According to Wikipedia, Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) is: … a software component developed by Microsoft that can be installed on Windows Server operating systems to provide users with single sign-on access to systems and applications located across organizational boundaries. It uses a claims-based access control authorization model to maintain application security and implement federated identity. ADFS can provide Single sign as an identity provider to users, but what if a developer needs the same sign on outside of “browser land”?

Traditionally if one was to secure a web server using TLS (or previously, SSL) – then one would configure your web server to use TCP port 443 to listen for TLS requests from clients (browsers). When a browser connects to the web server using the HTTPS protocol, the server would encrypt the communications and all would be well with the world. A problem occurs when you use name based Virtual Hosting on your web server.

A client I’m consulting for is using Jive as their EDRMS of choice. It’s not bad; but after using Office 365 recently, Jive is not as integrated as you’d like with Office 2013. Working in the cloud (Jive is a cloud EDRMS) requires that another client you may connect from have the appropriate client plugin. In the case of Office 2013, you need to install the Jive plugin from their community website.

I’ve recently been working more day to day on Amazon Web Services, and I found it a little unwieldy to navigate around policy documents assigned to IAM groups. Sometimes you just want to have a local copy of the policies to edit/play with/look at. Therefore, I came up with a quick script to solve this. Enjoy… Of course, the AWS SDK for Powershell is required.

I host this blog in WordPress, and it’s a great micro CMS with all the bells and whistles. I also publish and host the XML file for a podcast of the Angry Human. It’s picked up by feed burner, and then iTunes takes the feed burner RSS feed and et voila! All the Apple listeners to the show Angry Human by David Biedny get their recent shows! I recently had an issue where I’ve moved this site from Rackspace Cloud Sites to the Godaddy Managed WordPress sites.

I came across a useful bash alias. I don’t know where. I’ll call it dureport. alias dureport='du -sdk * | awk '\''{printf "%12d\t%s\n", $1, substr($0,index($0,$2),80)}'\'' |sort -r'

Everyone loves automated processes. With BizTalk 2013 if you want to provide a repeatable install; you need automation. PowerShell is where it’s at. Lucky for me, other very skilled people already have written PowerShell scripts providing the capability to create hosts and host instances. Sandro Pereira has written and published a PowerShell script to create your BizTalk host instances based upon the best practice of host separation. However, it’s only written for BizTalk 2010.

It has been a year from not blogging at all, due to a hectic professional schedule. I’ve been busy dealing with BizTalk 2010, WCF services and all things SOA. One thing I’ve learnt is I’m not a hardcore developer. I’m much better at implementing technical solutions and server sysadmin. I think I’ll stick to that. In the meantime my knowledge and skill level with BizTalk has gone up now having almost 2 years experience developing, deploying and maintaining an ESB based around BizTalk 2010 and WCF services.

I’ve started down the path of Darkness 🙂 In December 2011, I went on BizTalk training with @BizTalkBill and I’m now four weeks into the next stage of my career which is being an Microsoft “Integration Specialist”. You won’t find any open source in this realm, no ruby, nothing involving indie developers cracking out code until late at night. What this change means is getting to know Visual Studio, BizTalk, SQL Server and all things Microsoft.

This is more for me than you, however if you need Git on Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS) try this. The commands I ran get the pre-packaged PPA Git working on Ubuntu 10.04: sudo apt-get install python-software-properties<br /> sudo add-apt-repository ppa:git-core/ppa<br /> sudo aptitude update<br /> sudo aptitude safe-upgrade<br /> sudo aptitude install git