MCS UK Solution Development Team

Using the hosted build service available in the Team Foundation Service is great because you don't have to build and manage build servers. You can even get the hosted build server to run your unit tests automatically. To help maintain quality on a project...

This article is the third in a series of three. The first article looked at the context of the business challenge being addressed and the second article investigated the high level design. This article details code that will be needed in order to...

In the previous article (The Background) we looked at why a Self Service portal for developers wishing to submit their applications for deployment might be useful to a large multi-national organisation. The article also looked at why it was felt desirable...

This article is part of a series of three that documents the experience of working with a large enterprise customer which was migrating to SCCM 2012 for application deployment. The three articles are divided in the following way: Background –...

To create new VMs for use with the Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks preview feature for Azure, you can use the Azure PowerShell Commands available at https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/downloads/ . The specific commands to provision a VM are… New...

In this series I have looked how we secure and classify resources (such as Files and Folders) with Dynamic Access Control with the claims of users and devices accessing them.  In the previous post I looked at Resource Properties and User/Device Claims...

In the previous post I looked at Classifying resources. In this post I will be looking at setting up custom Properties to use on those resources and claims for users and devices. Resource Properties Now we will go a little deeper into the Resource...

Dynamic Access Control is a way for you to secure your resources (such as files and folders) without having to manage groups or user lists. In the previous post I looked at the basics of Dynamic Access Control. In this post I will be looking at Classification...

This is the first post in a series of 4 covering Dynamic Access Control. In this post I am going to be looking at the Dynamic Access Control features of Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. Dynamic Access Control is a way for you to secure your resources...

If you follow the samples for Parallel Programming with the .Net Framework , you may have come across the ParallelExtensionsExtras and the Additional TaskSchedulers . Although these samples cover a broad set of requirements I recently came across another...

.NET 4.5 has introduced some great new features to improve the usability of the Workflow designer. If you’re rehosting the designer outside of Visual Studio then you can take advantage of most of these features very easily which is what I have done...

Azure Accenture Control Services (ACS) allows you to secure an application (i.e. Relying Party, RP), by federating to a variety of Identity Providers (IdPs). Once you set your Relying Party application to use federated security with Azure ACS, you can...

Background We all know the following limitations about Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) and passive (browser) federation protocols, right? WIF does not support SAML2.0 protocol (SAML2P) There is a WIF extension out there to support SAML2P but it is a...

On my current project we are dealing with some quite complex xsd schemas. Whilst working with one of these I was confused by what I was seeing in the generated code produced by xsd.exe; specifically where an xs:choice was involved. I was expecting to...

Background Is it possible to secure a website using Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) without interfering with an existing authentication method? e.g. – Could a website secured using an ASP.NET membership provider, with all the code and configuration...

For a while I thought I would tackle the problem of creating an item-based recommender. Firstly I will start with a local variant before moving onto a MapReduce version. The current version of the code can be found at: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Co...

I thought I would take a break for a while from Hadoop and put together an F# .Net implementation of a Priority Queue; implemented using a heap data structure. Conceptually we can think of a heap as a balanced binary tree. The tree will have a root, and...

I recently had an issue where a website, secured with Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 (ADFS), was referencing images stored in another website, secured by the same instance of ADFS. This meant that if a user logged into the main website without...

Over the past month I have been working on a framework to allow composition and submission of MapReduce jobs using .Net. I have put together two previous blog posts on this, so rather than put together a third on the latest change I thought I would create...

An updated version of this post can be found at: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/carlnol/archive/2012/04/29/generic-based-framework-for-net-hadoop-mapreduce-job-submission.aspx If you have been following my blog you will see that I have been putting together...

Rehosting the WF designer in an application outside of Visual Studio is nothing new and since WF4, nothing particularly difficult. In fact the WF product team has gone out of its way to make rehosting the designer as easy an experience as possible and...

Lately I have been working with StreamInsight and thought it was about time to share some of my observations and key points. This is loosely based upon a requirement to aggregate Financial risk vectors and deliver changes to clients in an event based...

As mentioned in my previous post Hadoop Streaming not only supports text streaming, but it also supports Binary Streaming. As such I wanted to put together a sample that supports processing Office documents. As before the code can be downloaded from:...

As you may know Microsoft has recently announced plans for a Hadoop adoption for both Windows Server and Windows Azure . You can find out more about Hadoop and Windows Azure at Apache Hadoop-based Services for Windows Azure and Availability of Community...

This post covers the steps required to secure communication between a WCF client and a WCF data service using mutual certificate authentication. The client/service topology is depicted below: Both the client and server run on a Windows Server 2008 R2...