Break it, fix it

In case you need to connect subnets in different Azure subscription, you might come across the following (nice) article: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/vpn-gateway-vnet-vnet-rm-ps/ I just wanted to give a little more information based on my experience with the actions involved. If you try to follow the steps to connect the subnets using pre-existing gateways, it will not work. You have to create the gateways using the provided instructions. I suppose it is due to the fact that gateways created from the Portal have the "Basic" SKU (you can see it using the Resource Explorer). The PowerShell instructions include a specific parameter named SKU and we have to pass the "Standard" value. At the time of the writing it is not possible to pass this parameter in the Portal, hence the need to use PowerShell to create the gateways.

If you find yourself having to create diagrams for Cloud architectures in Visio, there are nice stencils from Microsoft with all the Azure services ! Here is the download link

There are a lot of articles about the integration of an Azure VM into Release Management for TFS. What if you simply want to deploy an ASP.NET MVC application without the need to provision a dedicated machine. It turns out to be quite simple. One of the most efficient way to do it is to create the initial deployment from Visual Studio and then pick up the piece to build a RM template. My Web Application is quite simple: a database, a Entity Framework Code First model all sitting inside the ASP.NET MVC application. Like all deployments, the main process is: - generate the Web Deploy Package with placeholders for configuration (connection string, parameters, etc.) using TFS Build (or whatever build system you have). - Deploy to the staging machine (using a agent-based or agent-less machine) - Run the MS Deploy CMD file with the appropriate parameters to trigger the deployment on Azure. The reason I use a staging machine as the basis for the CMD is that it allows me to restrict th...