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...

I have blogged a few times about interfaces , and how useful they are for producing good quality maintainable code. Let’s look at a problem and the solution I came up with which I am quite proud of. As previously mentioned I am in the process of moving images from AWS to Azure blob storage. Now that the actual files...

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...

Since I started creating an android app I have been writing simple UI tests. I have been taking advantage of the Visual Studio App Center which allows you to test against hundreds of different devices in the Test Cloud. In order to write a UI test create a UI Test App, this makes use of the nuget package Xamarin UI...

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,...

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...