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 →