Blog - Gordon Beeming

Playing with Azure and Terraform

I recently presented "Playing with Azure and Terraform" at our user group locally in Durban, there were some requests for a recording so I thought I'd share it here 😊 We play with a lot of different tech in this session like GitHub Codespaces, Azure, Cloudflare and Snyk

Posted on September 01, 2022 Azure Azure SQL Azure Web Apps Cloudflare DevSecOps GitHub GitHub Codespaces IaC Security SecurityScanning snyk Terraform YouTube Videos

Scanning Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for vulnerabilities

In the modern world where it feels like every sentence has a Dev⭐Ops word in it, 1 that is probably used more than most is DevSecOps.When teams focus on DevSecOps they make sure to integrate security into every phase of development, this includes scanning for vulnerabilities as soon as possible. This videos shows you briefly how you can use Snyk to scan your terraform templates for vulnerabilities from your CLI as well as part of every commit pushed to GitHub.

Posted on August 24, 2022 DevSecOps GitHub IaC Security SecurityScanning snyk Terraform

Interacting with Cloudflare DNS and Origin Certs using Terraform

In this video we'll take a look at connecting to Cloudflare with terraform to fully automate a full (strict) SSL/TLS encryption mode setup We'll also cover setting up a basic nginx server which we'll use to validate that our setup is working as expected.

Posted on August 17, 2022 Azure Cloudflare GitHub IaC Terraform

Managing GitHub secrets using terraform

In this video we'll take a look at Managing GitHub secrets using terraform as well as federated identities from GitHub into Azure. You should only be storing secrets if you absolutely need to, in this demo although we are only accessing storage accounts the change from a storage connection string to Azure Federated Identity means that we can access any of resource the identity has access too using RBAC which is a much better overall approach.

Posted on August 11, 2022 Azure GitHub IaC Security Terraform

Building basic Azure infrastructure using Terraform

In this video we'll take a look at how to build some basic Azure infrastructure using Terraform.

Posted on August 04, 2022 Azure IaC Terraform

GitHub Projects and Issues

Are you tired of your average planning tools? Take a look at what you could be using if you switched to GitHub Projects and Issues 😉

Posted on May 23, 2022 GitHub GitHub Issues GitHub Projects Planning Tools Productivity YouTube Videos

Setting up commit signature verification for GitHub

Ever wondered why some commits show verified and others don't? Take a look at how you can make sure all your commits are verified. Commands from this video are available in this gist https://gist.github.com/DevStarOps/6c88482ecd632ba04d68d9e15590b4a2

Posted on March 21, 2022 Commit Signing git GitHub Security Verified Commits YouTube Videos

Moving Repos to GitHub from Azure DevOps - GitHub Quick Tips

This is a Quick GitHub Tip on Moving Repos to GitHub from Azure DevOps

Posted on January 17, 2022 GitHub Git Code Pipelines Import YouTube Videos

Profile README - GitHub Quick Tips

This is a Quick GitHub Tip on Profile Readmes

Posted on August 11, 2021 YouTube Videos

Allow project users to manage Permissions Groups in Azure DevOps

In this video I'm going to show you... How to allow project users to manage Permissions Groups in Azure DevOps that aren't project administrators

Posted on July 22, 2021 Azure DevOps Postman Security YouTube Videos

Developing software for the modern world using only your browser and GitHub

In this video I'm going to show you... How to develop software for the modern world using only your browser and GitHub.

Posted on May 19, 2021 YouTube Videos

Having fun with GitHub Codespaces, docker, swagger codegen cli

In this video I'm going to show you... How you can use GitHub Codespaces to prototype an idea and put it into action... or should I say actions with nothing more than your browser.

Posted on February 02, 2021 Codespaces Docker GitHub GitHub Codespaces nuget.org Strava API swagger codegen cli YouTube Videos

MSB4019: Microsoft.Data.Tools.Schema.SqlTasks.targets was not found

.

