If you have an application, instrumenting it with something like Application Insights to emit useful data is something I cannot espouse the benefits of enough. As a service, however, Application Insights can offer other benefits, such as Availability Tests to tell you if the application is accessible to your users.

The …

Today I made the fateful mistake of offering to try to fix a family members home printer. Family IT, and especially printers, the bane of all IT Professionals.

The Problem

The system in question was a 10 year old setup made up of a Dell Optiplex desktop currently running Windows 10 and an HP M1132 LaserJet …

I am currently upgrading a .NET Core 3.1(LTS) MVC website to run on .NET 6, stepping it through intermediate .NET versions to make sure some EF Migrations were done correctly.

Everything upgraded without any major issue until the final step to .NET 6. As soon as I did this my MVC pages failed to render, but no error …

We recently hit a problem when we tried to edit a page on anold Umbraco 7 instance. When we tried to edit a page in the Umbraco web UI we got the error 'failed to retrieve data for content id 1119'

class="image_figure image_internal image_unprocessed" …

I posted recently on my experience moving to Hugo from WordPress. One feature lost in the move were the Wordpress plugins used to automatically post to Twitter and LinkedIn when a new blog post was created. I always found this very useful, so looked or a way to replicate this functionality for static pages.

The …

Background

Over the years, the Black Marble blog server has been hosted on many platforms. It's previous incarnation was WordPress, running as a network of sites with an aggregated feed. Of late we had found this slow to serve the first page (due to website start-up time) and there was the constant need to keep the …

I wanted to have a look at some GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) upgrade scenarios so decided to create a quick GHES install on my local test Hyper-V instance. Due to me skimping on resources, and making a typo, creating this instance was much harder than it should have been.

The first issue was I gave it a tiny data …

I was recently trying to set up a copy of the Outlook desktop app with two outlook.com email accounts and hit a strange issue.

I was able to add the first one without any problems, but when I tried to add the second one I got an error message asking for PIN, and most importantly on the same dialog showing the second …

A recent addition to GitHub Actions is the ability to create a custom job summary. Using a simple echo command in a script you can write to the job summary

1steps:   - name: Adding markdown
2  run: echo '### Hello world! :rocket:' >> $GITHUB\_STEP\_SUMMARY

Now, this got me thinking. I have a well-used …