Today I tried to locate the “Desktop Experience” server feature in Windows Server 2012 R2. Problem is, I couldn’t find it! The Desktop Experience feature lets you use normal Windows desktop features like media player and photo viewer, and so forth: It used to be a “top level” feature, but […]
Build and Config
23 posts
Introduction This is going to be a multi-part series of articles with the end goal of producing a solution which handles security/identity claims across domain boundaries using WCF services and Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 (with a federation trust) and Active Directory. In order to demonstrate an approach to handling […]
Part 1 Setting up TFS Azure Part 2 Configuring Visual Studio to use TFS Azure Part 3 Registering Team Build controllers for TFS Azure Part 4 Builds in the Cloud Introduction Continuing from Part 2, now that we have the essentials set up, we’ll take a look at how to […]
Introduction Recently I had to determine a universal product versioning syntax for our products and services. This was done to ensure a level of consistency between projects and products. Depending on the deployment, currently there has been a wildly different format used between products and services. Given the recent adoption […]
Continuing on from Part 1, our objective in this article is to create a new Visual Studio solution, and then populate it with some existing projects. To facilitate this, it would be beneficial if you had a few projects already created. For this example, I have defined the following structure: […]
Now for something completely different. Recently I had the desire to build a Visual Studio 2010 solution file for a number of project files under a directory. There were many projects, and each one linked to a solution file – but I wanted a “master” solution file.. one to rule […]
At times, especially if you own a small solid state drive, you find yourself needing to lighten the load on a hard drive (or portable drive). This can be a fairly mundane and time consuming process as you allow Windows (or alternatives) to rumble through your disk drive trying to […]
A permalink, or permanent link, is a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives. Gosh, those permalinks can be so important for search engine optimization. If you’ve taken WordPress out-of-the-box, you might find it curious that […]
Sometimes, for various reasons, we come across projects or solutions we have to maintain to our chagrin. We have an application which runs on .NET 2.0 and can’t be upgraded to 3.5 or beyond. This application consumes web services published via the old ASMX services, and uses Web Service Extensions […]
Should you have the misfortune of encountering MS Build warning MSB3268, you might be in for a world of hurt. That is exactly what has happened to me this fine day. The exact problem is: Microsoft.Common.targets(1360,9): warning MSB3268: The primary reference "<assembly reference>" could not be resolved because it has […]
You might find this information handy if you work with Windows Services, and wish to grant some basic permissions to user accounts. In my scenario, I wanted to be able to list the status of several key Windows Services used in my overall architecture (for a diagnostic website/control panel) and […]
Someone kindly posted this excellent flowchart in Stack Overflow which helps to identify the most appropriate WCF Service bindings to use in a solution. There’s another version located here: http://architectopia.blogspot.com/2008/01/wcf-binding-decision-chart.html Not a bad little reference chart!
If you are like me, you probably aren’t a huge fan of Kerberos, but it does have some advantages. When using an Active Domain (AD) account as a service account, it is handy to reduce the attack vector by minimising the chosen Domain Account’s permissions and privileges. If you are […]
If you are running a copy of any version of Windows since Windows Vista (i.e. Vista or Windows 7) you might be somewhat aware that the Windows folder on your system drive is quite large. Indeed, it is most likely to be the largest consumer of disk space on that […]
Today I learnt an important lesson about moving a PC from one Active Directory domain to another – the process will strip (domain) logins from SQL Server! Yes, I know this is kind of obvious and expected, but also easy to overlook. So our scenario is that we don’t have […]