Using gcloud in Azure Pipelines
Using Azure Pipelines to deploy Cloud Run applications has recently become a lot easier. Continue »
IAP Desktop 2.10
On Tuesday, I released version 2.10 of IAP Desktop, introducing proxy auto-configuration support, better AppLocker compatibility and more. Continue »
Onboarding workforce identities to Google Cloud
In a company’s journey to the cloud, one of the topics that is important to sort out early is identity management. To do anything meaningful with Google Cloud, employees need to be able to sign in to the Cloud Console – but manually creating user accounts for each employee is rarely a good idea. Continue »
Raising PropertyChanged events with the help of a LINQ expression
If you have done any modern GUI development on .NET, then you are probably familiar with the INotifyPropertyChanged interface and the joys of implementing that interface.
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How do I know when my VM is ready to connect
When you automatically provision VM instances, you might need to know when the initialization has completed so that you can connect to the VM or initiate the next deployment steps. There are a few ways to determine when a VM is ready, so let us explore what these are. Continue »
Creating a CI/CD pipeline with Azure Pipelines and Cloud Run
Azure DevOps has come a long way since its humble beginnings as Visual Studio Team System. Especially its CI/CD component, Azure Pipelines, has made some major leaps over the past years and is now actually quite nice to use. Continue »
Goodbye RDCMan, hello IAP Desktop
Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager (RDCMan) is gone, it and took the Google Cloud IAP for Remote Desktop plugin with it. But now there is IAP Desktop to supersede both of them. Continue »
Automatically joining a VM to Active Directory on Google Cloud
Cloud computing is all about being able to dynamically scale, provision, and decommission resources or entire environments on demand. But the idea that infrastructure is dynamic clashes with some assumptions Active Directory is built around, and creates a challenge if you run Windows workloads in the cloud. Continue »
Understanding Windows VM initialization on Google Cloud
On Google Cloud, a Linux instance boots in about 30 seconds while a Windows instance takes a full 2 minutes to turn up – why is Windows so much slower? Continue »
22 best practices for running Active Directory on Google Cloud
Twenty years have passed since Microsoft released Windows 2000 and introduced Active Directory to the market. The excitement about Active Directory has certainly ebbed since then – but at the same time, it is difficult to overstate the impact that Active Directory has had on the IT market. Continue »
Creating an image from an ISO file
If you have been an MSDN, TechNet, or Action Pack subscriber in the past, you probably remember the binders full of discs that Microsoft used to ship. Continue »
Certificate enrollment: Creating a certificate signing request by using CertEnroll
Having covered the basics of certificate enrollment and relevant Windows APIs in previous posts, this post will look at how you can programmatically create a certificate signing requests by using the Certificate Enrollment API (CertEnroll). Continue »
Certificate enrollment: Crypto API, CNG, and other Windows APIs
One thing certreq and the Certificate Manager MMC snap-in have in common is that they rely heavily on Windows’ built-in APIs for managing certificates, encryption, and keys. This post takes a deeper look at which APIs Windows provides for cryptography, key management, certificate management, and certificate enrollment. Continue »
Certificate enrollment: Manually creating a certificate signing request
In the last post, we looked at how certificates, private keys, and certificate signing requests relate to another. In this post, we’ll look at three common ways to create a certificate signing request (CSR) which can then be submitted to a certificate authority (CA) for signing. Continue »
Certificate enrollment: Concepts
Many of the protocols we use every day rely on certificates. The process to request and obtain a new certificate from a CA is called certificate enrollment. This post explains the basic concepts behind certificate enrollment. Continue »
Authenticating users in tools or desktop apps
If your plan is to develop a tool or desktop app instead of a server-side application, the benefits of application default credentials are less obvious and reusing the user’s personal gcloud credentials instead might seem attractive. But there are some pitfalls. Continue »
Application default credentials vs your personal gcloud credentials
gcloud manages two sets of credentials, your personal credentials and application default credentials. Having two separate credentials might seem redundant and can cause surprises the first time you use one of the Google Cloud client libraries. But the two credentials serve different purposes. Continue »
Installing Remote Desktop Connection Manager as limited user
Installing the Remote Desktop Connection Manager requires administrator privileges. That can be a problem in a corporate environment where you might not have local administrator rights. Fortunately, there is an easy way to overcome this limitation by performing an administrative installation. Continue »