Wow! What an amazing year 2015 has been and with 2015 about to end I thought it would be good to look back at what happened in this amazing year. January I started the year with a declaration that 2015 would be my year of code. Well I have had a few breaks from programming but I have learnt loads this year. I have...

Four months ago James David Martin Foster was born. And he is even more awesome now than when he was born. As I write this James only has a few sleeps (as James sleeps multiple times in a day I can’t put an exact number) until his first Christmas. James is pretty much unaware of what is going on as he is still too...

In December we count down the days to Christmas. People often have advent calendars filled with chocolates or even Lego. But what about if you are a programmer, how can you count down the days till Christmas? What about if you had a daily Christmas themed coding challenge? Well www.adventofcode.com is the answer. Each...

The Oatmeal created a comic which you really should check out. It can be found here . The comic tells the story of a plane crash, in which the 25 year old co-pilot goes back into the burning plane to rescue passengers and lead a group of survivors through the desert to find help. The co-pilot was named Gene...

I use SQL Server Management Studio all the time for writing queries, getting data and general SQL development. I have enjoyed seeing the improvements that each new version of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) introduced. One great improvement was intellisense. This feature saves typing and reduces errors by...

Over 50% Off this Black Friday! Yes your heard it correctly even www.funkysi1701.com has amazing offers. It is like the whole world has gone “Black Friday” mad, with every company in the world offering amazing and unmissable deals. So in an attempt to cash in on all the Black Friday fuss I will write a quick blog post...

I recently read a blog post by Pinal Dave about how you can backup straight to Azure Storage. The procedure he described is only available for SQL Server 2014 or later. I won’t go into detail of this method as Pinal describes it better than I can, but the basic of it requires setting up credentials and then running a...

I use git as my source control system. Here are some of the most common git commands in no particular order. Check Out a git Repository git clone /path/to/repository Add files to commit git add Commit files to git git commit -m “Commit message” Push changes to server git push origin master Show status git status Create...

For the past few years I have volunteered on the technical team at my local church St Michael le Belfrey . For the church to function well it requires volunteers in all sorts of roles, people to welcome visitors, people to pray, people to play music, people to look after children and many other roles. My natural...

For historical reasons I use Microsoft Access as the front-end for all my line of business databases. Access allows you to create an ADP file that can connect to your SQL Server database. However Office has dropped support for this, so the last version of office that I can use is Office 2010. Before I start hating on...