Microsoft Azure

When you’re working with building applications or services there’s always a need to store configuration. For Azure there’s a great service called Azure App Configuration that allows you to securely store, manage and retrieve configuration settings. It’s a perfect service for both smaller and larger projects and it keeps your configuration in control, and of course secured and audited. When I’m building solutions using node I typically start with storing my configuration in a local .env file and then use the dotenv package to import those settings into process.env properties. That makes it super easy to work with configurations, settings and change them as needed without fiddling through all the code and replace. Since I always add the .env file to my .gitignore I also reduce the risk of sharing secrets and passwords. When moving this from my local dev machine into Azure I have historically just used the Web App application settings. That works really great and is a simple solution to have these settings being read runtime, the web app only needs to be restarted to pick the new changes up.

I’ve been building chat-bots for a while now and I’m seeing more and more requests of building these bots for enterprises. For bots targeted at the enterprise, perhaps being hosted in Microsoft Teams, one of the first requirements is that they should get data from their internal systems and most specifically from Office 365, through the Microsoft Graph. The problem here is that we need to authenticate and authorize the user, through Microsoft Azure AD, to be able to access these resources. A Microsoft Bot Framework bot, does not inherit the credentials or security tickets from the application the bot is being invoked from, so we need handle this ourselves. For instance, even though you have logged in to Microsoft Teams, or Skype for Business or your Intranet – your security token cannot (and should not) be passed to the Bot.

The time has come for me to do, as I’ve done now for eight years (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006), my annual post to sum up the year. It is always fun to look back to what happened the past 12 months. This past year has been a somewhat “in-betweeners” year. We (me, my clients, colleagues etc.) are standing on the edge of something big and the bridge over to the other side is really, really long. Some hesitate to pass the bridge, thinks it is to steep down, some people are running across it in fear, some take it just easy and some pass it half-ways and then stalls there not knowing which direction to go. Microsoft has already passed the bridge to the other side, they ran as fast as they could. But, they dropped so many things on the way over, things that I and others need to pick up and fix and very often even remind Microsoft that they dropped it at all!

I’m so excited to be once again going to Singapore and speak at the Share-The-Point Southeast Asia 2014, held November 25-26 2014. It is one of my favorite conferences and this will be my third time in the awesome country and city of Singapore! Everything is just great about this; the people, the speakers, the attendees, the city, the food – you name it! This year I will have two sessions:

After doing the Microsoft Cloud Show interview with Andrew Connell I thought it might be a good idea to write some of my tips and tricks for running SharePoint 2013 on Azure IAAS. Some of the stuff in this post are discussed in more depth in the interview and some things we just didn’t have time to talk about (or I forgot). I really recommend you to listen to the podcast as well and not just read this post.

A couple of weeks back I was interviewed by Andrew Connell for the Microsoft Cloud Show. The Microsoft Cloud Show is an (almost) weekly podcast where Andrew (AC) and his wingman Chris Johnson (CJ) discusses everything related to Microsoft cloud offerings including benchmarks with other cloud vendors. If you’re not subscribing and listening to the show already then I urge you to do that as soon as possible! Me and AC sat down for almost an hour discussing Microsoft Azure IAAS and specifically when running SharePoint 2013 in that service. We had a great talk, as usual when it comes to AC, and I think we covered a lot of the issues and gotchas and things to think about when building a SharePoint 2013 infrastructure on Azure IAAS.

For no one out there, in the SharePoint space or any other space, Microsoft Azure has gone unnoticed. Microsoft Azure is a really great service, or rather set of services, that for a (Microsoft or SharePoint) developer or IT-Pro is something that they should use and embrace. Personally I’ve been using Azure since the dawn of the service and I’ve been using it more and more. I use it to host web sites, host SharePoint and Office Apps, Virtual Machines, Access Control and a lots of other things.