Handcrafted, AI-free blog posts about DevOps, DevSecOps, application security, web development, Azure and similar topics
In Azure DevOps organizations that are connected to Microsoft Entra, you may spot (duplicated) users with email prefixed with OIDCONFLICT_UpnReuse_{OID_HERE} (i.e. when trying to give them access or when mentioning them): Such users are neither visible in the Azure DevOps Web UI under Organization settings > General > Users nor when querying all users via... Continue Reading →
Multifactor authentication via SMS is vulnerable to bot attacks, potentially leading to high costs from automated account creations. To mitigate risks, it's recommended to disable SMS MFA, implement stronger bot protection, or disable sign-ups. If attacked, quickly identify and delete bot-created accounts using Azure portal and PowerShell scripts to manage user identities.
This week, I tested Office 365 SMTP credentials using PowerShell. I created a script that defines sender and receiver email addresses, subject, and message, and sets up an SMTP client with secure credentials. The server is smtp.office365.com, using SSL on port 587 to send the email successfully.
A few months ago, a colleague at work approached me and asked me about the easiest way to create release notes for a past release in Azure DevOps. Note that the CI/CD process in this case is implemented using Azure DevOps YAML pipelines. There are of course different approaches to solve this challenge. Some of... Continue Reading →
To test a certain use case in the context of the integration of an application with AAD B2C I wanted to change the User Principal Name (UPN) of a user. The UPN corresponds to the username and email address of a user. First, I tried changing the UPN directly through the Azure Portal by switching... Continue Reading →
In one of the projects I'm currently working on, I needed to insert a PNG file into a database column of type varbinary. I failed with my first attempts, but thanks to some blog posts and some threads on StackOverflow, I was able to come up with the following solution by assembling some of the... Continue Reading →
