Dev, Cloud and Stuff!
Category: Azure
A while ago I was having an issue deploying a SQL Data Tools project using the Azure DevOps pipelines. It worked fine when there was no data in the database, but once there was some data to preserve in the release the DACPAC deployment started to timeout with the following error when running SqlPackage.
Continue reading “‘*** Execution Timeout Expired’ with SqlPackage.exe on Azure DevOps Release Pipeline Fix”Adding tags to resources in Azure is generally a good idea. This helps administrators manage billing, knowing what things are and when they can be safely decommissioned etc..
I have includes here some guidance and useful scripts for adding tags and managing tags on resources and resource groups.
Continue reading “Resource Tag management in Microsoft Azure”
Azure Data Factory (ADF) is a great tool as part of your cloud based ETL tool set. However not all your data is necessarily accessible from the public internet. These instruction go through the steps required to allow ADF access to your internal or VNet data-sets.
The following are instructions for setting up a connection to an Active Directory (AD) Domain secured SQL Server using either SQL Server Management Studio or Visual Studio. This is especially applicable when not using a domain attached PC.
Continue reading “How to connect to an AD Domain Secured SQL Server from a non-domain PC”
By default a ‘Registered Application’ account is not a member of any Directory Roles and/or group memberships and there is no easy way to make these changes using the portal. You may have an API or back-end application that will be required to perform actions on your AD that requires elevated permissions (e.g. Reset passwords or delete accounts etc..)
Normally for advanced configuration, you will need to start editing the manifest file. Luckily this has been made easy using the Portal. You can now edit the file directly, or download, make changes and then upload.
However, to make a ‘Registered Application’ a member of a ‘Directory Administrative Role’ you need to use PowerShell to add the role member to the ‘Service Principal’ (as I couldn’t find a way to do this in the manifest!).
I have recently been trying to program against the Azure Active Directory (AAD) using the Microsoft.Azure.ActiveDirectory.GraphClient library. Unfortunately this library literally has no useful comments to assist understanding or clarify parameters etc.. Let alone how best to use or implement objects and methods or what and why exception may occur.
Equally the MSDN documentation seems to be lacking in any examples and really has minimal comments (although I see it’s getting a bit better…I think).
To this end I have created a ‘wrapper / handler’ to simplify all sorts of AAD interactions called AADGraphHandler. It effectively will help manage the creation of the ActiveDirectoryClient and a bunch of it’s operations. You can find this on GitHub at https://github.com/nrogoff/AADGraphHandler
You can get access to the ActiveDirectoryClient directly, and so any methods not covered yet. (e.g. Adding and removing roles to a user. Just not needed it yet!)
Continue reading “Azure Active Directory Graph API Wrapper to help make it a bit easier!”