Findings and thingies

I experience a lot of random errors on Azure. Code Functions will randomly fail to trigger until redeployed, builds pushed into Oryx will not always successfully complete. There isn’t the feeling of robustness with it that you get elsewhere.

I also see things described in this post from time to time. Especially random error messages and inconsistent behaviour si something which really can drive you nuts.

Therefore, I agree with the conclusion the Microsoft should spent some time serious engineering on both security and availability.

"Our recommendation is to not buy new Chinese phones, and to get rid of those already purchased as fast as reasonably possible," Defence Deputy Minister Margiris Abukevicius told reporters in introducing the report.

Cheap devices come at a cost...

Gute Audioqualität ist der Schlüssel zu akzeptierten Audio- und Videokonferenzen über das Internet.

Etwas Aufwand in das Setup zu investieren, ist auch eine Form von Respekt, den man seiner Gesprächspartnerin oder seinem Gesprächspartner entgegenbringt.

Das hier!

Ich kann nur sagen, dass schlechte Audioqualität anderer Teilnehmer eine Audio- oder Videokonferenz für mich persönlich, um ein vielfaches anstrengender macht.

So to summarize, here are my key points from this talk, in a nutshell — please make these your key takeaways.

• Distributed teams are better than localized teams — not because they’re distributed, but because they’re asynchronous.
• Avoid anything that makes a distributed team run synchronously.
• Use less chat.
• Have fewer meetings.
• Write. Things. Down.

This post is such a good summary on how and why one should embrace and extend working asynchronously.

As you’ve come to expect, this Book of News is your resource for all the announcements we’re making at Microsoft Build. Here you will find details about enhancements and integrations spanning the entire Microsoft developer platform across Visual Studio, GitHub, Microsoft Azure, Power Platform, Windows and Microsoft 365. We want to make it easier than ever for developers to go from idea, to code, to cloud—and we want to empower all developers to do more.

If you didn't had the time to attend all or even any session of Microsoft Build 2021 then the book of news is the resource to get all the news from this event and announcements made by Microsoft.

For as long as the Power Platform has existed, developers have wanted a free way to experiment with it.
In 2017, the "Power Apps Community Plan" was introduced. Even though this was free, it unfortunately did not offer all the possibilities that developers would like to play with.

Since this Microsoft Build, we now know that it takes a bit of time for Microsoft to respond to the developers' pleas, but that the wishes are ultimately fulfilled.

And so the Power Apps Developer Plan was introduced yesterday. Compared to the old Community Plan, this offers significantly more functions that can be used.

If you want to use your work or school account instead of your personal account, no problem simply look at this guide: Citizen Dev. Journey - Setting up your Microsoft Power Apps Test Environment | LinkedIn

Whilst some people employ lightweight modelling techniques such as C4, most diagrams in use today, are what I call, somewhat derogatorily, masala diagrams. No hard feelings, I call my own diagrams like this. Why masala? Because they are informal; they cover multiple dimensions at once, they may be both structural and behavioural, logical and physical. They are often a mishmash of the 4+1 architectural model’s views.

I must admit that I never liked UML for describing systems architecture. I can't name any special reason for this. However, I really like the term masala diagrams for diagrams illustrated in the linked article. From my point of view these kinds of diagrams feed the needs of the separate roles in a business context. And somehow everybody looking at these kind of diagrams gets a grasp of how the system is architected and what its intension is.

Even though I still see why UML has been appealing in the first place to describe business models.

I've written about the maps of Stephane Eyskens before. I must admit that I did not follow up on the following publishing's by him. Today I just noticed that he added another map to his portfolio.

The Azure Data Architecture Map - Microsoft Tech Community

It is pretty neat that he simply put a link to all of his maps in his most recent post so that one has all information in one place.

The same “brain drain” applies to any potential distractor even when they aren’t actively distracting us. Research in cognitive psychology tells us that we automatically pay attention to things that are habitually relevant to us, even when we are focused on something else.

Maybe it's time to get rid of even more apps on your smartphone.

Today I was facing the challenge that an import of a BACPAC file did not finish in a reasonable amount of time.

The process simply remained unchanged for about 4 hours in the state you can see in the above screenshot.

After investigating this further I found the money quote in the Microsoft documentation [1].

The Azure SQL Database Import/Export service provides a limited number of compute virtual machines (VMs) per region to process import and export operations. The compute VMs are hosted per region to make sure that the import or export avoids cross-region bandwidth delays and charges. If too many requests are made at the same time in the same region, significant delays can occur in processing the operations. The time that's required to complete requests can vary from a few seconds to many hours.

The documentation also states that an import will be cancelled if it is not processed within four days.

Unfortunately the Azure portal does not offer an option to cancel an import out of the box. For this you need to use the PowerShell (inside the portal). You can find a detailed description for this here.

To speed things up you can perform this import using your local SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). For this simply refer to the necessary steps in [3] specifically section »Importing a data-tier application in SQL Server Management Studio«. Of course this is only an option if your internet connection is sufficient for the amount of data that needs to be moved. If not you can still deploy an Azure VM and run the import process from there.

Resources

1. Import and export of a database takes a long time - Azure SQL Database | Microsoft Docs
2. How to cancel Azure SQL Database Import or Export operation - Microsoft Tech Community
3. An introduction to Data-Tier applications in SQL Server - WayBack