The following is a list of Active Directory Domain Services modules on Microsoft Learn sorted from introductory to advanced. Is there an Active Directory topic that isn’t listed here that you’d like to see covered? (AD CS modules are coming). If you know all this, remember we have the free 45 minute practical Active Directory […]
Active Directory Domain Services modules on Microsoft Learn Continue Reading
If you administer Windows, you’re already aware of Windows Firewall. You might use it to allow an application, open a port, or block unwanted inbound traffic. But those familiar tasks only scratch the surface of what it can do. The Microsoft Learn module Understand advanced Windows Firewall takes you beyond basic rules and introduces Windows
Introduction Building AI agents that can actually do things in your business systems—create records, update opportunities, trigger workflows—typically requires weeks of custom integration work. The Dataverse MCP Server changes that. In this tutorial, you’ll connect a Microsoft Foundry agent to your Dataverse environment in under 30 minutes, giving your AI agent secure, real-time access to
Building an agent shouldn’t require you to reinvent platform capabilities. With Microsoft Foundry, hosted agents inherit essential capabilities such as authentication, ingress management, A2A transport, and discovery endpoints, freeing developers to focus on business logic and user value. This article demonstrates the quickest route from a local containerized agent to a fully discoverable A2A endpoint
Enabling A2A endpoint and Agent Card for a Hosted Agent Continue Reading
An application starts reporting intermittent timeouts when connecting to Azure SQL Database. Some requests succeed, others fail, and a test from a developer’s laptop works perfectly. The database appears online, no recent deployment seems related, and the natural reaction is to ask: Is Azure SQL unavailable? Is the firewall blocking the connection? Should we increase
Lessons Learned #551: Azure SQL Connection Timeouts: Three Things to Check Continue Reading
Hello Folks! It’s 3 a.m. Your phone lights up. A critical workload that spans multiple clouds is on fire, ownership is fuzzy, the alert routed to the wrong team first, and now it’s your problem. You sit up in bed, cold and groggy, and start the ritual. Open the runbook. Pull logs from one place.
From Alert to Resolved: Building a Self-Healing Azure Platform with SRE Agent Continue Reading
Hello Folks! If you have ever wrestled with Azure Files inside a storage account, juggling shared RBAC, shared networking, and shared IOPS across a pile of shares that really should not live together, this session is going to address all that. During Microsoft Azure Infra Summit 2026, Vincent Du and Will Gries (both Product Managers
Having fun and learning from containers in my Docker Test Lab Intro This practical how-to shows how to install a Zabbix container monitoring stack on Docker Desktop, using VS Code Insiders and Copilot Chat as the development workflow. I was just testing and see how these products come together. Why this setup? Docker Desktop gives
Docker Desktop and Zabbix Container Stack deployed with VSCode and Copilot Continue Reading
In this post I go over some tools and techniques exist for hardening Windows Server. As always, apply controls according to the server’s role, test them against representative workloads before production rollout, document approved exceptions, and maintain tested console and recovery access in case a security control affects management or application compatibility. Apply the role-specific
Some tools and techniques for hardening Windows Server Continue Reading
Microsoft has released Windows Server vNext Preview Build 29621, and one feature stands out as a major step forward for on‑premises virtualization security: Trusted Launch for Generation 2 virtual machines. This capability, long familiar to Azure users, is now arriving in Windows Server for local Hyper‑V environments. What Trusted Launch Brings to Windows Server Trusted
Trusted Launch for virtual machines on Windows Server Insider Preview Continue Reading
