I hate MS Access and especially developing with it as you can’t do any thing clever with it. Wrong, Wrong, Wrong! There are a few clever things I have been able to script to make developing with it passable. I still would rather use Visual Studio but this improves the experience a fair bit. Source Control Access files...

Periodic Table of DevOps

The periodic table lists all the chemical elements and groups them together based on some key properties. Today I found an article about the periodic table of DevOps . I am not going to discuss every element but I thought I might go through some that I have heard of or used. Github – The repository of lots of open...

One of the features of git is the ability to tag a point in my change history with a tag. For a while now I have been manually tagging my code whenever I do a release, so I can easily work out what has changed by doing a diff between two tags. Now that I am automating my release process with TeamCity I am thinking...

That’s right this is the one hundredth post that I have written on this blog. So what have I learned in the past 100 posts? It is easier to write a blog before you become a parent. More recently I am increasingly finding it difficult to find the time to blog. It used to be that I could write on an evening, but now...

Last year you may remember me talking about playing with a Raspberry Pi. Well since then my Raspberry Pi has been sat on a desk collecting dust. This week I attended Leeds Sharp and the topic was Running Windows on Raspberry Pi and this has inspired me again to do something with a Pi. But first what did I learn. Here...

Where I work we use a really old fashioned way of recording where in the country employees are: Excel! For years I have been trying to persuade staff to use calendars in Exchange. Outlook is great for looking at one or two people’s calendars at once but quickly gets unmanageable for looking at ten or more peoples...

Last year I blogged about Team City , well I have been looking at it again recently. In that time they have even changed their logo! Lets start with thinking about what I want my Continuous Integration server to do. Check out my code from source control (usually master but all feature branches would be even better)...

Model View Controller or MVC is a software architectural pattern for implementing user interfaces on computers. It divides a given software application into three interconnected parts, so as to separate internal representations of information from the ways that information is presented to or accepted from the user. I...

Surface Book Review

I have just bought myself a new laptop, but it is not just any laptop it is a Microsoft Surface Book . I think this is probably the first time I have bought myself a top of the range laptop and after a few days of use I am loving it. The Surface Book is the latest in Microsoft’s Surface line of tablets but the first to...