I have just spent the first day at the conference Microsoft Ignite | The Tour. The conference was free I just needed to arrange travel and accommodation. Microsoft have really looked after me and all the other guests, breakfast and lunch has been provided, I got a free t-shirt, coffee (or tea) all day plus a beer or...

I have been using Azure DevOps (Or VSTS or VSO etc) for a while now and one of the great features is doing automatic builds with every check-in. This is more commonly known as a CI (continuous integration) build. More recently I have started playing about with creating my build using YAML files instead of using the web...

Let’s Encrypt is a free way to get a SSL certificate onto your website and until recently I had never tried it. It is very easy and I think it is awesome. IIS is the web server software the Microsoft include with Windows 10 and Windows Server. I have it installed on my laptop and it displays the default IIS page. It is...

DNS is the backbone of the internet and as such I believe every developer should know something about the basics and not just leave it for the sysadmin to sort. What is DNS? DNS or Domain Name System is what translates Domain names to IP addresses and vice versa. Wait what is an IP address and what are domain names?...

One of the websites I have been working on has been displaying an error in the console. The error reads as follows. The SSL certificate used to load resources from https://example.com will be distrusted in M70. Once distrusted, users will be prevented from loading these resources. See...

We are in the process of moving our companies websites onto the Azure platform. One of the challenges was to move image files out of the website project into blob storage. This week I have moved 150,000 of them. One thing I keep banging on about is that your source code should not contain data. If it does every time...

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...

I recently came home from a busy day of work to my wife blaming me for allowing our 18 month old son to reach some paint and get it all over the carpet. She was concentrating on the fact that he could reach the paint not on the fact that she had brilliantly got the paint out of the carpet. My instinct on being blamed...

As a developer using source control and git is bread and butter of what we do. Github is probably the most popular and widely known hosting service for source control but I have also used Bitbucket and Visual Studio Team Services. Lets have a look at each one and what they offer. Note while I have included prices I...

Next month I will celebrate ten years working at my current job, two weeks after that I will start a new chapter of my life at a new company. Lets take this opportunity to look back ten years at some of the great stuff I have achieved. 2006 In 2006 I had no IT experience. If you were to ask me where Event Logs could...