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: […]
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Quest Mode = On Today is April 1st, and (as always) it is April Fool’s Day. Google unleashed an awesome “Quest” mode on Google Maps, and for those who grew up in the 1980s this will appear quite familiar. King’s Quest time anyone?? I’ve lifted some screenshots of some interesting […]
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 […]
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 […]
Today I received an e-mail which made it past Google’s Junk E-mail protection. It was sent from “Gmail Team” and titled “Google Verification”. As I’ve had to do site verifications for Analytics and Webmaster tools, I took a look at the e-mail. Within half a microsecond, I decided to compose […]
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 […]
Hi Everyone, Well, it’s nearly the end of the year 2011, and hasn’t it been a doozy? I don’t know about you, but my year has been haywire, to say the least. I started the year living in China, moved back to Australia, set up in Sydney and then finished […]
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 […]
Recently, I decided that I need to begin a new learning exercise. This time around, I’ve chosen Apache Hadoop, partly because of the weird name, and partly because of how it is defined. To add clarity, here’s the official definition from the Apache site: What Is Apache Hadoop? The Apache […]
Recently I started to use this nifty application called GPS Log on my brand spanking new Apple iPhone 4S. I know what you are thinking: WTF is Rob using an iPhone for? Well, after years and years of failed promises from Microsoft to deliver a stable, functioning mobile phone* I’ve […]