On November 14, 2023, Microsoft released .Net 8. After getting Visual Studio Professional 17.8 installed, updating to .Net 8 was easy.More...

I recently updated from a 2018 MacBook Pro Intel i9 to a 2023 MacBook Pro M2 Max. The primary reason; faster compilation times. So how much faster is the new MacBook Pro M2 Max than the older machine: 50-80% faster in compile times.

Most of the OSX applications worked without any issues at all, but there were some limitations of the M2 that are not widely documented. There were several Visual Studio limitations on Windows 11 ARM under parallels. This is a summary of the limitations and issues I found. More...

Office 365 will by default filter out emails that have attachments that are executables (exe, scr, ps1, cmd, etc.) as well as an unencrypted zip file that contains executables. Office 365 allows HTML files as attachments to email because these are considered to be potentially valid email from some vendors. Attackers will attach HTML files that contain malicious javascript and will try to mask the origin of the email and it's contents. If they can convince you to download the attachment and open it, this can cause you some serious problems. This article is a summary of how to create an Office 365 Exchange Mail Flow rule to add some warning to users.More...

The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) allows one to configure DNS entries to list valid sources of truth for Office 365 email. Attackers will often try to send email from outside a domain to recipients inside the domain by pretending they are another person within the company. Creating an SPF rule that flags messages from outside the company pretending to be inside the company alerts users. This article is a summary of how to create an Office 365 Exhcange Mail Flow rule to warn users of SPF invalid messages.More...

If you want to generate a unique build number for each build in Azure Devops, Git, Team City, or other environments consistently, it can be challenging. This article is a summary of how to generate a unique build number when using git repositories, across multiple environments. More...

This is part of a series on Building an Azure Dev Test Lab.

There are many things that can be done in Azure without setting up Azure Networking. But, there are also many reasons to setup a private Azure network. This article is a summary of what Azure Services are required to get Azure networking in place. More...

This is part of a series on Building an Azure Dev Test Lab for software development.

Azure has Data Centers located all over the globe. But not all Data Centers have all the same features or price structure. Before you begin to setup Azure services, make sure the Data Center you select for your Azure Products and Services support what you will need and that you know the pricing. More...