Today I found myself in an odd situation where I wanted to access the SQL Server instance of a Windows Update Services (WSUS) instance, so I could perform some basic maintenance to reduce the DB’s disk and memory footprint. This instance of WSUS has been running for a few […]
Tips and Tricks
88 posts
Introduction Continuing from the experience with Visual Studio 2015, the next edition – Visual Studio 2017 – was officially released to Visual Studio (formerly MSDN) subscribers earlier this month. This edition follows the trend established in the previous edition of providing two channels of licensing – by using a Microsoft […]
It’s been a common practice of mine over the past three decades (yes) to use the Telnet client as a quick and easy way of determining whether a TCP port is open between two computers. As of Windows Server 2012, Telnet Client is not installed by default, which means you […]
Continuing on from the previous article, PowerShell Basics – Consuming a Web API, let’s move on to some slightly deeper scripting. Querying an API in isolation is seldom useful in isolation, as it requires a deal of manual work to keep feeding the script. What if we could programmatically import […]
Over the weekend I decided to do some tinkering with data from my long list of vinyl records. I’ve been trying to ensure that the more valuable LPs are stored away from the hands of my little cohorts – and popular website discogs.com happens to have both marketplace data, and […]
Hi All, Apologies for the lack of articles recently. I’ve been up to my usual design & architecture antics, but it’s not always blog worthy. However, I’m strongly considering publishing some examples of the kinds of architecture and documentation which I build on a regular basis. That is for another […]
Just a quick entry in case you are trying to solve a problem when attempting to install CRM Reporting Extensions. You might encounter a situation where you specify the SQL Server machine or instance name, but proceeding to select the SSRS instance produces a blank list. So you need to […]
A few years ago [1] I wrote about how you could enable Domain Accounts to self-manage their ServicePrincipalNames. This is particularly advantageous when using Kerberos to secure services. We recently needed to set up some service accounts in Active Directory to participate in establishing a Kerberos capability for middleware integration. […]
Happy Thanksgiving to folks in the USA. I’ve finally taken the plunge and decided to get stuck into the recently released Release Candidate (RC) of ASP.NET 5. Prior to today, I’d stuck with the RTM version of Visual Studio 2015 which insulated me from some of the changes which are […]
Introduction Continuing from the experience with Visual Studio 2013, the next edition – Visual Studio 2015 – was officially released to MSDN subscribers early this morning. This edition follows the trend established in the previous edition of providing two channels of licensing – by using a Microsoft Account or by […]
+ In this article, I’m going to take a look at some ways you could generate documentation for ASP.NET Web API. Unless you’ve never generated a Web API website, you’ll be aware that the default templates already include functionality to generate documentation for the API which you might implement, […]
Identity Server 3 supports the Client Credentials OAuth2 grant. I wrote a brief introduction to both OAuth2 and IdentityServer3 last month, this is a follow-on article exploring some other facets of authentication. This is a little bit like basic authentication, in that the client (the application which wants to consume […]
Windows Server 2012 R2 comes with IIS 8.5, and in this release an issue has been found in relation to the Dynamic Compression module. The module sets the “Vary” header which is used to specify caching properties that the browser uses to determine whether the response should be cached or […]
You might be unlucky enough to occasionally run into issues with a hard drive which has issues, and Windows will attempt to warn you via the System Log. However, as the issues are logged from a low level (below the UI level), the disk identifier can be a bit cryptic. […]
Recently I was asked about diagnosing deadlocks in SQL Server – I’ve done a lot of work in this area way back in 2008, so I figure it’s time for a refresher. If there’s a lot of interest in exploring SQL Server and deadlocks further, I’m happy to write an […]