Azure Key Vault is a secure way of storing your keys, certificates and secrets so your application can access everything it needs to but you don’t have them being stored insecurely anywhere such as in source control. I have been wanting to give Azure Key Vault a try for a while now as it can make use of Azure Active...
While at Microsoft Ignite I heard about a lot of cool tech that I want to know more about. The best way to learn something is use it to solve a problem. So what can I build that is both useful and will let me play with some new tech? I have a Xamarin Forms app Pwned Pass that has over 500 downloads on Google play and...
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...
Its been a while since I first released Pwned Pass so lets have a look at where we are now. We are very close to 500 Downloads from Google Play and we have recently smashed past 100 active installs, peaking at 116 and even now we are still over 100. I have had 9 reviews (6 x 5*, 2 x 1 * and a 4 *) which averages out at...
This is my annual lets make some goals for the new year blog post. So in no particular order. Improve House I can’t outdo last years goal of buying a house but I can continue to make efforts to improve it. I was going to put something about decorating or doing something to our bedrooms, however today I spotted a hole...
As 2018 starts to draw to a close let’s look at some of the highlights from the past year. New Home - I started 2018 with the goal of buying my own home and I managed it. At the end of October I actually moved in but it was months of looking at houses, speaking to estate agents, saving, packing and unpacking. There is...
Recently I have been investigating what all the fuss is about Docker and it has been well worth my time as Docker is pretty awesome for automating stuff. My development environment has typically required installing SQL Server. SQL is a bit of a beast with lots of options and takes time to setup how you want. However...
Remember me? I used to write blog posts but somehow life got in the way. So much has happened this year, lets have a look at my goals for 2018 and see how far we have got with them. Buy a house My first goal for 2018 was to buy a house. Well so much progress has been made with this goal. We looked at a few houses, and...
Recently I was asked how to convert a number to a string. Let’s look at a few ways of approaching this problem. Most objects in c# have a method called ToString() which displays the string representation of that object. This is because of inheritance, all objects inherit from System.Object which defines ToString()....