Blog de Joe Freeman

Bitlocker forces you to re-enter our BitLocker encryption key when a drive has been moved to different hardware.  Upgrading a graphics card will change the signature.  This means a graphics card upgrade may prompt you for your BitLocker key on startup. You will be prompted for your key.   Hopefully, you saved your BitLocker key to your Microsoft account to paper or some secure device. Microsoft provides the corporate recovery link The boot screen refers you to https://aka.ms/bitlocker .  This is the location redirects to htts://login.microsoftonline.com where Enterprise Accounts  keep their BitLocker keys.  You will get a message something like  AADSTS50020: User account <your account> from identity provider 'live.com' does not exist in tenant 'Microsoft' and cannot access the application ....(MSProtect Website [wsfed enabled]) in that tenant. The account needs to be added as an external user in the tenant first. Sing out and sign in again...

One of my favorite features of Azure DevOps is its ability to integrate Work Item updates with Office Excel.  This means you can run any canned ADO query from Excel, update the retrieved work items and then publish the updates back to ADO all from inside Excel.   Microsoft Guidance See the following pages https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/boards/backlogs/office/bulk-add-modify-work-items-excel?view=azure-devops&tabs=agile-process https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/boards/backlogs/office/faqs?view=azure-devops Install Azure DevOps Automation Download and install Microsoft Office Integration tools by installing 2019 dev-ops automation   This installs a TFSProtocolHelper that ADO can use to open Query results in Excel Create an ADO query that will execute and fill Excel Click on the Queries  in the Boards Menu Create a Query and save it to create a named query I tend to create two-tier queries for Features  first-level children,...

Azure Sphere is another example of  how vendors can create great end to end solutions. Time will tell if it will become another cautionary tale about vendor lock in and corporate attention spans. Why Azure Sphere? Azure Sphere is an end-to-end IOT platform to build applications, deploy them, manage them, securely communicate with them and and remotely update them. Microsoft spent the last few years learning the complexity of building and running secure IOT environments. The continual stream of IOT device hacks and attacks shows that building and running secure, scale-able IOT clouds is beyond the capabilities of many companies. Azure Sphere simplifies this by pushing some of the responsibilities onto Microsoft itself. Azure  Microsoft's Software Effort  Microsoft is putting in a real effort create a professional grade  IOT ecosystem with their Azure Sphere project. They have built a hardware and software platform where security and cloud integration ...

I recently ran into an issue where I was unable to deploy a DotNet Core 1.0 application in AWS using their CodeStar / CodePipeline / CodeDeploy / CodeBuild tooling.  The REST service started off as a simple demo .Net 1.x ASP.Net that was generated as a demo in AWS CodeStar.  I converted the source code, build and deployment components to DotNet 2.0. It worked great. Problem The service build / deployment broke in AWS when I added Swagger endpoint documentation that included information from C# XML documentation generated and stored an XML file. Startup failed saying they couldn't find the <ServiceName>.xml documenation file. This manifested as a build failure in CodePiepline/CodeDeploy. bin\Release\netcoreapp2.0\TokenService.xml not found Builds ran and deployed fine on my local machine in Debug and Release modes. Cause Microsoft's recommended " dotnet publish " command line may generate conflicting path with csproj files when using manipulating an...

Microsoft Azure Application Insights requires Mule 3.7 or later. Application Insights depends on org.apache httpclient and httpcore versions that are first bundled with Mule 3.7 Application Insights is an Azure based application performance dashboard that can monitor applications deployed inside, or outside, Azure.  Application Insights SDKs are available for a variety of languages with a heavy focus on standard library web driven applications or services. This blog entry describes how easy it is to enable Application Insights for a Mule ESB application that does not use any of the out-of-the-box supported web hooks. In this case, we monitoring the out-of-the-box JMX beans provided by Mule. Performance information is gathered by Application Insights where it is displayed in the Azure Portal. Mule exposes performance data about applications and flows via JMX.  Any of this can be forwarded to the Application Insights Dashboard. Steps Create an Application Insights...

Application Insights is an Azure based application performance dashboard that can monitor applications deployed inside, or outside, Azure.  Application Insights SDKs are available for a variety of languages with a heavy focus on standard library web driven applications or services. This blog entry describes how easy it is to enable Application Insights for a Spring wired Java application that does not use any of the out-of-the-box supported web hooks. In this case, we are enabling Java / JMX monitoring of a custom Spring application running in my home lab. Performance information is gathered by Application Insights where it is displayed in the Azure Portal. I did this work as part of building a message driven application that had no true web interface. The application runs in a container that does not support tomcat or web filters normally used to enable Application Insight. Microsoft does a good job of describing how to monitor Java Tomcat, Struts, Spring MVC and other sta...