Joe Crabtree

We recently published a whitepaper titled “Leveraging the Microsoft Platform for DevOps.” In it, we describe our DevOps maturity model. How mature is your DevOps practice? Some organizations are so mature, they are able to blow away and overwrite their production environment up to 1,600 times a day. That’s right; destroy the environment with no […]

Welcome from the Microsoft Ignite Conference. It’s been a great conference this week. We’ve had lots of great conversation with customers, partners, and our friends at Microsoft. The conference is huge, both in number of people and the area. I’ve definitely got my steps in for this week 🙂 It’s never been a more exciting time to […]

At Build 2016 last week, Vittorio Bertucci, Program Manager at Microsoft presented a session titled, “Microsoft Identity: State of the Union and Future Directions”. https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2016/B868 Most Identity conversations usually discuss Forests, Domains, and Active Directory Administration. This talk is for developers and Vittorio makes that clear in a very humorous way from the beginning. Microsoft’s vision […]

Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, hosted a session yesterday at Build titled “Building Resilient Services: Learning Lessons from Azure”. This was a great session where he detailed real world examples of how Microsoft has failed while deploying new features and functionality to Azure. Building, upgrading, and maintaining a platform where Enterprises deploy mission critical applications […]

Build Conference 2016 is now in day 2. I’m at lunch and finally have a chance to write-up my thoughts about day 1. Lots of cool new stuff coming down the pipe for developers – biometric identity, pen integration, Hololens, Cortana improvements, Xbox dev kit, and much more. Windows Hello This is Microsoft’s biometric identity […]

Also known as, ASP.NET 5, this introduction will cover some basic topics on the new framework. Microsoft hosted a free all-day training session this week at the MTC and I was able to attend. It was my first in-depth look at all the new features and I was quite surprised by some. The last version […]

As more and more data moves to the cloud and adoption of cloud SaaS products continues to increase, we need more sophisticated ways to extract, transform, and interact with that data. This spring at the //build conference, Microsoft previewed the “Office 365 Unified API”. That product is now in full production and has been renamed […]

Why to automate anything should be obvious. In addition to efficiency, there are also considerations on consistency, repeatability, and predictability to programmatically carry out tasks. Considering DevOps, automation is an effective vehicle to minimal user interventions from both Dev and Ops for establishing application infrastructure, configuring run-time, and deploying a target application. This automation provides […]

Today’s Internet scale services are built using microservices. Example microservices are protocol gateways, user profiles, shopping carts, inventory processing, queues, caches, etc. Microservices can further be defined by: Is (logic + state) independently versioned, scaled, and deployed Has a unique name that can be resolved Interacts with other microservices over well-defined interfaces like REST Remains […]

If you are a Yammer customer, you will know that the identity and directory synchronization has been separate from the rest of Office365. This means that you need separate servers and software installations to sync users from your on-premises AD and provide SSO capabilities to Yammer. If you are unsure about this configuration, check out […]

On a call with Microsoft this morning, they referenced this public case study. I thought it was a really nice example of using a multitude of Azure services to innovate their business – Machine Learning, Mobile Services, IoT Hubs, and Dynamics AX. Check out the video below and the full description here – https://customers.microsoft.com/Pages/CustomerStory.aspx?recid=12792

Every developer knows that builds are an integral piece to the Application Lifecycle. Using an automated build and testing process will help speed the time to market for your application. Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server offers a number of features to help with this process. To use Team Foundation Build for automated building and testing […]