Posted on November 20, 2020 Automated Builds dotnet core MSBuild SSDT

Rethink your application boundary and use Cloudflare

In this video I'm going to talk to you about... Rethinking your application boundary and using Cloudflare

Posted on October 21, 2020 Azure Cloudflare GitHub GitHub Actions msdug YouTube Videos

Migrating pipelines and releases in Azure DevOps

In this video I'm going to show you... Migrating pipelines and releases in Azure DevOps

Posted on September 29, 2020 Azure DevOps Azure DevOps Migrations YouTube Videos

Migrating Test artifacts and all other work item types using the Azure DevOps

In this video I'm going to show you... Migrating Test artifacts (and all other work item types) using the Azure DevOps Migration Tools

Posted on September 27, 2020 Azure DevOps Azure DevOps Migrations YouTube Videos

How to migrate SVN and TFVC repositories to git repositories in Azure DevOps

In this video I'm going to show you... How to migrate SVN and TFVC repositories to git repositories in Azure DevOps

Posted on September 24, 2020 Azure DevOps Azure DevOps Migrations YouTube Videos

How to migrate git repositories to Azure DevOps

In this video I'm going to show you... How to migrate git repositories to Azure DevOps

Posted on September 23, 2020 Azure DevOps Azure DevOps Migrations YouTube Videos

How to move Work Items between projects in Azure DevOps

In this video I'm going to show you... How to move Work Items between projects in Azure DevOps

Posted on September 23, 2020 Azure DevOps Azure DevOps Migrations YouTube Videos

How to delete a team project in Azure DevOps

In this video I'm going to show you... How to delete a team project in Azure DevOps

Posted on September 22, 2020 Azure DevOps Azure DevOps Basics YouTube Videos

How to recovery a deleted team project in Azure DevOps

In this video I'm going to show you... How to delete a team project in Azure DevOps

Posted on September 22, 2020 Azure DevOps Azure DevOps Basics YouTube Videos

How to create a team project in Azure DevOps

In this video I'm going to show you... How to create a team project in Azure DevOps

Posted on September 21, 2020 Azure DevOps Azure DevOps Basics YouTube Videos

How to use the same editor as Visual Studio Code in your sites

Wondering how you can use the same editor as Visual Studio Code in your sites? In this video I'll show you how you can 😀. 0:00 - Introduction 0:25 - Setup basic HTML file 1:55 - Add monaco editor html tags 3:23 - Use monaco colorizeElement functionality 5:17 - Create a monaco editor 9:46 - Monaco editor "Cannot read property 'AddEventListener' of null 10:38 - Use npm to install monaco editor dependencies 12:19 - Exploring the monaco editor playground 13:52 - Thank you for watching

Posted on August 12, 2020 Monaco Editor NPM Visual Studio Code YouTube Videos

[ code snippet ] JsonPropertyConverter.cs

JsonConverter that works with System.Text.Json allows having a string property that will just store the json element string instead of trying to parse the properties into a complex object

Posted on July 30, 2020 code snippet JSON

2020 Journey to 120

This post is just to kick off and mention that I will be doing a series of videos out on YouTube about my 2020 Journey to 120.

Posted on May 20, 2020 2020 Journey to 120

How to lower the real cost of a SQL Server Virtual Machine in Azure

Whenever you take out an Azure VM you generally get a single disk which is not that big, when you select a SQL Server based VM (even web edition) you automatically get a 1TB disk, if you are using managed disks you pay for that whole TB even if you are only using 1GB of it. This post will show you how you can lower the price of that virtual machine if you are in this situation

Posted on March 27, 2020 Azure Tips

Raising awareness and reliable information sources for #COVID19 by adding a banner to your websites

Recently talking to people it's obvious that a lot of people are either not following what is going on globally and in lots of cases have information that seems to have been obtained from unreliable sources MyBroadband released a post titled "New rules for all co.za websites and ISPs during coronavirus outbreak" which mentioned that ISPs needed a visible link to one of the South African information sites for corona virus so thought it would be a useful thing for more people to add banners in general to their sites linking to a trusted source for corona virus information

Posted on March 26, 2020 COVID19 Raising Awareness

Create pfx certificate file for Azure Web Apps from Cloudflare origin cert using openssl

Every time I create a new project using Azure Web Apps or even IIS and I need to add a pfx file for end to end https, Cloudflare gives you a private key and certificate but you can't use those directly with Azure Web Apps and I keep forgetting how to do this exactly so as I do sometimes I'm going to post the steps so that it's helpful to others as well as future me.

