Alexandre Brisebois

Comparing HTTP and HTTPS URIs

Working with URIs is a regular exercise when we crawl the web. Consequently, comparing HTTP and HTTPS URIs quickly becomes an interesting challenge. Fortunately, .NET has us covered with the Uri.Compare(Uri, Uri, UriComponents, UriFormat, StringComparison) Method

[TestMethod] public void CompareHttpAndHttpsURIsTest() { var http = new Uri("http://www.microsoft.com");…

Azure Cloud Shell – Creating Storage Account (CLI 2.0)

Azure Cloud Shell is Awesome!

At Build 2017 Microsoft announced the Azure Cloud Shell. This is actually really cool! Check out how easy it is to use Azure CLI 2.0 to create a new storage account and get its Connection String. (more…)

We converse everyday, but do we really know what makes a conversation good or bad? And, do we know how to improve them?

Designing a Conversation

How do we start meaningful conversations? And how do we structure them? I find these questions difficult to answer… my background is geared at building software, and communicating with a human isn’t as straight forward as I expected. I mean, we’ve…

Bots are the new Apps – Part 2

We communicate through images, movement, sounds, text, symbols, objects…

Bots are evolving so fast! Last October I wrote about how bots are the new appsand shared my thoughts about why bots and about the opportunities they create. Over the past few months, interest has grown and we as a community have iterated on our approaches to build bots. For some, the hype has gotten to a point where…

Getting Around Blocked Ports to Reach Azure Virtual Machines

Getting Around Blocked Ports

Regularly, I find myself in a location that blocks ports to the outside world. In many of those moments, I can’t use Remote Desktop (RDP) sessions to connect to Virtual Machines hosted on Azure. The strategy expressed in this post is one of many possible solutions that also applies to Linux and SSH sessions.

The Strategy

Using a Load Balancer and NAT rules to map port…

Migrate a Storage Account to the Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

Migrate a Storage Account to ARM

If you’ve been working with Azure for a while, you may have some of your Azure Storage Accounts deployed on the Classic deployment model (ASM). To simplify the deployment and management of resources, Microsoft recommends that you use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) for new resources. If possible, it’s also recommended that you redeploy existing resources through…

Getting to Know Containers

Getting to Know Containers

Containers have sparked genuine interest over the last few years. As a developer, I’ve had my fair share of “It Works on My Machine” days, where I spent an interesting amount of my time trying to identify why my code doesn’t run in a given environment. Did I make a mistake? Did someone else make a mistake? Uncertainty, risk and the Human Factor definitely make for…

Using PowerShell to Add a Key to the Registry

Using PS to Add a Key to the Registry

In a recent experiment, I had to disable User Account Control (UAC) on a remote Virtual Machine through WinRM.

Note

To better protect those users who are members of the local Administrators group, we implemented UAC restrictions on the network. This mechanism helps prevent against “loopback” attacks. This mechanism also helps prevent local malicious software…

What’s this all about?

In the old days, R&D was about features, marketing was about promoting products to prospective decision makers, sales were about getting big deals, and service was about implementing and fixing things. Today, it’s all about growing end-user consumption and selling microtransactions to consumers.

The risk is on us, and our reward only happens if our end-users are successful.

Creating a Staging Database Instance From a Production Instance on Windows Azure SQL Database

Debugging and  testing  against a live production database isn’t the greatest idea. At this point in the application’s lifecycle it comes in handy to be able to duplicate the production database to create a temporary staging environment. (more…)

Don’t Forget About Index Maintenance on Windows Azure SQL Database

Granted that Azure SQL Database takes care of a lot of maintenance tasks usually done by DBAs, you should definitely keep an eye on those Indexes. Indexes get fragmented and eat up lots of precious space. Furthermore, fragmented indexes make for slower queries.

I’m currently using the following technique to keep my Indexeshealthy so that I may offer a constant end user experience. Furthermore,…

Unzip a file in PowerShell (The Easy Way)

Unzip a file in PowerShell

Automating configurations on remote machines can sometimes make simple things interesting. In this specific scenario, I needed to use WinRm to Upload a file to a Virtual Machine (VM) on Microsoft Azure. Then I needed to unzip the file and finally go ahead with the configuration of the said software.

Searching the web gave me an appreciable amount of creative ways to go…

Bots are the new Apps

What if you could increase the accessibility of your App? While we’re at it, what if you reached a greater audience, reduced deployment complexity and reduced training costs?

Bots are the new Apps

In 2016, companies are facing unique challenges in their efforts to transform themselves. In their quest for diversity and inclusion, companies are challenged to step away from their comfort zones and…

Getting to Know Actors in Service Fabric

Quick Thoughts

Businesses need to be agile to compete in today’s global economy. Programmers use various tools and techniques in order to meet this business requirement. The challenge is great and quite complex. Going too fast without the right approach can lead to ephemeral success.

I believe that Microservices give us the agility and architectural patterns that empower us to scale and create…

A Practical Overview of Actors in Service Fabric

Speaking at DevTeach 2016

Years ago, I attended the DevTeach conference and was fortunate to participate in conversations that helped me overcome many challenges over the years that followed. This week I had the opportunity to speak at DevTeach in Montreal. For this event, I chose a topic that I’m really passionate about and needed to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time.

The talk had…

Deploying Azure Marketplace VMs via ARM Templates

Deploying Azure Marketplace VMs

The first step is to gather information about the Market Place Virtual Machine (VM) image that we want to deploy. For this example I decided to deploy a Tableau Server image.

Login-AzureRmAccount $location = 'eastus' Get-AzureRmVMImagePublisher -Location $location ` | Where-Object -Property PublisherName -Like Tableau* $publisherName = 'tableau'…

Are You a Teacher? Get a 5 Month Windows Azure Academic Pass!

Are you a teacher? If so, this may be for you!

Giving a course on Azure can sometimes be challenging due to the fact that everyone needs setup an account and that students don’t always have access to a credit card.

Account activation can take precious time away from productive lab exercises!

Furthermore, if your educational institution decides to go forward with the course on Azure, you can…