Intro If you want to manage your SQL Databases in Azure using tools that you’re a little more familiar and comfortable with – for example – SQL Management Studio, how do you go about connecting? You could read the help article from Microsoft, or you can follow my intuitive screen-based […]
Tips and Tricks
88 posts
This article will look at populating an archive of Twitter data into SQL Server 2014. This process can apply to older versions of SQL Server.
If you’re like me, you might have more than one installation of Visual Studio floating around, which can make the process of applying updates a bit tedious. With the release of Visual Studio Update 3 [description], we have another large (potentially ~2GB) set of updates to apply. Now, you might […]
This is a quick tip for those running Windows 8 who encounter this occasional problem where the Windows Explorer doesn’t display image thumbnails. Now, I’m going to assume that you’ve already checked the Explorer settings, and so on. This fixes a condition where the thumbnails appear very briefly (they flicker […]
Following on from the last instalment where I looked at supporting PowerShell script development in Visual Studio 2010, I’m going to take a closer look at PowerShell integration with the newer Visual Studio 2012. Again, I’ll be leveraging the excellent Quest PowerGUI product and the associated Visual Studio extension. Installation […]
Recently I needed to write up a new Powershell script to automate some actions independently of our major release cycle. This took me down a road with two possible options – write the script in Visual Studio 2012 or in Visual Studio 2010. I’ve decided to pursue both avenues, just […]
If you are a user of the new “Windows to Go” feature of Windows 8 Enterprise edition, which enables you to boot and run the Windows 8 operating system off an external USB device, you may have noticed something odd when trying to use the Windows App Store: In a […]
Recently, I had to authenticate to Team Foundation Server using an account with greater permissions to perform some administrative tasks. As you may know, this requires entering alternate credentials when you add the server to the list of TFS servers, or when you need to connect to the server. Once […]
This is sort of a follow-up to my first article on Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 (ADFS 2.0). This afternoon I spent far too many hours troubleshooting an issue I didn’t really have. Part of this complete and total waste of my time stems from what I now believe to […]
It was a little while ago that I blogged about Richard Bank’s approach to revert the menu in Visual Studio 2012 back to the friendly and reliable sentence case style that we all know and love. Since then, Visual Studio 2012 has launched with the RTM version, moving out of […]
Overview The recently released Windows 8 operating system contained support for an interesting approach to running your operating system – off an external bootable device. This article will show you how to boot your operating system using an external USB drive. If you’re not sure what Windows To Go is […]
Introduction Recently, I started building up a WCF Service Application from scratch to implement a specific set of operations from an existing WSDL. This was a little cumbersome, but gave me an excellent opportunity to extend and play around with a concept I’ve been trying to perfect for a couple […]
The series so far: 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 (this article) Introduction Following on from an earlier series of articles on […]
Recently, I’ve had no end of hassles activating valid copies of Windows – be it Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. At first, I thought it was perhaps the result of a “usual” cause – network connectivity, blocked ports or so on. To begin – a recap. I installed […]
I was recently reading an article about a phishing site which was uncovered recently. The site in question – "Bank of Switzerland" – bankofswissltd[DOT]com was undone by some suspicious discrepancies in their site’s WHOIS record. If you’re uncertain what a WHOIS record is, a decent analogy might be to compare […]