On the 5th of February I will be presenting at Microsoft’s online Techdays event. My session is entitled ‘How are you going to deploy that? A look at configuration as code’

“It does not matter what platform you are developing for, you are going to have to deploy your product in the end. Too often in the past the …

Twice recently I have hit the problem that I needed to a unblock ZIP files downloaded from a VSO source repository before I extracted the contents. One was a DSC modules, the other a PowerShell script with associated .NET assemblies.

In both cases the error messages I got were confusing and misleading. In the case of …

The DCS two step

When working with DSC a difficult concept can be that your desired state script is ‘compiled’ to a MOF file that is then ‘run’ by the desired state manager on the target machine. This is a two step affair and you have no real input on the second part. This is made more complex when Release Management …

Whilst helping a Java based team (part of larger organisation that used many sets of both Microsoft and non-Microsoft tools) to migrate from Subversion to TFS I had to tackle their Jenkins/Ant based builds.

They could have stayed on Jenkins and switched to the TFS source provider, but they wanted to at least look at …

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Whilst building a new TFS build agent VM using our standard scripts I hit a problem that SSDT projects would not build, but was fine on our existing agents. The error was

C:Program Files (x86)MSBuildMicrosoftVisualStudiov12.0SSDTMicrosoft.Data.Tools.Schema.SqlTasks.targets (513): The "SqlBuildTask" task …

I posted a month or so ago about my ‘Experiences using a DD-WRT router with Hyper-V’, well I have been living with it over a month? How has it been going?

Like the curate’s egg ‘good in parts’. It seems OK for while and then everything would get a bit slow to stop.

Just as a reminder this is what I had ended up with …

We use O365 to provide Lync messaging. So when I rebuilt my PC I thought I needed to re-install the client; so I logged into the O365 web site and selected the install option. Turns out this was a mistake. I had Office 2013 installed, so I already had the client, I just had not noticed.

If you do install O365 Lync …