service bus, and quickly go over the pricing.
Cloud en 5 minutes (Frank Boucher) - If French is your primary language, I just start a Youtube channel where every Wednesday I will publish a new video. // Si le français est votre langue première, je viens de lancer une chaine Youtube où à chaque mercredi je publirai un nouveau vidéo.
The other day, a friend asked me how he could add some functionality to an existing application without having access to the code. It the perfect case to demo some Azure Functions capability, so I jumped on the occasion. Because my friend is a Node.js developer on Linux, and I knew it was supported, I decided to try that combination. I know Node, but I'm definitely not and expert since I don't practice very often.
This post is my journey building that demo. I was out of my comfort zone, coding in Node and working on a Linux machine, but not that far... Because these days, you can "do some Azure" from anywhere.
The Goal
Coding an Azure Function that will connect to an SQL Database (it could be any data source). Using Node.js and tools available on Unbuntu.
Note: In this post, I will be using Visual Studio Code, but you could also create your function directly in the Azure Portal or from Visual Stusio.
Getting Started
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know how I like Visual Studio Code. It's a great tool available on Mac Linux and Windows and gives you the opportunity to enjoy all its feature from anywhere feeling like if you were in your cozy and familiar environment. If VSCode is not already installed on your machine, go grap your free version on http://code.visualstudio.com.
Many extensions are available for VSCode, and one gives us the capability to code and deploy Azure Function. To install it, open VSCode and select the extension icon and search for Azure Function; it's the one with the yellow lighting and the blue angle brackets.
Create the Azure Function
To get started let's great an Azure Function project. By sure to be in the folder where you wish to create your Function App. Open the Command Pallette (Ctrl + Shift + p) and type Azure Function. Select Azure Functions: Create New Project. That will add some configuration files for the Functions App.
Now Let's create a Function. You could reopen again the Command Palette and search for Azure Function: Create Function, but let's use the UI this time. At the bottom left of the Explorer section, you should see a new section called AZURE FUNCTIONS. Click on the little lighting to Create a new Function.
After you specify the Function App name, the Azure subscription and other little essential, a new folder will be added in your folder structure, and the function is created. The code of our function is in the file Index.js. At the moment, of writing this post only Javascript is supported by the VSCode extension.
Open the file index.js and replace all its content by the following code.
var Connection = require('tedious').Connection;
var Request = require('tedious').Request
var TYPES = require('tedious').TYPES;
module.exports = function (context, myTimer) {
var _currentData = {};
var config = {
userName: 'frankadmin',
password: 'MyPassw0rd!',
server: 'clouden5srv.database.windows.net',
options: {encrypt: true, database: 'clouden5db'}
};
var connection = new Connection(config);
connection.on('connect', function(err) {
context.log("Connected");
getPerformance();
});
function getPerformance() {
request = new Request("SELECT 'Best' = MIN(FivekmTime), 'Average' = AVG(FivekmTime) FROM RunnerPerformance;", function(err) {
if (err) {
context.log(err);}
});
request.on('row', function(columns) {
_currentData.Best = columns[0].value;
_currentData.Average = columns[1].value;;
context.log(_currentData);
});
request.on('requestCompleted', function () {
saveStatistic();
});
connection.execSql(request);
}
function saveStatistic() {
request = new Request("UPDATE Statistic SET BestTime=@best, AverageTime=@average;", function(err) {
if (err) {
context.log(err);}
});
request.addParameter('best', TYPES.Int, _currentData.Best);
request.addParameter('average', TYPES.Int, _currentData.Average);
request.on('row', function(columns) {
columns.forEach(function(column) {
if (column.value === null) {
context.log('NULL');
} else {
context.log("Statistic Updated.");
}
});
});
connection.execSql(request);
}
context.done();
};
The code just to demonstrate how to connect to an SQL Database and do not represent the best practices. At the top, we have some declaration the used the package tedious; I will get back to that later. A that, I've created a connection using the configuration declared just before. Then we hook some function to some event. On connection connect the function getPerformance() is called to fetch the data.
On request row event we grab the data and do the "math", then finally on requestCompleted we call the second sub-function that will update the database with the new value. To get more information and see more example about tedious, check the GitHub repository.
