Welcome back to ‘Adventures in Home Networking’ – Part 2. Recently, due to changes in our household, we were forced to consider making some physical changes to the way the house was set up. A decision was reached to move my home office into one of the bedrooms, so that […]
Technology
287 posts
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 […]
Introduction Following on from the previous article, where I installed the Visual Studio 11 Release Candidate on a Windows 8 Release Candidate, I’m now going to step through the process to set up a complimentary ALM capability – Team Foundation Server 2012 (Release Candidate). As per the previous article, links […]
Today was a big day if you happen to enjoy Release Candidate builds from Microsoft. Not only did we see the RC release of both Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 (and Hyper-V Server), but it also coincided with the release of RC editions of the Visual Studio 11 developer […]
Earlier this month some very useful guidance documentation was published on Codeplex. The topic? Build and versioning guidance, from Microsoft’s ALM Rangers group. The guides are broken down into a number of PDF files. In the main documentation archive (which you can download from Codeplex) are a number of files: […]
Recently I bought a brand new Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, as I’ve wanted (for a while) to redo my approach to storage capacity and – more specifically – add some fault tolerance (by way of redundant disks). I did some research and looked in to a number of NAS […]
When we moved into our new residence last year, we were not quite prepared for the long, painful learning process which was coming our way. This was the first time we had lived in a property featuring a back-to-base alarm system; and therefore the first time to experience pain with […]
Overshadowed, possibly, by the release of the new iPad? Not in the world of databases. Yesterday Microsoft officially released SQL Server 2012 “release to manufacturing” (RTM) which means we’re officially out of pre-release editions! Previously codenamed ‘Denali’, the new version brings to the table some serious changes, some of which […]
Recently Microsoft released a ‘Consumer Preview’ of their upcoming Windows 8 operating system. Today I downloaded a copy of the release and installed it into a virtual machine. What follows are screenshots of the installation process, and some notes about the OS once it has finished installation. Installation The setup […]
This weekend I discovered a pretty massive security fail on the iPhone 4S. As you might know, you can set a security pin code to prevent unauthorized use of an iPhone handset. You might also be aware of the new Siri feature built into the iPhone 4S. Assuming you have […]
Introduction From time to time, it is natural for us to deploy BizTalk solutions with Assembly dependencies. Usually this is because we have created helper classes (for mapping, or querying) or perhaps it reuses some common logic shared between application suites. Whatever the reason, it can be very handy to […]
Introduction In December 2011, Microsoft released an early Release Candidate (RC) of SQL Server 2012 (formerly known as codename Denali). There are a bunch of new things in SQL Server 2012 – here’s a list of just a few: Master Data Services Reporting Services PowerPivot for SharePoint Data Quality Services […]
What is FILESTREAM? Much data is unstructured, such as text documents, images, and videos. This unstructured data is often stored outside the database, separate from its structured data. This separation can cause data management complexities. Or, if the data is associated with structured storage, the file streaming capabilities and performance […]
It’s been a tough week for me from a hardware and infrastructure perspective. Late Thursday night, I lost one of the two desktop machines I own which still functioned. It had been on its way out for a while in theory, since somehow the CPU fan docking clamps were broken […]