While creating the PowerShell scripts for automatic deployment of the project’s Azure environment I discovered there are multiple Azure PowerShell modules.
When you want to manage a single resource, such as storage accounts, websites, databases, virtual machines, and media services, you need the (default) Azure module. However, when you need to manage resource groups, you will need the AzureResourceManager module.
This is useful information if you want to deploy new Azure websites with a specific hosting plan, like Basic or Standard.
Read more →There are quite a couple of Azure cmdlets made available by Microsoft. All of this sweetness can be installed on your system via the Web Platform Installer. After installing these modules you can start managing your Azure subscription in PowerShell scripts.
Most of the stuff for managing your Azure subscription is implemented in these Azure cmdlets. One of the things which isn’t implemented (yet) is managing the Service Busses in your subscription.
Read more →The project I’m working on at the moment has a lot of analytics data. This means there’s a lot of inserts and updates in the database and queries have to be fast! At the moment all of this is hosted in a single MS SQL Server which does a pretty decent job. Still, this seems like a perfect scenario to introduce a noSQL database, especially as we are migrating to the cloud to improve performance of the application as a whole.
Read more →About 1.5 years ago I received my Nokia Lumia 925 phone as a replacement for my Nokia Lumia 620, which I had lost. I couldn’t be more happy at that moment. It has a great screen, it’s quite fast and nice to look at.
The only downside was, it sometimes rebooted while I was doing something. This happened almost all the time when I was taking a picture, but also when listening to podcasts, driving my car, reading e-mail, etc.
Read more →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →