My name is Vincent-Philippe Lauzon. I studied in Mathematics-Physics before graduating in Machine Learning. I then spent most of my career as a consultant in different Information Technology context for more than 20 years.
I now work as a Cloud Solution Architect for Microsoft Canada.
I am based in Montreal, have a lovely family and do a lot of jogging.
I love Solution Architecture and envisioning solutions with customers using cutting edge technology. In recent years that has meant the Cloud. Now that Machine Learning is becoming real popular I can go back to my passion of mathematics & Machine Learning!
I post regularly on this blog and on Twitter.
I own those NuGet packages:
I own those CodePlex projects:
I wrote a few columns on Code Project:
- Entity Framework Patterns: Select Multiple Entities
- Advanced using OData in .NET: WCF Data Services
- An overview of Open Data Protocol (OData)
- Inversion of Control (IoC) in XAML
- Passing Arrays in SQL Parameters using XML Data Type in SQL Server 2005
- Simulating Monolog Conversations with SQL Server 2005 Service Broker
- TypeBuilderLib, a Library to Build Dynamic Types Easily
On this blog I speak in my and my name only. Opinions stated here are my own and not my employer’s.
Hi, I want to know can I use WCF Data Service to access Windows Azure Table Storage. If yes how can I do that.
Hi Saqib,
Of course you can. Table Storage are exposed as OData endpoints.
Try to direct an OData tool on your table URI (e.g. http://www.silverlight.net/content/samples/odataexplorer/).
The issue you’ll probably have is that you’ll need to give some credentials to your OData proxy in order to authenticate with Azure Storage.
But all of that is wrapped inside the Azure Storage SDK where you can do LINQ queries on tables without realizing you’re talking to an OData endpoint. Do you have specific requirements not to use that?
Vincent-Philippe
Hi Vincent-Philippe Lauzon, how can i get a list of users (in azure active directory) relative to an appID with microsoft graph?
Do you mean the “member” of an app, i.e. once you “Enabled for users to sign-in” the app?
If so… I would say “you can’t” since Microsoft Graph API have no notion of apps nor Active Directory per se, it just happened to have the notion of users and groups which are managed in AAD.
You can sort of get a directory object (see https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/docs/api-reference/v1.0/api/directoryobject_get) which you could use to get a hold on an app (I haven’t tried it though). But even then, I don’t see any way to access the members of that app.
You would need to use AAD Graph API (versus Microsoft Graph API ; I know not at all confusing). Please see https://msdn.microsoft.com/Library/Azure/Ad/Graph/api/api-catalog.
That being said, interacting with apps isn’t documented. I’ve done it once by… doing it with PowerShell while sniffing the HTTP packets coming out of my PC and basically reverse engineering the HTTP call (it’s only one call). That call uses the AAD Graph API. I used Azure Active Directory V2 PowerShell module (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/azuread/v2/azureactivedirectory) for that.
Not sexy, but it worked.
Hi Vincent, you’re right. The same thing I did and that I thought, but i can’t use AAD because it is not compatible with asp.net core project. So i have to use Microsoft Graph API.
Thank’s very much!
Hi Vincent. Wondering if you can help me with a Logic App.
I am trying to take the output (from a xml file) and run it through my Transform XML (Input)
But the output content has \r\n (new line character) between nodes now and then. This of course makes the xml content invalid.
Is there a way to get rid of the new line characters in the content body?
I have tried some expressions but to no avail. I’ll send you up some beer for some free help 🙂
SO.NC.SWAIN.CFR\r\n27Pine Street
Hi Josh,
I haven’t encountered that scenario.
On top of my head I would say… You can transform your XML string before ingesting it as XML. For instance, using the replace function (look for ‘string functions’ in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-ca/azure/logic-apps/logic-apps-workflow-definition-language#functions) to replace ‘\r’ by ”.
If that doesn’t work, you can hit Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/) with the question.
Good luck,
Vincent-Philippe
Hi Vicent-Philippe,
Great web site, thanks for sharing your knowledge.
I have a question. I am doing a Logic App. One step is calling an endpoint in an internal API.
That endpoints is requesting authentication. I have a user/password to call that endpoint.
However I don’t know how to call that API. I am trying with an HTTP connector, enabling the basic authentication, but no success.
Best regards,
There are many ways to authenticate. It could be OAuth or it could be some custom convention, e.g. passing the credentials in HTTP headers.
My advice would be to dig in the API’s doc to find the authentication mechanism. Then make it work in a separate venue, e.g. a simple C# Console App. Finally, make it work in Logic App.
Hi Vincent,
Great Blog, and very interesting blog on accessing Web Server Logs using Azure Data Lakes. I have a customer who has an interest is automatically monitoring these App Service Web Server Logs, and being able to spot Security Anomolies and being able to alert them should an anomoly arise. At present this is manually achieved using Log Lizard which is effective, but no alerting. Going forward I think they would be better to use an Azure Analyis Feature or integrate with a third party SIEM such as Splunk, Sumologic, ElasticSearch etc.
Is Azure Data Lake still the best approach for this? I note that you wrote this article in 2016. One would think that one could get the access data into Log Analytics and link to Azure Alerting, but I have failed.
Thanks.
Only other approach I have found is Web Server Logs -> EventHubs -> Data Explorer -> PowerBI. Not sure sure about the Log -> EventHubs bit to be honest, and how alerting could be added….
For that scenario specifically, I found look at Azure Monitor / Azure Log Analytics (the former is the free version of the latter).
It allows to ingest logs and define alerts on different events.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-ca/azure/log-analytics/log-analytics-queries
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/monitoring-and-diagnostics/monitoring-overview-unified-alerts