Posted on March 24, 2020 Azure Cloudflare Linux openssl Security

Publish aspnet core sites to Azure easily using GitHub actions

Have a site sitting in GitHub that you currently maybe manually deploy to Azure or use some other tool? Why not useGitHub Actionsto quickly and easily publish to Azure. I was pushing a small site (Guid.Empty) to Azure through GitHub and decided to document the couple steps for future me 😋... oh and for you of course 😅

Posted on March 23, 2020 Azure dotnet core GitHub GitHub Actions

The importance of regression testing and real world security consequences

Organizations often put a lot of effort around testing their products, they'll put tons of effort in unit testing, integration testing across their UI and API layers but sometimes have a strategy of covering everything. This doesn't always add value to their pipelines because the metric that is being chased is not value which agreeably is a hard thing to measure but rather it's a coverage metric. To start with I don't know if testing strategy is what was happening for TicTocTrack but is something that is definitely highlighted as something that would have been valuable for them. A security vulnerability discovered around a year ago from a fellow MVP and security expert Troy Hunt was patched and then earlier this year I re-discovered it

Posted on March 18, 2020 Security Testing

Find organizations linked to your AAD tenant in Azure DevOps

Did you know that you can get a list of all organizations linked to your Azure Active Directory tenant? Since august this has been possible 😁

Posted on December 10, 2019 Azure Active Directory Azure DevOps

GitHub actions… CI in 5 clicks

If you don’t know yet what GitHub actions are you can read about it on the GitHub Actions feature on GitHub. In short on the 8th of August GitHub announced an update to their actions which you can read about in this blog post. it’s a very easy way to automate anything from any event in GitHub.

Posted on August 19, 2019 GitHub GitHub Actions

Missing ctrl + enter in Visual Studio to commit changes? Here’s how you can add it

So something that you've probably noticed when using dev tools in the web and Visual Studio Code is that you can hit ctrl + enter and with this you may have noticed that in Visual Studio you can't do that. Below you'll see how you can add this to your IDE.

Posted on March 18, 2019 git Visual Studio VSTS / TFS

Adding routes to Strava and then to Garmin devices

I’ve spoken to a couple of people who want to add routes to their Garmin devices but the path isn’t as straight forward as you’d imagine it should/can be.

Posted on February 16, 2019 Connect IQ Garmin Know your tools Strava

Creating an Azure dashboard for Application Insights in 1,2,3

So watching this weeks asp.net community standup ASP.NET Community Standup - December 11, 2018 - 2.2 Release Party! and Scott Hanselman shows how to make a dashboard for your application insights resource in no time.

Posted on December 12, 2018 Application Insights Azure Dashboards Monitoring

#TYMHKON: How do I follow what's happening with Azure DevOps?

#TYMHKON: What is it?

Posted on September 24, 2018 Azure DevOps TYMHKON VSTS / TFS

How to Tweet Azure Pipeline activity easily

A while back I created a service linked to Twitter that tweets when your pipeline has completed in Azure Pipelines. This post is going to show you how you can easily tweet when your builds complete .

Posted on September 20, 2018 Azure DevOps VSTS / TFS Web Online Tools

#TYMHKON: Public projects in Azure DevOps

#TYMHKON: What is it?

Posted on September 15, 2018 Azure DevOps TYMHKON VSTS / TFS

#TYMHKON: What is it?

TYMHKON is something random that to me looks like it could be Japanese? Not sure what makes me think that when seeing it but what it really stands for is Things You May Have Known Or Not!

Posted on September 08, 2018 TYMHKON VSTS VSTS / TFS

Building libraries that target multiple frameworks

I've generally built libraries wrong by placing all binaries in the root and it's worked ok for now so why change it. I might also add that these libraries have been for internal use so no real reason for not doing this I guess.

Posted on July 30, 2018 NuGet nupkg nuspec VSTS / TFS

Turning on the new navigation for Visual Studio Team Services

Although I'm hoping everyone reading this doesn't need this I thought I'd share anyway. A little under a month ago Jeremy Epling (@jeremy_epling) posted on the Microsoft DevOps Blog about the New Navigation for Visual Studio Team Services. I'm not going to repeat the very detailed blog post but I am going to show you how to enabled the amazing experience quickly.

Posted on July 15, 2018 Just longer than a tweet Preview Features VSTS VSTS / TFS

A journey worth taking

The post is going to go over the last 10 years (7 in more detail) and how I applied a little self control (eventually) and have sort of changed how I motivate myself to try better and why I came to do that. You can almost think of the journey as being a good movie where the dude in high school has everything, somehow loses it (well finding other great things) and then finds his way again (sort of).

Posted on May 21, 2018 Personal

How do I fix HTTP Error 502.5 - Process Failure when hosting in IIS with dotnet core

I received a new error today that I haven't received before when deploying dotnet core apps. It was as the title suggest a "HTTP Error 502.5 - Process Failure" error

Posted on May 13, 2018 dotnet core IIS Just Coding

Set which chrome profile for Visual Studio to use

At MVP Summit this year one of the valuable things I learnt (which I can share ) was from Colin Dembovsky (ALM MVP) which was Using Chrome to Solve Identity Hell. Now I knew chrome profiles existed but never thought of using them to solve the problem of different identities, in-private mode was a way of doing things but you always lost that when closing the session so wasn't that great. Not going to talk much about that here, you can read his post to find out more.

