SQL Azure Data Sync

For quite a couple of years now, the SQL Data Sync software has been available to synchronize data between MS SQL Server databases. This SQL Data Sync however has been decommissioned and we have to resort to the the (new) SQL Data Sync (Preview) nowadays. SQL Data Sync is a solution/feature which allows you to synchronize data between several SQL (Azure) databases. The best thing is, you don’t have to synchronize your complete database. Read more →

Alter all tables in SQL

As I wanted to move an on-premise MS SQL database to Azure SQL I was notified with an error message telling me this: Error SQL71564: Element Column: [dbo].[SomeTable].[Id] has an unsupported property IsRowGuidColumn set and is not supported when used as part of a data package. Every table in the database has a GUID (uniqueidentifier) as a primary key and apparently, the ROWGUID is set to YES. It’s too bad there isn’t much documentation on the ROWGUID option telling us what it actually does. Read more →

Firewall blocks almost everything, can’t do development work

Sometimes you’re hired by a company which is a bit rigorous on blocking outgoing communication. A security consultant would probably agree on this practice, but most developers won’t. Nowadays a lot of services in the cloud operate on different ports. Azure services don’t always operate on port 80 and 443, hosted noSQL providers have connection strings with (seemingly) random ports, etc. It’s not always easy to get approval to open ports in the company firewall, especially if you’re doing some tests and proof of concept projects. Read more →

Migration from Orchard to MiniBlog

The past couple of days I’ve been working on migrating my blog from the Orchard CMS to MiniBlog. The main reason for me to migrate to a different system is because I don’t work a lot with Orchard anymore. There were also some crashes from time to time which I couldn’t explain. I’m currently hosting my websites on Azure Websites, because of that I didn’t feel much for using a database system. Read more →

2 SharePoint quirks which kept me busy

There are 2 ‘features’ in SharePoint (MOSS2007) which have kept me busy for quite some time in my last project. Yes, you’ve read it right the first time, my latest project was a MOSS 2007 web portal. Of course these issues aren’t really quirks as the product behaves by design, but it has kept me busy for more time as I would bargain for. First quirk For some reason I had to create a console application to query the SharePoint user list and delete the users. Read more →

Running commands as Administrator in Windows

There are some cool features available in Linux. In an earlier post I already mentioned the apt-get functionality which is now also offered in Windows via Chocolatey. One of the other cool features is being able to execute something in the terminal as an Administrator by specifying sudo in the command. Lucky for us Windows people, someone has created a tool which is able to do something similar as the Linux sudo-command. Read more →

Chocolatey introduction

Even though the Windows operating system is one of the best in my opinion, there are always something which is only available in a different OS. For example the apt-get functionality in Linux. I don’t know how this works exactly, but from my basic understanding it’s some kind of repository with a lot of software and libraries which you can download to your device by typing something like the following in a terminal window: Read more →

Creating a Web API to work with XML requests

For a project on the side I’m creating a Web API which has to parse XML requests in a POST. The first method I’ve written looks like this: [HttpPost] public HttpResponseMessage IndexPost(RequestModel requestMessage) { return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.Accepted) { Content = new StringContent("This is the POST API response from BusinessPartner!") }; } To test the new API I’m using the Postman Chrome plugin. With this plugin you are able to send requests to an endpoint and see what the response is. Read more →

Black lines in the watch window

On some installations of Visual Studio 2010, 2012 or 2013 I’m confronted with strange behavior. One of these strange things are the black lines in the Watch Window of Visual Studio. Just like the screenshot below (this isn’t my screenshot, I’ve ‘borrowed’ it from someone else) Normally this has something to do with the graphics driver, but updating these drivers doesn’t work all the times. There’s also a work around for this problem, described on the MSDN forum. Read more →

Move your SQL database files to a different disk

There comes a time when you have to do something which appears impossible at start. One of the things I had to confront is moving my SQL database files from the D-drive to the L-drive. Moving regular SQL database files isn’t that hard at all. Just detach the database, move the files to a new location and attach the database again. However, system databases can’t be moved in this way, which makes sense if you think about it. Read more →