As of late I’ve started using the VMWare products for virtualizing my development environments again as a replacement for Hyper-V.
Today I wanted to access some files of my virtual machine on the host in order to write a blog post on some code I had saved in there. The VMWare disk files are stored as a VMDK file and it’s not possible to mount these type of files in Windows like a VHD file.
Read more →With Windows 10 we’ve gotten a lot of nice little features which help us modifying the theme. There is however 1 option which the team hasn’t implemented (yet). The option to select different wallpapers for all of your connected displays.
I’m working with a triple monitor setup at home and at work most of the time with a dual or also a triple setup. Of course I don’t really need different wallpapers on all of my monitors, but it’s a nice feature.
Read more →While I was setting up a VPN connection to my Azure Virtual Network I wanted to uncheck the option to use the Default Gateway of the connected network. Normally you’d do this by clicking on the Properties button of the selected protocol.
However, there appears to be a bug in Windows 10 and VPN connections for this button which causes the Properties window not to appear.
I have solved this with the help of Todorovic Dragan’s post about this matter.
Read more →One of the reasons for me to create an Azure virtual network is being able to connect to my development machines in the Cloud from anywhere, without exposing them to the public. In order to do so, all machines have to be added to the virtual network. You also have to select the option to set up a point-to-site VPN connection to the virtual network.
Setting up a point-to-site VPN connection to an Azure virtual network is documented quite well on the Azure documentation pages.
Read more →Nowadays it’s possible to create virtual networks within your Azure subscription. This can be very useful for managing your Azure resources within a specific network or setting up a point-to-site or site-to-site connection to expand your current on-premise network.
To me creating a virtual network sounds like a great way to manage my virtual machines and services for development purposes which I’m running within Azure. It will also let me connect to them without exposing stuff to the public internet.
Read more →In my previous post I’ve talked about creating new projects in Octopus Deploy in order to deploy projects to different environments. In this post I’ll explain a bit on how to create Octopus Deploy packages for your Visual Studio projects via Teamcity.
To enable packaging for Octopus you’ll need to include the Octopack NuGet package to the project you are packaging. In my case this will be the Worker project since I’m only working with Microsoft Azure solutions at the moment.
Read more →The latest project I was working on didn’t have a continuous integration and continuous deployment environment set up yet. Creating a continuous integration environment was rather easy as we were already using Teamcity and adding a couple of builds isn’t much of a problem. The next logical step would be to start setting up continuous deployment.
I started out by scripting a lot of PowerShell to manage our Azure environment like creating all SQL servers, databases, service busses, cloud services, etc.
Read more →In my previous post I’ve described how to use Application Insights and use it within your new web application. Most of us aren’t working in a greenfield project, so new solutions have to be integrated with the old.
The project I’m working on uses log4net for logging messages, exceptions, etc. In order for us to use Application Insights, we had to search for a solution to integrate both. After having done some research on the subject we discovered this wasn’t a big problem.
Read more →Some time ago the Application Insights became available as a preview in the Azure portal. Application Insights helps you monitor the state of an application, server, clients, etc. As said, it’s still in preview, but it’s rather stable and very easy to use and implement in your applications.
The documentation is still being worked on, but with all the getting started guides on the Microsoft site you can kick start your project with it in a couple of minutes.
Read more →Once you have set up your sharding solution with a fully configured Shard Map Manager, modified your data access layer to use Elastic Scale, added fault handling and running your stuff in production, there will be a time when you are in need to split, merge or move shardlets between shards.
This is where the Elastic Scale Split Merge tool comes in place. The team has created a nice web application which will enable you to do this kind of management.
Read more →