As 2017 starts to draw to a close let’s look at some of the highlights from the past year. Edward In November I became a father again and celebrated the arrival of Edward into the world. Before the birth I was worried how well my first son James would adapt to the new arrival but I am happy to say I didn’t need to, he...

Azure Table storage is cheap way to store data, however it has some drawbacks that you should be aware of. Azure Table storage is a simple way to store NoSQL data with key/attribute pairs. I am very familiar with storing data in SQL databases and would still choose SQL over Table storage, however Table storage is...

DNS is the backbone of the internet. It converts domain names into IP addresses. But how can we do clever things with it? Making DNS changes has always been a pain. You have to remember what company you registered your domain name with, then locate the login details for their website, login and fill in some web form...

I think Azure is great, but there is loads to it so I can never know about all of its features. There is a video series hosted by Scott Hanselman called Azure Fridays which I have started to watch in an effort to keep more up to date about some of its cool features. I watched this video recently and it is all about...

I recently blogged about using Azure Web Jobs , Azure Function is another way of doing the same thing, lets look at how they work. (Sorry its been a while since I blogged but I suspect an erratic schedule will continue for the next few months.) To create an Azure Function go to the Azure portal and click add new and...

For the past week or so I have been playing around with Xamarin and creating an android app. Well I now have an app in the Google Play Store. Check out https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=6148298088834956775 . Before you rush and download the app I must warn you that it doesn’t do much yet. It displays some...

I keep hearing about Azure WebJobs but I have never used them. Time to change this. WebJobs are a feature of Azure App Service that can run a script at a specific time. In my case I would like to hit a specific url of my website at the same time every day. To the right you can see an example of the WebJobs form on the...

Last time I started looking at Amazon Web Services and how it differed from Azure. I am going to continue looking at what it can do. Virtual Machines Lets look at what you can do with Virtual Machines. I selected to create a new Virtual Machine (or as AWS calls them an EC2 Instance) First you choose a name for your VM...

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 have spent most of the day tweaking my Azure websites. Lots of fun! Last week unfortunately Azure had some problems and many websites that were running in the North Europe data centre were unavailable for several hours. And you guessed it my websites were hosted here. All hosting providers are going to have downtime...