Different Azure PowerShell modules for managing single resources or groups

While creating the PowerShell scripts for automatic deployment of the project’s Azure environment I discovered there are multiple Azure PowerShell modules. When you want to manage a single resource, such as storage accounts, websites, databases, virtual machines, and media services, you need the (default) Azure module. However, when you need to manage resource groups, you will need the AzureResourceManager module. This is useful information if you want to deploy new Azure websites with a specific hosting plan, like Basic or Standard. Read more →

Adding Azure service bus queues via PowerShell

There are quite a couple of Azure cmdlets made available by Microsoft. All of this sweetness can be installed on your system via the Web Platform Installer. After installing these modules you can start managing your Azure subscription in PowerShell scripts. Most of the stuff for managing your Azure subscription is implemented in these Azure cmdlets. One of the things which isn’t implemented (yet) is managing the Service Busses in your subscription. Read more →

Data access for MongoDB

The project I’m working on at the moment has a lot of analytics data. This means there’s a lot of inserts and updates in the database and queries have to be fast! At the moment all of this is hosted in a single MS SQL Server which does a pretty decent job. Still, this seems like a perfect scenario to introduce a noSQL database, especially as we are migrating to the cloud to improve performance of the application as a whole. Read more →

Solved spontaneous reboots of WP8 Lumia 925

About 1.5 years ago I received my Nokia Lumia 925 phone as a replacement for my Nokia Lumia 620, which I had lost. I couldn’t be more happy at that moment. It has a great screen, it’s quite fast and nice to look at. The only downside was, it sometimes rebooted while I was doing something. This happened almost all the time when I was taking a picture, but also when listening to podcasts, driving my car, reading e-mail, etc. Read more →

SQL Azure Data Sync

For quite a couple of years now, the SQL Data Sync software has been available to synchronize data between MS SQL Server databases. This SQL Data Sync however has been decommissioned and we have to resort to the the (new) SQL Data Sync (Preview) nowadays. SQL Data Sync is a solution/feature which allows you to synchronize data between several SQL (Azure) databases. The best thing is, you don’t have to synchronize your complete database. Read more →