I will be speaking at Leeds DevOps on the 21st of July on the subject of Desired State Configuration (DSC).

‘In the Windows world, due to its API based architecture, deployment is too often not as simple as copying an EXE and updating a text configuration file. Desired State Configuration is an attempt to ease the pain …

Update 21 Aug 2015 - This post contains all the basic information, but there is an improved PowerShell script discussed in Using Release Management vNext templates when you don’t want to use DSC scripts – A better script

Many web sites are basically forms over data, so you need to deploy some DB schema and something …

Whilst setting up Application Insights on one of our web sites I hit a problem. The target site appeared to be working OK, but if I setup a ping test it failed.

Digging into the failure, as with much of Application Insights just keep clicking to go deeper, I found the issue was that a CSS file was failing to load.

Did you miss content from Microsoft  Build and Ignite events?

Well you can catch up on Channel9, but we at Black Marble are running free round up events on the 20th May in Leeds.

Why not come and talk to Black Marble and Microsoft staff who attended the events?

To register go to the Black Marble events site.

If you are using a parameters.xml file to set value with MSDeploy I have just found a gotcha. You need some value in the web.config file, not just an empty XML tag, else the replacement fails. So to explain…

I had the following parameters.xml file, and use Release Management to replace the __TAG__ values at deployment …