Posted on March 26, 2018 Chrome Productivity Visual Studio

Setting wild card branch policies in @VSTS

I’ve probably mentioned it before but keeping up with what’s happening with VSTS is incredible hard with their 3 week cadence and generally huge set of features each 3 weeks. This week at MVP Summit I had what I thought would be a cool request to allow wild card branch policies. I was thinking of writing a console app to do this but thought it would be interesting to ask the product group as it’s part of the many benefits of being a MVP .

Posted on March 10, 2018 Source Control. Git VSTS / TFS

Creating a new branch in @VSTS

This is a quick reference post that shows you how to create a branch in VSTS and TFS.

Posted on March 10, 2018 Tips VSTS / TFS

Setting up 2 factor authentication and email verification with .net core 2.0

Today I played with a new .net core template just to see what the authentication options were out the box and was surprised to see just how easy it is to go from nothing to having a base project that has authentication fully baked in with 2 factor authentication and email verification.

Posted on February 15, 2018 dotnet core Just Coding Security

Creating an asynchronous AuthorizeAttribute in MVC

A couple days ago I needed to call a remote web api call in my AuthorizeAttribute sometimes but as mentioned in this (Is it possible to use async/await in MVC 4 AuthorizeAttribute?) StackOverflow question (and other forums) it isn’t supported but is in the newer .net core. Unfortunately the project I needed this on was traditional MVC so I was left still finding a way .

Posted on January 26, 2018 async C# Just Coding MVC

Moving Application Insights resources between subscriptions in Azure

There is documentation available for Move resources to new resource group or subscription but things are easier to do with exact sample code so here it goes . The steps below will work for moving between Resource Groups as well, you'll just skip some steps that would be obvious.

Posted on January 03, 2018 Application Insights Azure PowerShell

BenchmarkDotNet: IsBoolean method

This post might seem weird and is slightly. It's really just a pointer as with all my posts to send people to instead of sharing lots of text "on the down low" 😁.

Posted on December 28, 2017 BenchmarkDotNet Just Coding

Work Around for .NET Framework 4.7 or a later update is already installed on this computer

I see this message most times I format my machines after opening existing projects in Visual Studio and I always forgot how I solve it

Posted on December 07, 2017 dotnet Visual Studio

Connecting agents to TFS using integrated security on http from external domain

If you have TFS on the domain but you are trying to connect agents to it from outside the domain and TFS is not running on https then this post is for you.

Posted on August 06, 2017 Digi Cert Security TFS TFS Agents VSTS VSTS / TFS

Searching in VSTS/TFS

This post is largely showing off a cool feature of chrome but the core focus is how you can be more productive with VSTS search

Posted on August 06, 2017 Google Search TFS VSTS VSTS / TFS

Bulk import git repositories into VSTS/TFS

With the rate that the VSTS team releases with all the features they releasing it's hard to know everything that exists in VSTS. I recently needed to migrate git repos from various Team Project Collections (TPC) into a single Team Project and started out doing it very manually and slowly progresses to importing over 100 in a couple hours .

Posted on July 25, 2017 git GitHub Projects Source Control TFS VSTS / TFS

Battling to Join Insider Preview?

Today I tried to join one of my machines to the insider preview. Most people if they get issues would probably take it as a sign that putting the broken bits on their machine was a bad idea and the universe has saved them…I need my broken bits fix .

Posted on June 20, 2017 Microsoft Account Windows Insider Program

Converting Html to Pdf using C# and magic!

Everyone at some point needs to convert and html page into a PDF for some reason or another. For this I've always used a component which was cheap at the time (and is far from it now). This component has worked well for the last 8(ish) years, most ish in the last while because it doesn't deal well with https sites. When contacting the vendor they said hey but our latest version which can be expected I guess because it's 8 years down the line but then came the it's ALL OF THE $ . The last issue is that the component I used doesn't work in Azure. That lead me to some investigation and then ultimately this post.

Posted on May 22, 2017 Azure GitHub Projects Just Coding Pdf-to-Html

Using ngrok to test web apps on mobile while developing

I often never really test on mobile properly because most sites are responsive so it's easier to just resize your browser and test like that. This works great until you trying to get the perfect mobile experience and looking at every element like how drop lists present themselves with different content taking into account how wrapping might happen in mobile browser controls (which is different from web browser, even in chrome ). A long time ago I briefly used ngrok just to test how it works and now I use it constantly for testing apps while they are still in development.

