Microsoft recently released Azure Service Fabric which can be configured on-premise, as well as on Azure. This provides a staged transition of services to Azure in the future, without having to re-architect or migrate.

IIS Express is usually installed with Visual Studio, and is used to develop web applications and debug locally. It is designed to be used for development purposes, and is configured to only listen to local requests. This makes it difficult to test websites from another PC.

Before .NET core, project files are made up of complex XML which is automatically generated using Visual Studio. Individual files were listed, including build steps for each file. This was arduous and required Visual Studio to keep files up to date. MS Build natively support these files, but other build engines and services didn’t always provide support.

Twitter is a great way to promote blog articles to your followers. This article explains how to make your tweets look more appealing using an image and description metadata. Cards are not new to Twitter, however it took me a while to find the right links, and to get it up and running.

As you may know, I am using Github Pages to host my blog. I previously wrote about setting up CloudFlare and hosting for my blog. In this post I will go into some more detail about getting started with Github pages.

I am in the process of refreshing my blog, including setting up a custom domain, and setting up HTTPS by default. I’ve used WordPress for my free blog previously, but want to explore other options, and keep management as simple as possible.

I have an Ubuntu VM running under Hyper-V on Windows 10. Time synchronisation is enabled, however after hybernation, or suspending my laptop, time is not resynched to my VM.

A SQL Alias is an alternate name used to make a database connection.

A common scenario for using WebDAV is for a SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) package to read an Excel spread sheet stored in a SharePoint document library. The package imports the contents into a SQL database. Business users are able to upload Spread sheets using SharePoint (no IT involvement required), data can automatically be imported (using scheduled SQL Jobs), and users can view reports (through Reporting Services in SharePoint Integrated Mode) with up-to-date data. Here’s a diagram: