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Creating (web) applications which use Azure Active Directory for authentication can be quite simple. As a developer, you don’t have to know which code is added to your application for authentication. Visual Studio will handle that burden for you. But, what if something goes wrong and you suddenly have to debug your code. Or you’re just curious and want to know what happens under the hood. In this post, I’m going to add the code for authenticating my MVC application to Azure manually. This will provide more insights in the different parts which are added by Visual Studio using the project templates. Insights you might need in the future when troubleshooting more complex scenarios. ...

When you are developing apps for Azure or Office 365, there comes a time that the app needs to be added to Azure Active Directory for authentication. There is written a lot about the manual approach of doing this. But maybe there are other ways to do this, and maybe can we do this even quicker? In this article, I’m going to show four different ways of adding your application to Azure AD. I will cover both manually as programmatically and provide some samples on how to do this. Let’s start with the easiest one, directly from Visual Studio. ...

Visual Studio generates a lot of code for you, when you use the ASP.Net project templates. The code required for authentication your application to Azure AD, is added automatically for you when you run the ASP.NET Web Application wizard creating a new project. As a developer, you don’t have to know what happens under de hood. You can just fill in your Azure subscription details, generate your project and press F5… That’s all. ...

In the previous post on AMS I’ve shown how to create a new media channel, and wrote some simple code for uploading a video to AMS. In this post, I want to elaborate a bit more on the uploading of video files. Some Background information A best practice for uploading video files to AMS is, that each asset contains a unique instance of media content. Each asset should not contain multiple edits of a file, in order to reduce difficulties submitting encoding jobs and streaming and securing the delivery of the asset later in the workflow. ...

Who are you, and what do you do? My name is Sjoukje Zaal and I live in The Netherlands. I work as a Principal Architect & Lead Productivity for Ordina, an IT company in the Benelux (Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxemburg). Sixteen years ago, I started my career as a web designer. After that I worked as a software developer for several years and for the last 6 years I work as an Architect. ...

Back in the early (Azure) days, I did a project in which we used the Microsoft Expression Media Encoder SDK for encoding video's from inside a Azure Worker Role. We stored those video's in Azure Blob Storage and used IIS Smooth Streaming & Silverlight for playing those video's. But now there is Azure Media Services, and this will make it all a lot easier and better! Let's take a look at what Azure Media Services has to offer from a developer perspective. ...

In this wiki article I give an overview on how to set up your development environment for Office 365. Office 365 Developer Tenant Before you can start coding, you need an Office 365 developer tenant. You could sign up for a 1-year free developer subscription on: http://dev.office.com . Navigate to the website, follow the instructions and sign up. You will receive a welcome email with a link to sign up for an Office 365 development tenant. First Release will be enabled already for this tenant. ...

Office included in Office 365 ProPlus, can be deployed to your users in two different ways. First is, by using the user driven approach and second, the IT driven approach. This article explains how to use both ways to deploy Office to your users.. User Driven Approach The first approach is user driven, the end user can login to the Office 365 portals and install Office from the portal. As a user I can choose which version of Office I want to deploy. As an administrator, there are a couple of settings in the portal which you can set to restrict the installation process for your users. You can exclude Office and Skype for Business and SharePoint designer (for some versions of Office 365 Visio and Project are added to this list as well). But that’s all. If you want complete control over the installation process, you have to use the IT driven approach. ...

Office 365 provides the ability to add your own domain. When setting up Office 365 Microsoft gives you a onmicrosoft.com domain out-of-the-box. If you want to use your own domain, and for most companies this is preferred, you can add your own domain using the setup wizard in the Office 365 admin center. This will provide you the ability to use your own email in Office 365 or login using to Office 365 and Skype for Business, using your own domain. ...

Certificates in BizTalk 2013 Part 2: How To Configure the BizTalk WCF Adapter to use the SSL Certificates In the previous post I explained hot how install SSL certificates in BizTalk to make a secure connection to a third party (web) service. In this article I will explain how you can configure the WCF Adapter to use these installed certificates to encrypt the message that is send to the service. ...

When I installed the Cumulative Update for Workflow Manager 1.0 I received a Microsoft.Workflow.Common.FatalException error. The Workflow Manager Backend Service stopped working and when I tried to re-start the service it crashed. Navigating to the workflow management site gave me a 500 internal server error. I checked the Event Viewer and the following error message showed up: Microsoft.Workflow.Common.FatalException: An unrecoverable error occurred. For diagnostic purposes, this English message is associated with the failure: 'A required Workflow Manager configuration 'WorkflowServiceScopeSnapshotProcessBatchSize' is not present. Please add this configuration value.'. ---> System.IO.InvalidDataException: A required Workflow Manager configuration 'WorkflowServiceScopeSnapshotProcessBatchSize' is not present. Please add this configuration value. ...

