When Software Attacks!

Configuring BizTalk 2020 Application Insights telemetry behind a firewall

BizTalk 2020 allows you to connect it to an Application Insights instance, where it will send tracking data as customEvents so you see what’s going on. However, getting it working in an environment where security is important and the network team want to open the fewest paths through the firewall as possible is an exercise in patience. This blog post is as much aide memoire for me as an information post for you.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, August 6, 2022

Deploying the ASDK for effective development use

Microsoft Azure Stack is a truly unique beast in terms of the capabilities it can bring to an organisation, and the efficiencies it can bring to a project that spans Public Cloud and on-premises infrastructure through it’s consistency with public Azure. We’ve been using Stack in anger for a customer project for a year now and have learned several things about development and testing, and how to configure the ASDK to be an effective tool to support the project.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, September 22, 2018

Configure Server 2016 ADFS and WAP with custom ports using Powershell

A pull request for Chris Gardner’s WebApplicationProxyDSC is now inbound after a frustrating week of trying to automate the configuration of ADFS and WAP on a Server 2016 lab. With Server 2016, the PowerShell commands to configure the ADFS and WAP servers include switches to specify a non-default port. I need to do this because the servers are behind a NetNat on a server hosting several labs, so port 443 is not available to me and I must use a different port.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, August 24, 2018

Define Once, Deploy Everywhere (Sort of...)

Using Lability, DSC and ARM to define and deploy multi-VM environments Configuration as code crops up a lot in conversation these days. We are searching for that DevOps Nirvana of a single definition of our environment that we can deploy anywhere. The solution adopted at Black Marble by myself and my colleagues is not quite that, but it comes close enough to satisfy our needs. This document details the technologies and techniques we adopted to achieve our goal, which sounds simple, right?

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, March 2, 2017

Setting Enroll Permissions on ADCS Certificate Template using DSC

As part of the work I have been doing around generating and managing lab environments using Lability and DSC, one of the things I needed to do was change the permissions on a certificate template within a DSC configuration. Previously, when deploying to Azure, I used the PSPKI PowerShell modules within code executed by the Custom Script extension. I was very focused on sticking with DSC this time, which ruled out PSPKI.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, March 2, 2017

Creating Website Slots and SQL Elastic Pools using Azure Resource Templates

Recently I have been helping a number of organisations automate the deployment of their applications to Azure and came across a couple of scenarios that were not documented: Deploying an App Services web site with slots and SQL connection string settings, and the creation of a SQL Elastic Pool. Of those, the SQL Elastic Pool I found to be written up already by Vincent-Philipe Lauzon and all credit to him - my template draws on his excellent article.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Notes from the field: Using Hyper-V Nat Switch in Windows 10

The new NAT virtual switch that can be created on Windows 10 for Hyper-V virtual machines is a wonderful thing if you’re an on-the-go evangelist like myself. For more information on how to create one, see Thomas Maurer’s post on the subject. This post is not about creating a new NAT switch. It is, however, about _re_creating one and the pitfalls that occur, and how I now run my virtual environment with some hack PowerShell and a useful DHCP server utility.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, April 8, 2016

Unblocking a stuck Lab Manager Environment (the hard way)

This is a post so I don’t forget how I fixed access to one of our environments yesterday, and hopefully it will be useful to some of you. We have a good many pretty complex environments deployed to our lab hyper-V servers, controlled by Lab manager. Operations such as starting, stopping or repairing those environments can take a long, long time, but this time we had one that was quite definitely stuck.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, March 17, 2016

Net Writer: A great UWP blog editor

I came across Net Writer some months ago, when it’s creator, Ed Anderson blogged about how he’d taken the newly-released Open Live Writer code and used it in his just-started Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app for Windows 10. In January it only supported blogger accounts, which meant that I was unable to use it. However, I checked again this weekend and discovered that it now supports a wide range of blog software including BlogEngine.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, March 13, 2016

My Resource Templates from demos are now on GitHub

I’ve had a number of people ask me if I can share the templates I use in my Resource Template sessions at conferences. It’s taken me a while to find the time, but I have created a repo on GitHub and there is a new Visual Studio solution and deployment project with my code. One very nice feature that this has enabled me to provide is the same ‘Deploy to Azure’ button as you’ll find in the Azure Quickstart Templates.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, February 26, 2016