Posts

My Go-To Visual Studio Extensions

There are a number of extensions for Visual Studio that I always keep installed. Time and again they’ve proven their value for me. Maybe they can do the same for you. I haven’t made the full transition from VS2015 to VS2017 as i use 2015 at work and 2017 at home. Some of these have different versions between the two VS versions. The links below are all to the 2015 versions in those cases.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017 | 3 minutes Read

Running a Regularly Scheduled Task with Azure Functions

One of the more recent features of cloud computing is what’s called “serverless computing”. There are a number of different ways in which it is implemented, but for the most part it’s just a way to set up a code function to be able to run without needing to create an entire application and all it’s resources. One of my favorite ways to utilize this feature in Azure apps is to use the functions to kick off nightly maintenance jobs. By using an external function to kick off the job, I am able to keep my Azure web apps set to not be “always on”. This helps keep my costs down, but still lets me kick off regularly scheduled tasks easily. And Azure functions can be written in any of several languages, including JavaScript and C#.

Saturday, November 11, 2017 | 7 minutes Read

VSTS Deployment with Azure App Service Deployment Slots

Utilizing Azure Application Deployment Slots with the Visual Studio Team Services build and deployment system is quite simple. Set Up Deployment Slots The first step is to create your deployment slots for your application. You do this in your Azure Portal. Open the dashboard to your App Service application’s options. About halfway down the menu options that appear for your app you will see “Deployment slots”. Select this option. Click “Add Slot” and give your deployment slot a name. It also asks you to select whether or not to copy the existing configuration options from an existing slot. This will depend on your preferred deployment process. Some people let their deployment instance use all the same configuration options. I usually use the existing database connections, if any, but will alter any message queues, blob storage, table storage, and anything else that can trigger functionality on the back end, I point these to their respective testing versions so I don’t mess with production data unexpectedly. This is especially true for message queues, I feel. I want to be able to control the testing of the staging slot and not have it kick off unexpectedly if some production message gets through.

Saturday, November 11, 2017 | 6 minutes Read

Deploying Service Fabric App with VSTS

Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) makes it incredibly easy to deploy Azure Service Fabric applications to your Service Fabric clusters as part of a continuous integration process. There’s just a few easy steps to get it set up and running. Setup Your Service Endpoint VSTS-Service Fabric-Service Endpoint VSTS Endpoint Connection Start with setting up your service endpoint. This will connect your VSTS instance to your Azure Service Fabric. In order to make the connection, you’ll need to use the same security you use to connect to your cluster endpoint. This is usually either certificate based or using Azure Active Directory credentials.

Saturday, November 4, 2017 | 4 minutes Read

My Favorite Podcasts

As developers, we need to receive frequent knowledge downloads from other sources to enhance our skillsets and help us think in new ways. There are all kinds of sources where this can come from: online training, YouTube, Pluralsight, books, classes, and so on. One of my favorite ways to help me think new thoughts are podcasts. What follows is a list of my favorite podcasts, the ones that I listen to on a regular basis. Some are developer focused and some are not. You shouldn’t limit your sources of knowledge:

Tuesday, October 31, 2017 | 4 minutes Read

Avoid Burnout: Take Time To Unplug

One of the biggest struggles that developers face is burnout. I’ve seen it happen time and time and time again. We do too much. We work 40, 50, 60 or more hours a week in an office doing development work, then come home and spend another 20, 30 or more hours at home working on our personal projects or side clients. Add to all that the various levels of personal commitments we might outside of development, be it family, church, charity work, and so forth. All that time takes its toll and, if we’re not careful, it overwhelms us and we burn out. It happened to me.

Saturday, October 28, 2017 | 9 minutes Read

The Worthlessness of Project Estimates: Why We Still Do Them

Whether we are developers, project managers, business analysts, stakeholders or anyone else involved in the software development process, we all know that estimates for software development are always wrong: ALWAYS. I have never once been involved in a software project that met it’s estimates or even came close. Sometimes we get the job done earlier than estimated, but usually it runs over. You know it. I know it. We all know it. Even if that estimate seems reasonable at the time we do it, it always ends up being wrong. So why do we still bother to do them?

Tuesday, October 24, 2017 | 8 minutes Read

What I do as a developer

A lot of people ask me what I do as a developer. Well, it’s pretty simple. I convert marketing promises (more commonly referred to by developers as lies and bullshit) into applications (referred to by developers as see the amazing creation of perfection I have created that somewhat resembles the lies marketing told but is in every way better than their promises anyway). See, it’s simple!

Tuesday, October 24, 2017 | 1 minute Read

The Unroll.me Controversy - Its Our Fault

A tweet caught my attention yesterday afternoon that was related to the whole Unroll.me/Uber data collection situation. Users’ data is being anonymized and then sold by Unroll.me, with one of the buyers in this situation being Uber. The co-founder of Unroll.me posted a message to Medium which basically put the responsibility for the controversy on the end users of Unroll.me.

Saturday, April 22, 2017 | 4 minutes Read

My Dev Story

One of the things I don’t talk about much is my development history. It’s not that I mind talking about the journey that got me to this point, but I just don’t think about it all that much. I decided, though, it was time to document it so that anyone who might ever be interested can know. Thanks to my late father, my interest in computers and programming started very early. I still remember the day he brought home a little black Sinclair ZX81 computer. I was around 9 years old and I loved tinkering around with the “massive” 1K of memory and the membrane keyboard that was nigh impossible to actually type on. We added a cassette recorder for tape storage, the tiny printer and eventually the huge 16K RAM add-on memory block. It was fun to play around with and I would spend hours entering lines of code copied from a magazine or book. It was my first introduction to programming (and the BASIC language in particular) and it has stuck with me for a lifetime.

Thursday, March 9, 2017 | 7 minutes Read

Mentoring

If you are a student or someone in a different career field and looking to move into software development, I am happy to provide what time I can spare to speak with you 1 on 1 and provide what guidance or insight I can. You can schedule time with me on my Calendly.

Saturday, January 1, 2000 | 1 minute Read

My Creative Side

Not everything is about tech. I’ve got a creative side too… Sometimes. Take a look if you want something other than tech. My Creative Side

Saturday, January 1, 2000 | 1 minute Read