For the past week or so I have been playing around with Xamarin and creating an android app. Well I now have an app in the Google Play Store. Check out https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=6148298088834956775 . Before you rush and download the app I must warn you that it doesn’t do much yet. It displays some...
I keep hearing about Azure WebJobs but I have never used them. Time to change this. WebJobs are a feature of Azure App Service that can run a script at a specific time. In my case I would like to hit a specific url of my website at the same time every day. To the right you can see an example of the WebJobs form on the...
Last time I started looking at Amazon Web Services and how it differed from Azure. I am going to continue looking at what it can do. Virtual Machines Lets look at what you can do with Virtual Machines. I selected to create a new Virtual Machine (or as AWS calls them an EC2 Instance) First you choose a name for your VM...
I am a big fan of Azure but I know zero about its biggest rival – Amazon Web Services or AWS. So lets sign up for a free trial and see what it can do. The AWS free trial is available from https://aws.amazon.com/free/ and lasts for 12 months. From memory I think the Azure free trial lasted only one month. To start you...
One of my plans is to create new MVC Webapps for my companies databases. Once I publish these I will need to secure them so only staff have access. The traditional way to do this would be insert membership tables into my database. The user then has to remember another username and password and I have to secure the...
I recently read a blog post by Pinal Dave about how you can backup straight to Azure Storage. The procedure he described is only available for SQL Server 2014 or later. I won’t go into detail of this method as Pinal describes it better than I can, but the basic of it requires setting up credentials and then running a...
The Software as a Service (SaaS) website that I work on has been sold to lots of clients now. Which is great news. However the more Azure websites we have, the more websites we have to administer, especially if like us you take advantage of Traffic Manager which requires multiple website in different regions. Azure has...
I recently replaced my installation of Visual Studio 2013 with Visual Studio 2015 RC. I like the new version, I am not a Visual Studio expert so it will probably take me a while to find all the good stuff but here are some initial thoughts. Being as my MSDN subscription is still valid I have installed the professional...
In Cloud Computing there are a lot of terms that end aas or As a Service. Most of these I hadn’t heard of until I started writing this list. Any service that is delivered over the internet instead of hosted locally on your network or PC could in theory be described as an As a Service. PaaS Platform As a Service This is...
We all know that it is important to monitor your servers and services, so you can spot issues before they become problems. I personally have spent a lot of time configuring nagios to email me about issues and I have recently been configuring various different alerts in Azure. My old boss has this idea that I should...