Welcome to another Azure Content Spotlight! These articles are used to highlight items in Azure that could be more visible to the Azure community. This week’s content spotlight is about Microsoft Research Open Data, a new data repository in the cloud dedicated to facilitating collaboration across the global research community. It offers datasets representing many years of data research which were used in published research studies. Microsoft Research Open Data is an outcome of the Microsoft Research Outreach Data science program and was made possible by a collaboration between many teams at Microsoft, Microsoft researchers, academic advisors, and various industry partners. The goal of this platform is to share datasets and other research related tools with Microsoft researchers and collaborators. Datasets can easily be accessed and the platform provides datasets of state-of-the-art research in areas such as natural language processing, computer vision, and domain specific sciences. This datasets can be downloaded or copied directly to a cloud-based Data Science Virtual Machine from the portal.

Welcome to another Azure Content Spotlight! These articles are used to highlight items in Azure that could be more visible to the Azure community. This week’s content spotlight is about some tips & tricks for Azure Cosmos DB. The first one is about Horizontal Partitioning in Azure Cosmos DB, an Azure Friday video from Channel 9. This video will cover how to partition your data in Azure Cosmos DB, will give you best practices for choosing a partition key, and how to troubleshoot bad partition key choices. For more information about Partition and scale in Azure Cosmos DB, you can refer to the following site: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-ca/azure/cosmos-db/partition-data. The second one is about Tips for using the Gremlin API with Azure Cosmos DB. Gremlin is the traversal query language for Cosmos DB graph and for writing efficient Gremlin queries, knowledge of the graph structure and the query execution plan is required. In this video you will learn how to structure a Gremlin query, and what the best practices are, and you will get tips & tricks to get the best performance. For more information about the Graph API for Cosmos DB, you can refer to the following website: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-ca/azure/cosmos-db/graph-introduction. You can watch the videos over here: ...

Welcome to another Azure Content Spotlight! These articles are used to highlight items in Azure that could be more visible to the Azure community. IoT is hot! Microsoft recently announced that they are going to invest $5 billion in the Internet of Things over the next four years. Why? Because their goal is to give every customer the ability to transform their businesses, and the world at large, with connected solutions. And why now? Because they now see the kind of increased adoption and exponential growth that analysts have been forecasting for the past years. You can refer to the full article here:https://blogs.microsoft.com/iot/2018/04/04/microsoft-will-invest-5-billion-in-iot-heres-why/ But now back to the development part of it. IoT offers tremendous opportunities for developers and the recently published IoT Interactive Development Guideoffers common application patterns and tutorials that will get you up and running fast. If you are planning on doing some IoT development or if you are just curious, you should really take a look! It offers a lot of valuable information for beginning and more experienced IoT developers. -Sjoukje

Modern computing today is all distributed and Azure is designed from the ground up using distributed services and resources. Examples of those services and resources are, Azure Functions, Logic Apps, Azure Services Bus, IoT Hub, and more. But, all those services and resources are operating on their own island and to let those different resources, communicate with each other, Azure Event Grid comes into place. Azure Event Grid offers a fully-managed intelligent event routing service, which can be used to glue all these different distributed services and resources together. It is part of the messaging landscape of Azure and it offers a cross cloud eventing platform from the Microsoft Cloud. ...

This is the fifth part in the series about securing your Logic Apps. In the previous post, we’ve covered how to use the Validate JWT access Restriction Policy in API Management for securing your Logic Apps. In this post, I’m going to show you how you can add your Logic App to an App Service Environment to create an isolated and secure environment for your app to run in. In this series: ...

Welcome to another Azure Content Spotlight! These articles are used to highlight items in Azure that could be more visible to the Azure community. This weeks content spotlight is all about Azure Cognitive Services. Seth Juarez’sAI Show on Channel 9 provides regular updates on all the new AI features on the Azure platform, including Cognitive Services. See below a collection of the latest video’s of that show, including video’s that cover the updates and enhancements announced at the BUILD 2018 conference: ...

This is the fourth part in the series about securing your Logic Apps. In the previous post, I’ve described how to secure your logic app using Azure Active Directory. In this post, I’m going to show you how you can leverage the Validate JWT Access Restriction Policy for your Logic App inside the API Management Service. In this series: Secure access to the trigger. Secure your Logic App using API Management – Access Restriction Policies. ...

This is the third part in the series about securing your Logic Apps. In the previous post, I’ve described how to add several Access restriction policies to your API inside of the API Management Service. In this post, I was going to show how you can leverage the Validate JWT Access Restriction Policy. But when I did some research for this article, I found out that, to proper implement that policy, it is better to first secure your Logic App with Azure Active Directory using API Management. And as this is also a great topic for this series, I’ve decided to add this as well. So, a little side step is added to this series. ...

This is the second part in the series about securing your Logic Apps. In the previous post, I’ve provided several ways to secure your Logic App at the Trigger Level. In this post, I’m going to show how to secure your App using API Management. In this series: Secure access to the trigger. Secure your Logic App using API Management – Access Restriction Policies (this post). Secure your Logic App using API Management – Validate JWT Access Restriction Policy. ...

I think Azure Logic Apps is a great way to implement scalable integrations in the Cloud. It comes with over 100 connectors for integrating applications and data in the cloud and on-premises. You can now choose to use the Logic App designer or create your apps from Visual Studio, call Azure Functions from inside of your Logic App, easily scale up and down, and all this for a fair price. I truly believe this is going to be the future of Enterprise Integration and when I get the chance, I’m using them in all my client projects. ...