Publish to Azure
All the code is ready; it's now time to publish our function to Azure. One more time you could to that by the Command Palette, or the Extension menu. Use the method of your choice and select Deploy to Function App. After a few seconds only our Function will be deployed in Azure.
Navigate to portal.azure.com and get to your Function App. If you try to Run the Function right now, you will get an error because tedious is not recognized.
Install the dependencies
We need to install the dependencies for the Function App, in this case tedious. A very simple way is to create a package.json file and to use the Kudu console ton install it. Create a package.json file with the following json in it:
Open the Kudu interface. You can reach it by clicking on the Function App then the tab Platform features and finally Advanced tools (Kudu). Kudu is also available directly by the URL [FunctionAppNAme].scm.azurewebsites.net (ex: https://clouden5minutes.scm.azurewebsites.net ). Select the Debug consoleCMD. Than in the top section navigate to the folder home\site\wwwroot. Drag & drop the package.json file. Once the file is uploaded, type the command npm install to download and install all the dependencies declared in our file. Once it all done you should restart the Function App.
Wrapping up & my thoughts
There it is, if you go back now to your Function and try to execute it will work perfectly. It's true that I'm familiar with Azure Function and SQL Database. However, for a first experience using Ubuntu and Node.js in the mix, I was expecting more resistance. One more time VSCode was really useful and everything was done with ease.
For those of you that would like to test this exact function, here the SQL code to generate what will be required for the database side.
CREATE TABLE RunnerPerformance(
Id INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY,
FivekmTime INT
);
CREATE TABLE Statistic(
Id INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY,
BestTime INT,
AverageTime INT
);
INSERT Statistic (BestTime, AverageTime) VALUES (1, 1);
DECLARE @cnt INT = 0;
WHILE @cnt < 10
BEGIN
INSERT INTO RunnerPerformance (FivekmTime)
SELECT 9+FLOOR((50-9+1)*RAND(CONVERT(VARBINARY,NEWID())));
SET @cnt = @cnt + 1;
END;
Azure SQL Databases Disaster Recovery 101 (Xiaochen Wu) - One of the best posts a read on the topic. I'm not sure if I can sale the alien part to a client, but other than that very clear. lol
Improvements to Azure Functions in Visual Studio ( Justin Clareburt ) - Wow. Azure Functions may evolve quickly but the tools are following, and this is impressive. Check out all the features that would be included in the next version (currently accessible in preview).
Creating a Minimal ASP.NET Core Windows Container (Jeffrey T. Fritz) - This is an amazing post that shows how to optimize our containers. It may be about Asp.Net Core but it applies to any containers. It also shows one of the big improvements with .Net Core...
Why I won't be switching to VSCode any time soon - A geek with a hat (Swizec Teller) - I was surprised when I saw the title of this post, how could you not like VsCode? However, after reading it, I understand. Through preferences are personal, VSCode does a lot and needs a bit more than few minutes to be tame. I got also overwhelmed when I started using it. The secret is the documentation... and sometimes. Then it becomes whatever you want.
Writing tests in Postman (joyce) - With all the connected things and all the API in our system, this post shows a brilliant and simple way to test all those external calls.
How we set up daily Azure spending alerts and saved $10k (Mike Larah) - Cloudyn is definitely a must in many cases. I need to see how it manages CSP subscriptions and limited access for clients. This post also shared how to integrate it in Slack, pretty cool.
Making Time (Bob Clagett) - I really enjoyed reading that book. I've been watching Bob's YouTube Channel for a while. ANd was happy to ear about his new book. In Making Time, a little bit like in his videos, Bob explains how he build stuff... but this time instead of a furniture or a room, it's a new career/ business. A short book (88 pages) but a lot of fun.
![729c5a03-6992-401b-a653-7f9b343472e0[1]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFpjuWfHMwM_EdBh4Co4wXFKtaTcBrmqaEbqdhFqo5OC0L0PcVA0sqd7XlMMceRuaYWKS0uZDJ1lWrVk_5q4zGxEnY71stnoO2p_L2411RVrEFVkKtnl80NX-GPKsNrUtCEzmrWi3cjyc/?imgmax=800 "729c5a03-6992-401b-a653-7f9b343472e0[1]")
