Category: Programming

Update Azure Active Directory Service Principal credentials

Aug 302019

For some reason it’s not straight-forward to create new credentials for an existing Service Principal account in Azure Active Directory using PowerShell.

I’m using PowerShell, because I’m not an Azure AD admin in my current organization, but as a developer, I am able to create and manage service principal accounts. This is extremely convenient, because we use them for automated deployments to Azure.

We started using Azure DevOps release management about a year ago, and thus I recently encountered the first credential expiration of a service principal that was used by Azure DevOps to deploy resources to Azure. This makes sense, because service principal credential lifetime defaults to one year.

Modifying Azure DevOps Release Pipeline parameters

Azure DevOps, Visual Studio Online No Responses »

Oct 132018

I’ve started working with Azure DevOps (previously known as Visual Studio Team Services – VSTS, previously known as Visual Studio Online…).

I’m using it to automated Azure deployments in some projects.

In our setup we have several different environments (dev, test, prod, etc.). Depending on the project, the environments are either Azure Resource Groups or completely different Azure subscriptions. In any case, we have created service principal accounts in our Azure Active Directory, that have the necessary Contributor roles to those subscriptions or resource groups, where they should be able to deploy resources.

The service principals have been added to Azure DevOps as Service Connections, so that we have a service connection for each project and environment.

We want to use a Release Pipeline for each project. Each Pipeline has a stage per environment.

Releases are triggered using package management (in these projects we don’t use VSTS for source control and build). Instead, our build server generates NuGet packages and uploads them to Azure DevOps package management, and this triggers the release process.

The Pipeline looks like this:

Creating an X.509 Certificate Chain in C#

.net, Azure, C#, Certificates, Device Provisioning Service, IoT Hub, Programming 4 Responses »

Apr 172018

I had some problems with the various PowerShell and bash samples in the Microsoft documentation on how to create a certificate chain for use with the Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service. Why did it have to be so complicated to get started with X.509 based authentication towards DPS?

What if I wrote my own program to create the root certificate, some intermediaries, and could also create device certificates? I set out to do that.

In the end, it turned out to be not that hard. .NET Core 2.0 has some new classes to help with certificate requests, so it isn’t necessary to call into native Windows libraries or use an extra library like BouncyCastle etc. Continue reading »

Using Azure IoT Hub Device Provisioning Service to provision a device

Azure, Device Provisioning Service, IoT Hub, Programming No Responses »

Apr 092018

Internet of Things (CC BY 3.0 - https://www.iconfinder.com/samatodedara)

As you may have read, I made a previous blog post, which described how to create a Certificate Authority root certificate and a chain of intermediates using a Microsoft provided PowerShell sample.

In that post, I also showed how to create a Device Enrollment Group within the Device Provisioning Service (DPS). That’s all very nice, but the purpose of IoT Hub and the DPS is to connect devices. So let’s go ahead and do that.

First of all, the device needs its own certificate, which is trusted by the root CA certificate configured in the DPS device enrollment group.

TIL about Azure Resource Manager templates

Application Insights, Azure, Programming No Responses »

Sep 292017

I recently wanted to create an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template with a number of interdependent resources. This post contains a number of “Things I Learned”. Hopefully, you can avoid some of the problems I had.

The resources were:

SQL server and database
Azure function app
Azure web app for an ASP.NET Core site
Storage account
Application Insights instance for the web app
Application Insights instance for the function app

In my previous post I described a place to get detailed logs about Web App site extension installation. I had spent a long time to figure out the reason that the installation of the Application Insights site extension failed.

Visual Studio 2017 not discovering unit tests

.net, Programming, Visual Studio No Responses »

Aug 082017

On my work computer, I have VS2017 and VS2017 preview installed. Recently both stopped being able to discover MSTest unit tests, and Resharper also did not discover tests until I opened a file containing some tests.

There was nothing in the Visual Studio log windows that indicated problems, and it proved to be an issue whose cause was hard to find.

Using Azure Application Insights to monitor a self-hosted WCF service – Part 3

.net, Application Insights, Programming, WCF 3 Responses »

Dec 172015

In this part of the series I will look at using a WCF IParameterInspector implementation to time the actual WCF service operation and send the tracking metrics to Azure Application Insights.

The previous parts of this blog series have discussed adding the necessary NuGet packages to the Visual Studio project, so the Application Insights parts work, how to create a Telemetry Initializer to add information to each Application Insights tracking event, and how to use a WCF IDispatchMessageInspector to get information about each request to the WCF service.

Using Azure Application Insights to monitor a self-hosted WCF service – Part 2

.net, Application Insights, Azure, Programming, WCF 1 Response »

Dec 082015

In the first part of this series I wrote about what Azure Application Insights (AI) can do and how to add extra information to the tracking telemetry your application sends to AI.

The solution that I wanted to add AI tracking to was a Windows Service with self-hosted WCF services. One service is the server side of a SOAP service where the caller defined the SOAP WSDL, and the other WCF service is a single method that receives raw XML as a http POST message. To track each request to the WCF service, I decided to use a message inspector.

Using Azure Application Insights to monitor a self-hosted WCF service – Part 1

.net, Application Insights, Programming, WCF No Responses »

Dec 032015

Application Insights is a service in Microsoft Azure for Application Performance Monitoring. See more here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/application-insights/ .

I’ve previously (1, 2, 3) posted about Application Insights when it was part of Visual Studio Online. It has been moved to the Azure portal, and now has a slightly different API.

It can be used to detect crashes, tracks performance issues and usage of mobile apps, web apps and more.
I’ve used it on a few web sites hosted in IIS or on Azure, and it works great.
For ASP.net web sites, it’s really easy to set up and get going. There the VS2015 integration to it makes it really seamless, and if you can follow a few wizard steps, there is no additional setup needed.

However, if you don’t have a mobile app, an ASP.net site on Azure or local IIS or a J2EE application, then there are no wizards, and no easy setup.

Setting up Visual Studio Online build.vnext to publish an Azure Cloud Service

.net, Azure, Programming, Visual Studio Online 3 Responses »

Jun 232015

I have an Azure Cloud service which consists of web and worker roles. To make it quicker to update the cloud service whenever I’ve made changes to it, I want to deploy it from Visual Studio Online.

I already use VSO for source control for this project, and I have previously used the XAML based build process in VSO. Since I was going to move the project from one Azure account to another (from my play/test account to the business account), I decided to change the build process.

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