Welcome to another Azure Content Spotlight! These articles are used to highlight items in Azure that could be more visible to the Azure community. Microsoft has made a huge step in their drive to eliminate passwords for good! In the next Windows updates, they’re adding a limited preview of FIDO2 security key support. This will improve security significantly and cut the risk of phishing attacks.This new capability will give employees the ability to sign in to an Azure Active Directory-joined Windows 10 PC without a username or password. All that is needed is to insert a FIDO2compliant security key into their USB port and they will automatically be signed in to the device and get Single-sign on access to all Azure AD protected cloud resources. Check out the following video to see how this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9lqFsWiyPg ...

Welcome to another Azure Content Spotlight! These articles are used to highlight items in Azure that could be more visible to the Azure community. IoT is hot! Microsoft recently announced that they are going to invest $5 billion in the Internet of Things over the next four years. Why? Because their goal is to give every customer the ability to transform their businesses, and the world at large, with connected solutions. And why now? Because they now see the kind of increased adoption and exponential growth that analysts have been forecasting for the past years. You can refer to the full article here:https://blogs.microsoft.com/iot/2018/04/04/microsoft-will-invest-5-billion-in-iot-heres-why/ But now back to the development part of it. IoT offers tremendous opportunities for developers and the recently published IoT Interactive Development Guideoffers common application patterns and tutorials that will get you up and running fast. If you are planning on doing some IoT development or if you are just curious, you should really take a look! It offers a lot of valuable information for beginning and more experienced IoT developers. -Sjoukje

Welcome to another Azure Content Spotlight! These articles are used to highlight items in Azure that could be more visible to the Azure community. More and more organizations are embracing the Microsoft Cloud these days and want to upload their offline data stores into Azure to benefit of all the features and capabilities Azure has to offer. Microsoft (together with partners) introduces an offline service for migrating these on-premises data easily. Organizations will only have to choose the Azure storage tier and the partners will take care of the rest. This service is suitable for all types of media and data, like SAN and NAS data, disks or tapes, or even video cassettes or 35mm, and partners can work with organizations all over the globe. ...

First, you need to download and install the Office 365 Developer Tools: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/office-tools-vs.aspx This is the first part in the series on developing an Office 365 app. In this article I will explain how you can associate your Office 365 account with Azure AD, which is the first step in Developing Office 365 Apps. In my case I’ve created an Office 365 Developer account using my MSDN Premium subscription (Ultimate will do as well). This means that you will get a Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise E3 Developer account for free. You can also register for a trial account or buy an Office 365 license. For an overview of the different Office 365 versions you can check my post: Detailed Office 365 version Comparison ...

2 different ways of using Azure Key Vault in your Logic Apps Security is key nowadays and this means that you should secure your applications to the max. Azure Key Vault offers you a way to safely store your credentials, certificates and hardware security modules in Azure. These values can also be used inside your custom applications, like in web applications, Azure Functions, and Azure Logic Apps. Azure Logic Apps offers an out-of-the-box connector that you can use to retrieve values easily and use them in your Logic App. However, there is a caveat here. You cannot use Managed Identities to access the Key Vault using the connector. Managed Identities are service principals in Azure Active Directory that are used to connect different services. You can use the identity to authenticate to any service that supports Azure AD authentication, including Key Vault, without any credentials in your code. ...

Azure Active Directory is the heart of everything inside of Microsoft Azure. All Azure services are depending on it and using it for Identity Management in the Microsoft Cloud. Office 365, Intune, Exchange Online, Enterprise Mobility Suite, are all examples of Azure Services depending on Azure Active directory for both security and identity management. And when implemented right, all your custom applications, which are hosted in Azure or somehow are integrating with Azure services are using Azure Active Directory as well. ...

Veel bedrijven maken tegenwoordig een digitale transformatie door. Dit modewoord duikt overal op. Als ik zoek naar een aantal definities van wat digitale transformatie nu eigenlijk inhoudt, dan komt het volgende o.a. naar voren: Digitale transformatie betreft de impact van (digitale) technologieën en de toenemende digitalisering van bedrijfsprocessen op mens, bedrijf en zelfs maatschappij. Organisaties die zich richten op de verdigitalisering van het landschap door in te spelen op de (veranderende) wensen en behoeften van klant, werknemers en maatschappij. ...

Veel bedrijven maken tegenwoordig een digitale transformatie door. Dit modewoord duikt overal op. Als ik zoek naar een aantal definities van wat digitale transformatie nu eigenlijk inhoudt, dan komt het volgende o.a. naar voren: Digitale transformatie betreft de impact van (digitale) technologieën en de toenemende digitalisering van bedrijfsprocessen op mens, bedrijf en zelfs maatschappij. Organisaties die zich richten op de verdigitalisering van het landschap door in te spelen op de (veranderende) wensen en behoeften van klant, werknemers en maatschappij. ...

In my earlier post: Microsoft Identities: What’s new, I briefly talked about the new Application Portal for application registration in Azure. In this post, I want to show how you can register your application in the new portal. No more manually registering your application in Azure Active Directory using the Azure Portal, from the Microsoft Graph site, you can do this in a couple of clicks. So, let’s get started. Navigate to https://graph.microsoft.com/. ...

At Build conference, a lot of new features were released. And of course, also in the Microsoft Identity space. This article will provide an overview of all the awesome new features that were covered there. Azure Active Directory v2.0 Endpoint The v2.0 endpoint allows developer to write apps that accept sign in from both Microsoft Accounts and Azure AD accounts, using one single authentication endpoint. When your application makes a call to the Microsoft Graph, additional functionality and data will be available for Azure AD users. For instance, data from SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. But for reading a user’s mail, or retrieving contacts, the code is exactly the same for both Microsoft and Azure AD accounts. ...