What do you like to do to refresh and re-ground yourself?

Anyway, life is very good right now…. I hope yours is too.

Here are a few of the links I’ve used tonight. . .

• Azure Bot service documentation
• Principles of bot design
• Design a bot’s first user interaction
• Design and control conversation
  flow
• 40 conversational bots
• Bot Framework samples repo on GitHub

But I’ve also been doing a lot of studying of the Microsoft Power Platform, specifically Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents. No code, low code environment, which sounds nice and easy, but the learning curve has been larger than I expected. I recently found a bunch of YouTube videos that I’m working my way through.

• Power Platform sessions at Ignite 2910
• PowerApps new features
• PowerApps #LessCodeMorePower
• Power Platform technical overview
• PowerApps webinars
• PowerApps deep dive
• PowerApps at Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2019

Anyway, that’s been taking up a lot of my time. Soooooo, I decided to shift gears regarding this AKS project.

Miniblog is a nice engine, but all my content is currently at jimblizzard.wordpress.com. I didn’t want to have to try to migrate all my old posts into Miniblog, so I used the WordPress bitnami image and threw it into an AKS cluster, and pointed my old domain name snowstormlife.com at it. I then exported all my wordpress content from wordpress.com and imported it into snowstormlife.com. Worked like a charm. These instructions gave me a great head start. And I pointed Open Live Writer to it so I can compose from my laptop. Easy peasy.

I still need to . . .

• [] add a cert to snowstormlife.com
• [] create a post about my adventures in converting Miniblog into docker-able source code and putting it into an AKS cluster
• [] create a post about creating the Azure DevOps pipeline from the Azure DevOps Service in the Azure portal – 5 minutes and done. Maybe a video would be better, since writing all the stuff down would take a lot longer.
• [] and a few other odds and ends.

To create / edit snippets, in VS Code, press Ctrl+Shift+p then type “snip”

To edit your snippets, select Preferences: Configure User Snippets, then select the snippets file or create snippets

In WSL Ubuntu, my c# snippet config file is located here: /home/jim/csharp.json

Here’s an example of a couple that I created:

{

    // Place your snippets for csharp here. Each snippet is defined under a snippet name and has a prefix, body and 

    // description. The prefix is what is used to trigger the snippet and the body will be expanded and inserted. Possible variables are:

    // $1, $2 for tab stops, $0 for the final cursor position, and ${1:label}, ${2:another} for placeholders. Placeholders with the 

    // same ids are connected.

    // Example:

    // “Print to console”: {

    //  “prefix”: “log”,

    //  “body”: [

    //      “console.log(‘$1’);”,

    //      “$2”

    //  ],

    //  “description”: “Log output to console”

    // }

    “Property”: {

        “prefix”: “prop”,

        “body”: [

            “public ${1:type} ${2:MyProperty} {get; set;}”

        ],

        “description”: “Create a property with ‘private type varName {get;set;}'”

    }

    “PropertyFull”: {

        “prefix”: “propfull”,

        “body”: [

            “private ${1:type} ${2:myVar};”,

            “”,

            “public $1 ${3:MyProperty}”,

            “{“,

            ”   get { return $2; }”,

            ”   set { $2 = value; }”,

            “}”

        ],

        “description”: “Full property with private backing”

    }

}

After you save the file, in the VS Code editor for your C# project, simply type the snippet prefix, such as “prop” or “propfull” then press tab and fill in the values

Snippets are such handy things…..

There are a bunch of topic-specific config files available for use, too. For more info, see: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/userdefinedsnippets

Enjoy!

And don’t forget to wash your hands.

.

There are a ton of DevOps best practices regarding people, process and tooling. Blog posts, books, videos, etc. DevOps is all about a transformative journey. It’s not just about CI/CD.

Even so, over the weekend I pulled together a list of best practices for Azure DevOps pipelines and GitHub repos. Some of it is overview info, some links contain hands on walkthroughs. You might notice there’s a bit of a Kubernetes flavor sprinkled around. That’s because I’ve been spending some time coming up to speed. There’s a lot to learn in that space. Anyway, here’s what I have so far:

• • Protect your code 
    • Branching – Release flow branching strategy – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/learn/devops-at-microsoft/release-flow
    • Create branch policies – https://help.github.com/en/github/administering-a-repository/configuring-protected-branches
    • From Azure DevOps, build GitHub repositories and run pull request build: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/repos/github?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml
    • Review code with pull requests: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/repos/git/pull-requests?view=azure-devops
    • More about pull requests – https://help.github.com/en/github/collaborating-with-issues-and-pull-requests/about-pull-requests

• • Infrastructure as code
    • Walkthrough: Integrate ARM templates with Azure Pipelines https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/vs-resource-groups-project-devops-pipelines

• • Automated testing in build / deployment pipelines
    • Visual Studio Test task https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/tasks/test/vstest?view=azure-devops
    • Run Selenium tests in Azure pipelines: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/test/continuous-test-selenium?view=azure-devops
    • Microsoft Learn module: run quality tests in you build pipeline https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/run-quality-tests-build-pipeline/

• • Pipelines
    • Kubernetes deployment strategies: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/overview/kubernetes-deployment-strategy/
    • Build and deploy to AKS with Azure yaml pipeline and GitHub repo
      • Walkthrough: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/ecosystems/kubernetes/aks-template?view=azure-devops
    • Canary releases in Azure DevOps and AKS / blue-green deployments
      • End-to-end ACR/AKS walkthrough (It’s a bit intense): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/ecosystems/kubernetes/canary-demo?view=azure-devops

• • Security scan, vulnerability scan
    • Overview and concepts: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/migrate/security-validation-cicd-pipeline?view=azure-devops
    • Checkmarx – Installing and configuring CxSAST Azure DevOps plugin: https://checkmarx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/KC/pages/1011155072/Installing+and+Configuring+the+CxSAST+Azure+DevOps+MS-VSTS+Plugin+v8.8.0
    • Microsoft Learn module – Scan code for vulnerability in Azure Pipelines: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/scan-for-vulnerabilities/
    • Microsoft security code analysis extension: https://secdevtools.azurewebsites.net/

• • Useful documentation about migrating from Jenkins to Azure Pipelines – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/migrate/from-jenkins?view=azure-devops

I’ve created a gist over on GitHub. I’ll post new items over there as I find them. . .

Here are some references. . .

Data Factory Security: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/data-factory/data-movement-security-considerations

Azure Data Factory does not store any data except for linked service credentials for cloud data stores, which are encrypted by using certificates.

Databricks uses Azure Data Lake Storage, which is encrypted at rest: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-service-encryption

Azure Data Lake Storage: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/data-lake-storage-introduction

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is a set of capabilities dedicated to big data analytics, built on Azure Blob storage. Data Lake Storage Gen2 is the result of converging the capabilities of our two existing storage services, Azure Blob storage and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1. Features from Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1, such as file system semantics, directory, and file level security and scale are combined with low-cost, tiered storage, high availability/disaster recovery capabilities from Azure Blob storage.

Ok. That’s enough mindfulness for now. Or maybe, not enough…

It’s New Year’s Eve 2018. I figured it was time to go out and do some paddle boarding. It was a nice day, 82° with beautiful blue skies and a gentle breeze.

A good way to finish the year.