Don’t build your solutions in Visual Studio

The solutions in the project I’m working on are quite big and can easily take up 30 to 90 seconds to build, even though we have rather fast laptops. This is probably because of some build-plugins we are forced to use and the tight SharePoint integration of those plugins. Nevertheless, it’s quite annoying to see Visual Studio ‘hang’ every time you build your solution. Last week I had some time on my hands to do some research on how we could improve these long builds. Read more →

Convert from SQL to SQL Compact

When setting up an Orchard website you’re given a choice to use a ’normal’ SQL database, or SQL Compact. When developing new modules I often choose for the SQL Compact option. I choose this option, because it’s very easy to backup and restore the database file. If you mess something up, you’re fairly safe. You can of course backup and restore normal SQL databases, but this takes a bit more effort compared to copy-pasting a database file. Read more →

IIS Admin Service doesn’t start anymore

All of a sudden all my websites didn’t work anymore. Using some common sense in searching for the root of the problem I discovered the IIS Admin Service hadn’t started after booting up my machine. Trying to manually start up the service didn’t help much either, I was confronted with a message telling me The system cannot find the file specified. Sadly, the event logs didn’t help much, as the logs told me about the same Read more →

Fixing the trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed

Some time ago my ForeFront TMG server had crashed and not being an expert sysadmin, I wasn’t able to figure out what was wrong. The only thing I could think of was restoring the server from an earlier snapshot. Thanks to the Hyper-V interface this is really easy, even a software developer can do this. After having restored the server to an earlier state I connected to the server and was prompted with a message telling me “the trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed”. Read more →

Import SQL Azure database on local machine

At the moment I’m working on a (Orchard) project which is deployed to Windows Azure and uses a SQL Azure database. As my team needed to fix some issues which occurred in the Acceptance and Production environment, I wanted to get a recent database dump so we would be able to reproduce the issues on the development machines. I couldn’t find an easy way to synchronize the databases or create a backup which I could restore. Read more →