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...

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)...

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...

TeamCity is a Continuous Integration software package which is very easy to install and set up. So easy I managed it over a weekend. First of all I fired up a VM in Azure. I found that a Basic A1 VM was sufficient so running a CI server doesn’t have to be expensive, alternatively you could always set a Virtual or...

I have spent most of the day tweaking my Azure websites. Lots of fun! Last week unfortunately Azure had some problems and many websites that were running in the North Europe data centre were unavailable for several hours. And you guessed it my websites were hosted here. All hosting providers are going to have downtime...

I want to learn Development and eventually move into a development role. But what is the difference between development and what I already do? Put simply Development or programming is the creation of new programs, websites or databases. IT Operations or System Administration is the administration of existing servers,...