When Software Attacks!

Calling Application Insights API using Powershell

If you have an application, instrumenting it with something like Application Insights to emit useful data is something I cannot espouse the benefits of enough. As a service, however, Application Insights can offer other benefits, such as Availability Tests to tell you if the application is accessible to your users.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, August 6, 2022

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

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

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 Azure Virtual Networks using Powershell and XML Part 4: Local networks and site-site connectivity

This is part 4 of a series of posts building powershell functions to create and modify Azure Virtual Networks. Previous posts have covered functions to create virtual networks and then delete them. In this part, I’m going to show you functions that will define local networks and configure site-site VPN connectivity between a local and virtual network. Next on my list is to create functions to delete the local networks and remove the site-site connections.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Sunday, March 9, 2014

Gary Lapointe to the rescue: Using his Office 365 powershell tools to recover from a corrupted masterpage

I also need to give credit to the Office 365 support team over this. They were very quick in their response to my support incident, but I was quicker! Whilst working on an Office 365 site for a customer today I had a moment of blind panic. The site is using custom branding and I was uploading a new version of the master page to the site when things went badly wrong.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, March 7, 2014

Creating Azure Virtual Networks using Powershell and XML Part 2: Powershell functions

In my previous post I talked about what was involved in creating an Azure network configuration using Powershell. In this post I’ll cover where I’ve got so so far, which is a series of functions that do the following: Contact Azure and get the current network configuration. Convert that to sensible XML and if it’s empty, create the basic structure. Create a new virtual network, checking to see if one with the same name already exists.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Creating Azure Virtual Networks using Powershell and XML Part 3: Powershell functions for deletion

This is part three of a series of posts about using powershell to script the creation, deletion and (hopefully) modification of Azure Virtual Networks. In part 1 I went through the key steps with some rough code. Part 2 showed the much tidier functions I’ve now written to create virtual network elements. This is part 3, and I will present functions to remove elements. Hopefully I will manage to get the modification functions to work which be a fourth installment!

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Creating Azure Virtual Networks using Powershell and XML

I’ll be honest, I expected this task to be easier than it is. What I’m working on is some powershell that we might use as part of automated build processes that will create a new Virtual Network in an Azure subscription. What I’m after is to add a new network to the existing configuration. There aren’t many powershell commands for Azure virtual networks. The two we need to use are get-azureVnetConfig and set-azureVnetConfig.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, March 3, 2014

Content Types programmatically added to SharePoint libraries not appearing on New menu

This one caused some consternation, I can tell you. As usual, the solution could be found on the great wide web, but it took some digging, so as usual I am repeating it here. As part of a SharePoint migration we did recently, we replaced a SharePoint 2007 feature that the client was using (which added content types to libraries from a central list) with a mix of content type replication and PowerShell to add the content types to the libraries.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, April 4, 2011