Global Azure Bootcamp 2017

All around the world user groups and communities want to learn about Azure and Cloud Computing! On April 22, 2017, all communities will come together once again in the fifth great Global Azure Bootcamp event! Each user group will organize their own one day deep dive class on Azure the way they see fit and how it works for their members. The result is that thousands of people get to learn about Azure and join together online under the social hashtag #GlobalAzure! Join hundreds of other organizers to help out and be part of the experience!

Ingenious USB Flash Drive Repair Utility

Every now and then it happens when you expect it the least: Windows fails to mount and read your trusted USB flash drive that is urgently needed and requests to format it. When you reluctantly agree after struggling to remember whether there was any important information on it (check point: never use USB flash drives for long term storage) you only see that Windows recognized just a tiny portion of the drive as accessible and it's useless because the file you need to copy is way larger. What to do?

Intel Network Cards are a Disappointment: still no solutions

For years, Intel network cards both wired and wireless have been a standard of quality, performance and compatibility in my book. Unfortunately, this situation is changing rather quickly. Recently, the quality of hardware and software drivers of the Intel products have been disappointing. There are compatibility problems with Windows 10 and I haven't found solutions to resolve the problems described below. I am sharing this information in the attempt to help other people avoid the problems if they can.

VPN Site-to-Site connection between Azure VPN Gateway and pfSense: Important Details

When implementing an IaaS solution on Azure for, let's say, hosting a web application, it is important to have a controlled secure access to the Azure network from the office site in order to limit an exposure of the Azure virtual machines to the public Internet and prevent unauthorized access to the Azure network resources. Standard solution for this requirement is a site-to-site VPN that allows continuous encrypted connection between two networks: a physical office network and a virtual network on Azure.

Easily add config transformation files to a Console App project

This is a very short post. Not digging into a theory of config transformations just add this add-on Configuration Transform to your Visual Studio and you'll be able to right click on an App.config file and see "Add Config Transforms" in the context menu. Works just fine.

Using Google Tag Manager to deploy Azure Application Insights client-side monitoring

If your web application is hosted on Microsoft Azure and you are using Application Insights for monitoring you'll have to add a piece of JavaScript on web pages to collect client-side statistics like page load time, JavaScript errors, users and sessions analytics, etc. The script can be found on Azure portal when Application Insights is enabled for a web application.

WebDav Client for Windows

Recently I've been involved in migrating JIRA Server to JIRA Cloud and one particular required step was to upload exported JIRA data files on to Atlassian cloud storage. Atlassian supports WebDav protocol but they have no suggestions about what client software to use most likely because of the large diversity of what operating systems their customers use.

I was working on Windows 8/Server 2012 and did not have previous experience nor preference for a particular WebDav client. Google search returns a number of choices on the first page but it's hard to pick one based just on reading so I ended up installing and trying a number of different software packages. Without further ado to save time to someone who is facing similar exercise my tool of choice happened to be BitKinex. Extremely easy and intuitive to use, works immediately with no additional configuration, and provides familiar Windows Explorer user experience with drag and drop support. Thumbs up!

Controlling console output from a windows task

Windows tasks continue to be very handy especially for automating batch operations that do not require constant human attention. But even such operations may require occasional human interference to troubleshoot problems.

Most of the Windows tasks execute command line programs that do not have graphical user interface but produce output in form of log files or console messages. While monitoring of log files can be relatively easy automated via different kinds of log collection services, the console output that is mostly meant for human eyes and could provide helpful information is usually lost as by default Windows task does not save console output anywhere.

There is however a relatively easy way to save console output produced by a Windows task in a text file. Windows command line environment provides with a function to redirect standard program output to stdout or stderr to a file using redirection commands '>' or '>>'. The first one redirects that output to a file and replaces the file if it exists with a new version and the second one appends the output to a file if it exists.

In order to use output redirection a Windows task action should be configured to execute a CMD shell instead of an actual cl program. So instead of

>myprogram.exe > output.txt

it should be configured as

>CMD /C "myprogram.exe" > output.txt

In the first example of direct calling a program Windows task will ignore output redirection and the entire output will not be saved. In the second example the redirection will be executed not by a Windows task but by a CMD shell instead and the output will be saved in a file.

404 Error in IIS for a Url with a plus + in the Path

Default Internet Information Server (IIS) behavior since IIS 7 rejects requests to Urls with a plus (+) sing in the path like:

www.somesite.com/one+two or
www.somesite.com/path/subpath/three+four

The behavior is considered a security feature and controlled by a setting called "Double Escaping Filtering". To override the default rejecting behavior the setting needs to be changed either via a web.config configuration:

<system.webServer>
  <security>
    <requestfiltering allowDoubleEscaping="true" />
  </security>
</system.webServer>

or an IIS Management user interface: