Guy Harwood

Application Insights for Node JS Applications

At the time of writing, there is no user journey through the Azure Portal to configure Application Insights from your Linux App Service.  The tab is greyed out. Enabling it is fairly straightforward, but not obvious... 1. Ensure your target web application is created first 2. Add the application-insights [https:

Serverless

Deploy Node JS Azure Functions from AzureDevOps

UPDATE OCTOBER 2018 Much has changed since this post was written, and Azure Functions V2 has been officially released, with V3 now on the way. Func pack has been deprecated in favor of Run From Package [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/run-functions-from-deployment-package] , and the tooling has been improved.

Conditional Travis Builds with Pull Request Labels

We have Travis configured to build all Github Pull Requests that will be merged into master. This is very convenient, as all unit and end-to-end tests are run against the resulting merge, giving you an indication of how healthy the final build will be. There is one big caveat with

Linux Build Server for Visual Studio Online (VSTS/VSO)

Setting up a Linux build server for VSTS is not as straightforward as it first seems. Below are my notes on setting one up... Pre-requisites Official docs on pre-reqs: https://github.com/Microsoft/vsts-agent/blob/master/docs/start/envubuntu.md Install the VSTS agent on Ubuntu https://www.visualstudio.com/

Configuring MongoDB and C# Client for TLS / SSL

MongoDB supports secure data transmission but requires some configuration on both the client and the server before it will work correctly. This article covers the server configuration (can be applied to a mongo instance on any OS) and the C# client [https://www.nuget.org/packages/MongoDB.Driver/2.3.

jenkins

Manually installing Jenkins Slave as a service on Windows

One option of installing a Jenkins slave on Windows is to install it as a windows service. This has the added benefit of automatic startup and running under the credentials of a service account if you so wish. The documented process [https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Step+by+step+

jenkins

Upgrading Jenkins on Windows

This procedure is the same for other operating systems, yet many windows users end up looking for an msi installer, mistakenly thinking that it should be updated in the same way as a traditional windows application. Jenkins is a java application, and is distributed in a war archive file called

asp.net

xUnit tests with asp.net 5

If you've been playing around with the cross platform asp.net 5 bits (currently RC1) you will no doubt be aware of how difficult it can be to get things playing nicely together. My first task was to get a test framework configured with command line execution. To

Automation

Chocolatey Package Manager for Windows

Setting up a fresh dev box with all your favourite tools is something that every developer should automate. This is fairly straightforward on OSX and Linux thanks to the great package management ecosystem, but support for this on Windows has historically been poor, until some genius called Rob Reynolds [http:

EntityFramework

Entity Framework Tests with LocalDB

Whenever i work on an Entity Framework Database First project i often think back to when i first saw Ayendes post on using sqlite for an in memory database while unit testing nHibernate [http://ayende.com/blog/3983/nhibernate-unit-testing]. It keeps things simple for testing code that works directly against

NDepend

Solution review and refactoring with NDepend and Resharper

Recently I have been performing a lot of refactoring on a commercial web product that I built over 6 years ago.  It’s got a bit of everything in there - good code, bad code, the "please just work so I can go to bed" quick fixes and

TFS

Build Warning - MSB3247: Found conflicts between different versions of the same dependent assembly

Build Warning - MSB3247: Found conflicts between different versions of the same dependent assembly I kept seeing this in the output window when building a solution, but all it would show me when i clicked on the warning was the Microsoft.Common.targets file where the rule was defined. In

Dependency Injection

Runtime discovery of Ninject Bindings with Conventions

Ninject can figure out a lot of your interface implementation bindings with a few hints on where to look using the conventions extension. Typing out lots of explicit bindings for Ninject almost takes on the same kind of monotony that comes with declarative bindings in XML (think old style structure

Visual Studio

SQL71501: User has an unresolved reference to Login in Visual Studio 2012 Database Project

If you create application specific logins (which you should) then you are going to come across this error when trying to build your solution. UPDATE: 15th May 2013 - Jim commented a fix for this - "I have resolved this, it's quite simple to add the logins.

Visual Studio

Custom HttpHandler returns 404 after migrating to Vs2012

After migrating an asp.net web forms app to visual studio 2012 we started to observe some odd behaviour. The custom http handler used across the site to render images was returning a 404. The framework version had not been changed, nor had any configuration been updated. I decided to

Visual Studio

Working with Visual Studio Database Projects

Visual Studio keeps a SQL file for each and every object in the database, and it can be cumbersome to have to maintain these manually, especially when working with tables. A more productive process is to have visual studio create a database locally for you, make your modifications in SQL

Visual Studio

Visual Studio 2012 - Generating SQL Data Inserts

Want to generate insert statements for a set of data in a SQL Server table? Open the table, and click the single script button... and out pops a batch of inserts, complete with IDENTITY_INSERT statements…

Windows Server

Installing TFS 2012 - Error: TF400069 A required component is not installed on the application tier

If your TFS Application Tier resides on a different instance of windows to your SQL Server, you may come across this error... The issue here is that TFS needs the SQL Server Client Tools installing on the same box, so it can manipulate the data via the Analysis Services API.

Windows Server

Gotcha – Unauthorised 401 on IIS

One of the most common issues i see developers having with running websites on IIS7 – 8 is permissions. When IIS7 was made available it introduced the concept of an ‘Application Pool Identity’, which effectively means that the host process for your site in IIS is run under the context of

Cheat Sheets

Mercurial - Common Tasks Cheat Sheet

I find myself referring back to a text file full of commands that i keep on Mercurial when performing common tasks like branching and merging.… To create a branch called myNewFeature (notice how you must commit the branch creation, which is different to git) > hg branch myNewFeature > hg

Visual Studio

Dont forget to manually delete your bin directory after changing namespaces in an asp.net project

If you change the default application name on the web tab of the project properties in your asp.net project, and you have previously compiled your project, you may find some strange errors when you next build your project. This is because the dll names that the build outputs in

Visual Studio

Unable to find the requested .Net Framework Data Provider. It may not be installed

This usually means that a provider specified in one of your web.config connection strings is not installed on your machine. In my specific case the offender was this… <add name="MyContext" connectionString="Data Source=|DataDirectory|myDatabase.sdf" providerName="System.Data.SqlServerCe.4.0&

Windows Server

Giving the App Pool Identity folder permissions in IIS7 on Windows Server 2008 (First Release)

When setting up a new Application Pool in IIS7 the default user (or identity) is ApplicationPoolIdentity which is a specific user account with minimal rights, created specifically for that application pool to run under the context of that user. In Windows Server 2008 (the Vanilla version, as this is ‘slightly