Building something

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Building a secure remote access solution using Azure Bastion Host

I wrote about my experiences and challenges when building a secure remote access solution for Azure-based virtual machines back in February 2019. It’s one of my more popular posts in this blog, and I guess it’s helpful for many because it travels through the options and provides justification for the choices. As that’s often one of the challenges when working with Azure and architectures – there is plenty of choices, and it might be burdensome… Read More »Building a secure remote access solution using Azure Bastion Host

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Understanding and getting started with Azure Sentinel

Today, Microsoft announced that Azure Sentinel is now Generally Available (GA). What this means, is that Azure Sentinel can be used in production, the pricing has been revealed and it’s stable for enterprise-grade usage. In this post, I’ll have a look at what Azure Sentinel is, how to get started and what to keep an eye for in the future. What is Azure Sentinel? Azure Sentinel is Microsoft’s vision of a cloud-based SIEM – which… Read More »Understanding and getting started with Azure Sentinel

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Building an automated pipeline to keep my Amazon Kindle full of interesting content

I have several Amazon Kindle reading devices. The one that I use – almost daily – is the Kindle Oasis, from last year. Battery life is insane, as in “it’s never empty”, and rarely needs a recharge. Perhaps I’m not using it enough. I traded in my old and beaten Kindle from 2015 for this, and only paid about $100 for the upgrade while visiting in New York last summer. The problem is, however, that… Read More »Building an automated pipeline to keep my Amazon Kindle full of interesting content

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Challenging myself with Microsoft’s Quantum Computing development tools and Q#

Every evening I read a book to my youngest son. He’s turning 2 later this year and loves books. Or perhaps it’s just his way of buying more time before going to sleep. We started with Astrophysics for Babies, back in 2018. Since then, we’ve read Newtonian Physics for Babies, Rocket Science for Babies, General Relativity for Babies and plenty more. One of his favorites is Quantum Computing for Babies: It’s pretty great! Taking a… Read More »Challenging myself with Microsoft’s Quantum Computing development tools and Q#

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Building a custom Twitter Analytics tool using .NET Core, Azure Storage, and Power BI

This week has been very productive for me. I’ve been running and thinking, and in the mornings I’ve written about my thoughts. Today is no different! I’ve been a Twitter user for 10 years now – I joined in May 2009. At first, I was a passive user, but in recent years I’ve given it more effort and I’ve found Twitter quite useful and valuable for myself. One thing that’s kept me awake all these… Read More »Building a custom Twitter Analytics tool using .NET Core, Azure Storage, and Power BI

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Building my own RSS feed generator using .NET Core and the new System.Text.Json assembly

It’s that time again! And by this I mean I was thinking of grabbing a cup of coffee, splashing out a few lines of code and have something useful come out. The way I seem to make learning easier for me is to build something. Many times when I’m in the middle of debugging some code, I realize the solution I’m about to build has probably been done a thousand times already, by more experienced… Read More »Building my own RSS feed generator using .NET Core and the new System.Text.Json assembly

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Building a command-line utility using .NET Core and C# to track my car

I’m still partially on vacation mode, as school and other obligations won’t resume until next week. The fun part about the Finnish summer holidays is that the whole country essentially shuts down and hibernates for 6 weeks. This provides a nice way to think about other stuff than work, as customers and colleagues are mostly offline or unreachable until mid-August. I’d been thinking of checking out how I could get data from my car. I… Read More »Building a command-line utility using .NET Core and C# to track my car

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Azure Lighthouse – managing customer Azure tenants as a Service Provider

Yesterday, Microsoft announced Azure Lighthouse. This post will walk you through what the service is, what benefits it brings, and why you should start using it. What is Azure Lighthouse? Azure Lighthouse is a new service from Microsoft, released on July 11th, 2019. It brings better management capabilities and flexibility for managing multiple Azure tenants through delegated access. It’s intended primarily for Managed Service Partners (MSPs), or companies that provide support, service desk and similar… Read More »Azure Lighthouse – managing customer Azure tenants as a Service Provider

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Building a Raspberry Pi 4-based weather monitoring solution using Ruuvitag sensors, Azure IoT Hub and Azure Functions

The Raspberry Pi organization announced Raspberry Pi 4 just a few weeks ago. I had to get one, and after placing an order, I received my RPi4 in only a few days. It’s a powerful little computer, with 4 GB of RAM and dual-HDMI outputs. It powers through USB-C, which is an excellent addition. I installed Raspbian on it and connected it to one of the 4K displays I use at my home office. I… Read More »Building a Raspberry Pi 4-based weather monitoring solution using Ruuvitag sensors, Azure IoT Hub and Azure Functions

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Running a static site in Microsoft Azure using WordPress for content management

I’m currently running my blog (the one you’re reading, thanks!) in Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform. For the longest of times — which is maybe five years — I ran multiple WordPress sites in Azure using the PaaS offering. This includes the Azure Marketplace-based template, that provisions a Web App and MySQL database with a few simple clicks. I also had our company website, e-commerce services and a few different blogs on this same setup —… Read More »Running a static site in Microsoft Azure using WordPress for content management