In this series of posts I will take a deep dive on creating Workflows in SharePoint 2013. As I am focusing on Microsoft integration in my daily work and had to create some workflows for the SharePoint 2013 platform in the last months, I have spent a lot of time doing research on this subject. Workflow has changed a lot in SharePoint 2013 (in a positive way) and in upcoming posts I will provide you with some product insights as well as samples you can use in your own projects. I will stick to Microsoft Best Practices and give some more information on (workflow) Architecture, reusability and security regarding this topic. ...

This is the first part in a series on how to use SSL Certificates in your BizTalk Application to secure your data transfer when connecting to third party (web) services. In this post I’m going to explain how to install the certificates in the BizTalk servers certificate store. SSL Certificates SSL certificates contain a private (.pfx) and a public key (.cer) which will need to be installed in the appropriate certification stores. (For more information on SSL Certificates you can read the following article: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/SSL-Certificates-HOWTO/x64.html.) ...

Afgelopen maart heeft Microsoft Azure App Services gelanceerd. App Services is een samenvoeging van verschillende services n.l., Web Apps (wat voorheen Azure Websites was), Mobile Apps (wat gebaseerd is op Azure Mobile Services) en 2 nieuwe services, Logic Apps en API Apps. Met deze nieuwe services biedt Microsoft een breed scala aan mogelijkheden. Met Web Apps en Mobile Apps kunnen ontwikkelaars web applicaties en mobiele applicaties bouwen. Met Logic Apps is het mogelijk om integratieoplossingen te ontwikkelen en deze onderdelen kunnen onderling met elkaar communiceren d.m.v. API Apps. ...

Last week I had to connect to an Oracle Database using SSIS 2008. I had a couple of issues installing the Oracle Client tools, the Microsoft Connector for Oracle Provided by Attunity and the configuration on the client side (my SSIS server) and the server side (the Oracle Database server). Besides that, it took me an awful lot of time reading the amount of information written on this subject before actually finding the right solution for making the connection. ...

In this series of posts I will focus on leveraging the Out-of-the-Box SharePoint REST API in visual studio workflows. I will provide some samples on how to use this REST API, which includes making calls to the REST Services as well as retrieving Security Tokens to authenticate to SharePoint. Besides that I will create some Custom Activities which can be downloaded and used in your own SharePoint Workflow projects. The following topics are included in this series: ...

In this post I will guide you through installing and configuring the Workflow Manager for SharePoint 2013. Before starting the installation of the Workflow Manager, make sure that at least the SharePoint 2013 March Public Update (KB 2767999) is installed on toy SharePoint Server. This update has some bug fixes and added extra support for the Workflow Manager and workflow. Installing the Workflow Manager It is best to install the Workflow Manager using the Web Platform Installer tool. This will automatically install all the prerequisites like Service Bus 1.0. ...

This is the first part in a series of posts about SharePoint 2013 Workflows. In this post we will discuss the architecture and improvements of the new Workflow Model in SharePoint 2013. Workflow Architecture Besides the SharePoint 2010 workflow model, which is still part of the SharePoint 2013 installation, Microsoft introduced a new Workflow architecture in SharePoint 2013 (and Office 365). SharePoint 2013 is now using Workflow Manager 1.0 which acts as the host for the workflow runtime, is hosting the latest version of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF 4.5) and unlike the 2010 Workflow model, is totally decoupled from SharePoint using OAuth secured WCF Services. SharePoint 2013 is configured to send all related tasks to the workflow manager to execute workflows using these services. ...

Today I found a very handy tool to check your computer or server security settings: The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. This tool determines if Windows administrative vulnerabilities are present, If weak passwords are being used and it checks if there are any vulnerabilities in IIS and SQL Server. After installing the tool you can scan your server or computer. After completion it provides you with a detailed report and instructions on how to make your environment more secure. ...

If you want to debug your SharePoint 2013 on-premise workflows you need to allow the workflow manager to access your system through the firewall. Take the following steps to allow the workflow manager to access your system: In Control Panel, choose System and Security and then Windows Firewall. In the Control Panel Home list, choose the Advanced Settings link. In the left pane of Windows Firewall, choose Inbound Rules. In the Inbound Rules list, choose Workflow Manager Tools 1.0 for Visual Studio 2012 – Test Service Host. In the Actions list, choose Enable Rule. On the properties page of your SharePoint project, choose the SharePoint tab, and then select the Enable Workflow debugging check box.