Welcome, 2015 – may you be an improvement on your predecessor. Today’s article focuses on the deceptively non-trivial task of reading from the Windows Event Logs using the Microsoft .NET Framework. For those who haven’t looked there in a while, here’s a quick look at the Event Viewer: The Windows […]
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Introduction We have a requirement at the moment to modify AD FS 3.0 (which is a role in Windows Server 2012 R2) to allow users to authenticate without having to specify the domain name. This is for two reasons – the current external system doesn’t have a requirement to prefix […]
Introduction Recently I was asked to look into solutions for moving some WordPress sites in-house for a client. At first this looked fairly straightforward, until I realised that they wanted the ability to spin up new self contained VM sites with little effort. Naturally, I pursued the logical step of […]
This morning I struggled to get Microsoft Lync 2013 to work. The symptoms consisted of the application running normally – I could authenticate, and the contact list would load – but after a few minutes the application would hang. Naturally, I Googled the symptoms and found a match for the […]
Do you prefer offline help and documentation? Sometimes I prefer offline help, particularly when I’m travelling or when a stable Internet connection is not available. It is particularly useful if you work in an environment where external access is difficult, for example in a secure datacentre. I find offline documentation […]
Introduction As you’ll no doubt recall from my earlier 2012 article, I have a NAS in my home office. It is a Thecus N5200XXX 5-bay Network Attached Storage device, and it sits on my home gigabit network. The Thecus features an OS which accommodates pluggable “modules”, one of which is […]
So late last year I was having trouble trying to figure out why a web site I’d been writing wasn’t working once published to Windows Azure. I can’t remember which library it was (JQuery.UI perhaps), but once published I was getting a lot of broken JS calls (“can’t load library”, […]
If you’ve spent any amount of time in the IT industry – and particularly in software development – you’ve probably been asked to forecast the effort associated with some kind of work, outcome or deliverable. Software development is tricky as it involves some degree of guess work – requirements can […]
Introduction Hi all. I’ve been working with the old ASP.NET Dynamic Data website templates, as I wanted a quick and easy to use web UI for managing the data at http://rs-photography.org. As the site is (obviously) image-centric, I wanted to make some modifications to the out-of-the-box Dynamic Data project to […]
Introduction Recently, I mentioned that the newly minted Visual Studio 2013 asks you to authenticate with a Microsoft account to tie your copy to a specific account. This comes in the wake of Visual Studio no longer being pre-pidded (when a product has a license key included in the installation […]
In case you haven’t heard yet, Visual Studio 2013 (RTM) has been made available to MSDN subscribers this morning. In case you aren’t already familiar with the different flavours of Visual Studio, here’s a link to the product comparison page at Microsoft.com. One important change which I highlighted when I […]
Introduction Over the weekend, I decided to try and import image metadata using C# and the .NET Framework. Aside from “normal” file attributes such as date modified and size, the Windows Explorer (shell) provides extended file property information which can be quite valuable. The challenge was how to extract this […]
Introduction When we left off in Part 1, we had edited the T4 template which generates Entity Framework POCO entities and had it add appropriate attributes to assist in data validation checks. The next step is to show you how we can make use of these annotations. Note: the data […]
Introduction The next logical step in my journey across the Entity Framework v6 RC1 after having established a fairly robust data access approach was to imbue my solution with some more “smarts” when it came to entity validation. Out-of-the-box Entity Framework POCO entities are exactly as advertised – plain old […]
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 […]