Thursday, January 04, 2018

Handy Azure Resources

These resources have been really handy for me when working on Azure projects.

Azure Services Reference

Licensing

Cloud Adoption Framework

Well Architected Framework

Azure Architecture and Design Patterns

Azure Data Centers and Service Availability

The service availability matrix was really handy to understand which services are available in which regions so we can plan accordingly.

Azure Speed Test

Allows you to check the latency from your IP location to the Azure Data Center.

Azure Tools


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Azure Tools – Azure Storage Explorer

Azure Storage Explorer is a free stand alone application that is available for Windows, Linux or Mac and connect to the storage account on Azure and to upload, download and manage blobs, queues, tables and Cosmos DB entities.

Download Azure Storage Explorer

Install the Azure Storage Explorer and connect to your Azure account as below.

Add an Azure Account. Options available in the Drop Down List are Azure, Azure China, Azure Germany, Azure US Government, Create Azure Stack environment.

AzureStorageExplorerConnect1

Provide your credentials to connect to your Azure Account

AzureStorageExplorerConnect2AzureStorageExplorerConnect3

Once connected, you can now see your Storage accounts as shown below

AzureStorageExplorerConnect4

Navigate your storage account and do appropriate action you need to perform on them.

AzureStorageExplorerConnect5

Great tool to just navigate your Azure Storage locally without the need of using the Azure Portal. I use the Blob storage to store my SQL bacpac files and this tool is quite handy to download them or perform other actions.

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Chocolatey

ChocolateyChocolatey is an open source Package Manager for Windows. Package Managers are used for installing and managing multiple programs at the same time in an unattended manner. Chocolatey provides Universal approach for Software Management. Chocolatey uses PowerShell. Chocolatey comes from the community repository and it is open source and secure. It supports offline installation of software programs.

Install Chocolatey (Free version) from https://www.chocolatey.org/.

chocolatey1

Run the following command in an command prompt opened in Administrator mode

@"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -InputFormat None -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"

chocolatey2

Packages on Chocolatey - https://www.chocolatey.org/packages

To install software use the below commands

choco install googlechrome –y (for Google Chrome)

chocolatey3

choco install firefox –y (for Firefox)

choco install git –y (for Git)

Chocolatey is really great to provision Dev environments with common tools with great automation.

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Monday, January 01, 2018

Querying the SSRS 2017 REST API using Fiddler

Fiddler is a tool to test the API Request/Response messages. Let us see how can we use Fiddler to send and retrieve messages from the SSRS 2017 REST API.

URL format for the REST API - http://<ReportServer>/Reports/api/v2.0/<endpointname>

e.g. http://<ReportServer>/Reports/api/v2.0/MobileReports to get the list of all Mobile Reports from the SSRS Portal.

Swagger Documentation - https://app.swaggerhub.com/api/microsoft-rs/SSRS/2.0

Note: The SSRS 2017 REST API is OData compliant and if you need to learn about OData queries you can try them from here. (http://services.odata.org/ODataAPIExplorer/ODataAPIExplorer.html)

OData Tutorial - http://www.odata.org/

a) Download Fiddler, install and open it.

b) Click on the Composer Tab and type the URL to get the list of MobileReports uploaded to the SSRS Portal.

RestAPI1

c) Click on Options tab and check the “Automatically Authenticate” option.

RestAPI2

d) Go back to Parsed tab and click the Execute button and you can see the HTTP Status code as 200 as shown below.

RestAPI3

Note: If you see 401 error then you need to go back and check whether you have done the Step c correctly.

e) Finally you can see the JSON output under Inspectors > JSON tab

RestAPI4

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