Adding Skype and Skype for Business HTML Links
Have you ever needed to add links into a web page that enabled a visitor to click to begin a chat or phone call with a Skype or Skype for business user? If you have the necessary plug-ins enabled in the browser, a phone number may be recognized automatically, but that can't always be guaranteed. There are native URI's to ensure that, if a site visitor has Skype or Skype for Business installed, a chat or phone call will be initialized.
Installing and Enabling Telnet Server on Ubuntu Linux
By default, Telnet server is disabled for security purposes in favor of SSH. However, you can enable Telnet for testing purposes or for legacy scripts.
Install WordPress on Microsoft Azure PaaS
I have been hosting this blog on WP Engine for a couple of years and my experience has been fantastic. A while back, I explored moving my blog to Azure, but in order to have the same high-availability that WP Engine offered, I would be required to construct a load-balanced WordPress IaaS implementation - installing, configuring and managing the WordPress app environment and the MySQL database (VMs, load balancers, firewalls, etc.). Additionally, I could have chosen to use ClearDB as the MySQL provider. But, all in all, creating a linux-based high-availability environment would be considerably expensive.
Just recently, Microsoft released two new features in Azure - Azure Service Plan on Linux and Azure Database for MySQL Server. These two components allow me to run a full PaaS implementation of WordPress. Continue to read to learn how to install WordPress on a Microsoft Azure PaaS environment.
Azure Functions - Simple Website Demo
In this first demo post, I want to show how to create a simple website using Azure functions. This isn't anything fancy and, more than likely, you won't be attempting to do this in production, but it will still serve a purpose for us to get introduced to building functions. It is important to note that, when functions first became available, some people did, in fact, try to host their website(s) by using functions only. Why not? After all, they would only have to pay for the time the function actually ran. This could end up being a mere $1 or $2 each month. Microsoft got wind of this and put some mechanisms in place to prevent this sort of thing. We're going to sidestep some of these mechanisms by hard-coding some HTTP responses. Again, this isn't production-worthy.
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Conjunction Junction, What's Your Function: Azure Functions - Overview
So, you've heard about Azure Functions? Possibly read about them somewhere? Why all the fuss? What exactly are Azure Functions? Well, you've stopped at the right place. In this post and the next couple of posts, I'm going to talk about Azure Functions, along with their history, use cases and some tutorials. So, let's get started.
Citrix Cloud with Azure using a Raspberry PI 3 VDI Client
I've recently had a lot of interaction with customers who have asked about Microsoft's partnership with Citrix. More specifically, different people have asked how Citrix Cloud can be coupled with Azure in order to deploy a Citrix XenDesktop environment into Azure IaaS.
In this video, I don't necessarily show the setup process. But, I do demonstrate a Raspberry PI 3 VDI client connecting to Citrix Cloud hosted Storefront and running XenDesktop/XenApp from a Windows Server 2016 machine in Azure. One interesting thing is seeing how responsive a YouTube video is while running on a Raspberry PI. Instead of the typical constraints imposed by the PI (e.g. processor, RAM, etc.), I'm leveraging the full resources of Windows Server while letting the VDI client simply render changes in the video to the user. The performance, I believe, is quite good - especially, when considering the possible deployment of such a device within the enterprise.
All in all, this makes for a very secure, economical VDI client.
IoT Asset Management Starter Kit
First demonstrated at Microsoft's 2016 Ignite Conference in Atlanta, GA, the IoT Asset Management Starter Kit is a boiler plate project comprised of Node.js and Angular 2 that facilitates the quick development of an IoT project for Asset Management. The project brings all the necessary components - Azure IoT Hub, Stream Analytics, Heroku, MongoDB and Raspberry Pi 3 - together to build a working end-to-end IoT solution.
The Internet of Things: What You Need To Know
A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of doing a live broadcast on Microsoft's Channel 9 Developer Network. In the broadcast, I discussed various uses for the Internet of Things (IoT) across different industries. In particular, I followed an original story line from the previous couple of broadcasts that involved using BI for retail establishments to gather sales and marketing insights for driving revenue.
I've taken that story to the next level in examining some ways we can use IoT for predicting sales and being more proactive in marketing initiatives by monitoring human behavior. If you're interested, check out the video.
PowerPoint's Menu is Too Big
It seems that when Microsoft deployed their latest versions of Office, they forgot to adjust the DPI (dots per inch) settings for PowerPoint rendering the menus on second monitors extremely large. With the menu and its fonts so large, the design space on a secondary monitor is very limited, if not useless altogether.
VNet Peering Makes Azure Networking Much Easier
same network as compared to being on two separate networks that are simply connected. VNet peering is just another giant step in making Microsoft Azure a game-changer for hybrid networks.