I have worked with Azure Service Bus for years and one of the biggest challenges was always how to manage change on the Queues and Topics within a Service Bus Namespace. You could use a tool like Service Bus Explorer to manually make the changes, but this approach is manual and error prone. You can do exports and imports of configuration but a bit like managing SQL Script changes it’s tough to work out the delta and deploy just what’s needed [...]
Ive recently just added a section to the Integration Playbook talking about how architects can apply governance to their Azure Estate by looking at azure policies https://www.integration-playbook.io/docs/azure-policy-allowed-resources
In 2019 I decided to try and get out and about a bit more and to start exploring what there is these days in terms of IT community around the local area. Newcastle Power BI User Group The Power BI user group is a new group started in 2019 and is ran by some of the guys from the team at NCFE. They are also heavily involved with the data platform user group but have recognised there is [...]
I have just launched the Integration Playbook which I have had in mind for a few years but only recently got around to doing. The idea is a community resource aimed at Architects, CTO and Leads. The resource will provide information, guidance and insights around common architecture and integration topics and relate them to the Microsoft technology stack. Where do I use which technologyHow does Microsoft relate to this IT or architecture topicHow can integration architecture help me [...]
This blog post is more of a reminder for myself as much as anything. I had a need to mark some service accounts in Azure AD so that their passwords dont expire. The aim was that we had a few service accounts used in a couple of places and we wanted to have a controlled process to change their passwords. To do this we did the following: Create a group to store associate all of the service accounts [...]
This post is really a note to self and if its useful to anyone else then great! If your wanting to script setting up many Azure Function Apps then you may find this useful. I had a task to create a bunch of function apps in different resource groups and locations to support a project. I have created the below powershell script to help me do this. The script assumed your resource groups are already setup and then [...]
Imagine a scenario where you want to add guest users from another Azure AD tenant to your own tenant so that they can use your CRM instance. This could be a B2B collaboration story or it could also be a story of mergers and acqusitions. In this case we have a business with a parent and 2 child organisations. The parent organisation is creating a CRM solution and workers from the 2 child organisations will all work together [...]
In this article I would like to discuss a pattern I've implemented recently where we could improve the user experience in a web app through the use of Logic Apps and Signal-R. Lets imagine we have a scenario at Acme University. They have built a super Student Portal building using ASP.net and Azure. The home page for this app will require some authentication probably against Azure AD and once logged in the student will be presented with a [...]
Anyone who follows my blog will know I am a big fan of Specflow for testing components. We usually use SpecFlow to compliment normal unit testing with some automated integration tests which combine the idea of "Does the component behave like we expect it to" with the opportunity to have some tested documentation describing the component behaviour. Ive used Specflow for years when testing Web API and WCF Services and I was keen to use Specflow when coding [...]
Recently we had an issue with a WCF service hosted on Azure App Service. This lead to an interesting troubleshooting scenario which I thought would be interesting to share. The experience showed some of the opportunities of cloud and some of the challenges at the same time so I thought it would be interesting to share this. The Scenario The scenario we had was similar to one of the patterns for Service Bus Relay you can use the [...]