Automating setup of keys for Release Annotations in App Insights during an automated Release

Microsoft has finally added this ability, though the documentation is not available at the time of this writing. For instructions on how to do it, see this UserVoice item for the issue :

https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/357324-application-insights/suggestions/13607550-enable-creation-and-management-of-api-keys-via-pow?tracking_code=06b602f1fc962c339ed8bcf534fcdb2f#{toggle_previous_statuses}

Switching environments, data sources, and other dynamically changeable settings in TFS Lab (on-premise) for 2013

Thanks to a post on this blog, we can access the settings inject into Lab-managed builds in TFS 2012 and 2013. Even though this is 2016 and many people are moving to the cloud with VSTS, there are still a good number of companies out there with considerable infrastructure "on-premise", and TFS can help with executing automated tests in those environments. I'm going to be building a library for helping others out with retrieving settings dynamically from TFS and I'll update my blog when it's available.

MSDeploy: The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send.

Our company has started deploying all of its numerous web applications via automated (or at least scripted) deployment with MSDeploy. This has worked fine, up until very recently where one machine in particular seemed to be cursed and simply didn't want to work. Even when we nuked the VM and completely recommissioned it from scratch from our VM web server template, we still kept getting the following error:

Error: Could not complete the request to remote agent URL 'https://myserver:10987/MSDeployAgentService'.
Error: The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send.
Error: Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.
Error: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host
Error count: 1.

The problem turned out to be caused by the fact that we hadn't correctly configured the Management Service for MSDeploy (even though we use a custom port for the MsDepSvc deployment service, the Web Management Service (WMSvc) wasn't correctly configured): 

1. Because we were behind a load balancer, we needed to specifically set the IP address of the server
2. We were attempting to use SSL, but we didn't have a certificate specified in the Management Service configuration.

Here's what our configuration looked like in the end, obfuscated to protect the guilty:

Step 1:

Step 2:

Updating your Azure AD Application Manifest

We've recently found that as we develop more applications in Azure, we need to put safeguards on the deployment of the applications to ensure that they're configured correctly. Part of this means editing the application manifests to ensure that certain settings are always enforced on certain applications. Here's what Microsoft has to say about updating Application manifests.

Bottom line, if you want to automate anything to do with manifests, you'll have to write your own application to use the Azure Graph API libraries to retrieve the manifest / application settings and edit them.

Debugging database deployments with MSDeploy and SqlPackage

I recently had problems deploying a database to Azure, and thanks to this article, I now know why. The best part of this experience is that I've learned to debug this in a much easier manner than relying on the unhelpful error message:

*** An error occurred during deployment plan generation. Deployment cannot continue.
Failed to import target model my-database-name. Detailed message Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: conn
Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: conn

The short of it is that:

1) you need to enable a log trace with these commands for dbDacFx and SSDT:

logman create trace -n DacFxDebug -p "Microsoft-SQLServerDataTools" 0x800 -o "%LOCALAPPDATA%\DacFxDebug.etl" -ets

logman create trace -n SSDTDebug -p "Microsoft-SQLServerDataToolsVS" 0x800 -o "%LOCALAPPDATA%\SSDTDebug.etl" -ets

2) Go execute the command that's causing you grief
3) Execute the following commands to stop the logging trace:

logman stop DacFxDebug -ets

logman stop SSDTDebug -ets

4) Open 'eventvwr' in the Run dialog available from the Start Menu
5) Go to the right side 'Actions' pane, and click on 'Open Saved Log'.
6) When prompted to convert the log, click 'No'.

The logs will display under the 'Saved Logs' folder in the left hand navigation tree, and you'll be able to inspect the errors that occurred. Good luck with deployment!

RSS and Me

I love RSS, I think it's a great way to read the news and generally stay up to date on any sites you read and any (legit) torrents you may want to download, or podcasts if that's your thing. I've been kicking around the idea of having an RSS notifier for our system at work, so that I wouldn't have to be sending out extraneous emails all over the place. According to this guy, creating an RSS feed is stupid simple. Maybe when I get the chance I'll give it a try.

*EDIT* : Ok, me being me, I was fascinated with the idea of dealing with something new and couldn't let it go. I followed one breadcrumb after another and found, fortunately for me, that Spring already has an (Abstract)RSS view class in the Spring Modules library that uses the Java Rome RSS library in the background. I can't wait to slog through the crap I have to deal with at the moment so that I can fool around with RSS and have RSS feeds supplying the notifications for our production system. This is going to save so many headaches.

*EDIT 2* : Heh, this guy's page is awesome. It shows that you can use security with RSS feeds, which will be perfect for my company.