Posted on May 18, 2017 Just Coding Mobile Visual Studio

Generating code documentation using Ghost Doc Enterprise

I've recently started catching up with all the blogs that I've wanted to write and have had flagged to write for a long time. This one I have had flagged since 26 January 2016.

Posted on April 30, 2017 Automated Builds C# Ghost Doc Visual Studio

Setting up .net core continuous integration build with VSTS/TFS

You might be wondering after recently posting Setting up a standard continuous integration build with VSTS/TFS why I'd need to post specifically on .net core. After all it's still a Visual Studio solution so things should just work, the keyword here is should . Things didn't just work when I tried to get this working so decided to share my experience here (as well as document it for myself later ).

Posted on April 23, 2017 Automated Builds dotnet core Visual Studio VSTS / TFS

Setting up a standard continuous integration build with VSTS/TFS

If you do a quick Google for pros of setting up continuous integration you'll come across a lot of articles about how good setting up continuous integration (CI) is compared to googling cons of setting up continuous integration which basically gives you the same posts of the the pros search so we won't dig too much into that now .

Posted on April 23, 2017 Build Automation Maximum Effort Visual Studio Visual Studio Marketplace VSTS / TFS

Implementing a dynamic robots.txt

Firstly you might want to know why would you want to implement a dynamic robots.txt? Isn't it better to just put a static file in the web app? Yes it is but when you running your application on certain platforms like web apps in Azure when you using deployment slots. I found this handy link which explains deployment slots quite nicely , but basically what happens is when you switch 2 slots Azure will do a virtual IP switch so traffic from your slots will now be switched (not the files from each slot).

Posted on April 12, 2017 Azure Deployment slots Just Coding MVC robots text file

So I installed VS Enterprise 2017 and have no MTM, where is it?

If you've installed Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise and weren't one of the people that went over to the Individual Components tab to see what you weren't installing you probably don't have Microsoft Test Manager installed.

Posted on March 08, 2017 Test Manager Visual Studio Visual Studio 2017

Using C# 6 to make 'bad' SQL awesome

I'm busy going through Pluralsight watching Exploring C# 6 with Jon Skeet by Rob Conery. Jon Skeet goes ahead and makes this epic method that looks like it's so naughty but is pretty cool.

Posted on February 09, 2017 CSharp-6 Just Coding SQL Injection

Easily adding auditing to a Entity Framework Code First project

If you've done any amount of development where you need to interact with data you'd know that at some point customers or stakeholders always want to know who made that change or when was that change made. To answer these questions you'd look to your auditing which in most cases is the last thing people think about adding into their apps for some reason.

Posted on January 05, 2017 Auditing Data Entity Framework

Opening apps from the directory you in as Administrator

The other day I saw a post that Greg Duncan shared about opening CMD and PowerShell from the directory you in.

Posted on December 13, 2016 Command Line PowerShell Run As Admin Windows Explorer

SSMS 2016 where have my line breaks gone?

I’m hoping it’s not just me but one of the things I was missing from SSMS 2014 is that I had my line breaks when copying large text fields out of the query results. For a long time I have been putting it off and only using SSMS 2014, last week I re-installed my Operating System and decided not to install SSMS 2014 just for this 1 feature.

Posted on July 25, 2016 Data SQL Server SSMS 2016

Visual Studio Team Services Overview - Video Series

A couple weeks ago I was asked to present at DUT to a group of students. The presentation was quite a long one so I had to cut some bits out in order to present in the timeslot that I had. So I decided that I'd record all the content and post it up so that others can potentially benefit from it as well.

Posted on May 03, 2016 Automated Builds Azure Load Testing Release Management Source Control Test Manager VSTS / TFS Work Item Management

Making a Cake Day

Today I decided to record a presentation I did recently. It will be posted soon but in the meantime here's something else. While I was busy recording my wife (Tiani) decided that her and the kids would make a cake. It was as usual one of the best cakes I've tasted. If you haven't seen any of her other creations take a look at her Facebook page3 Tiers Novalty Cakes, below is my cake for my 25th birthday cake.

Posted on May 02, 2016 Personal

VSTS widget for GitHub badges

When I first heard about the SDK for widgets in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) I wanted to make a couple of widgets, one of these was a GitHub widget that would show some info from any GitHub repo on your VSTS dashboard. This can can be helpful when you have your source open on GitHub but still work out of VSTS.

Posted on January 28, 2016 GitHub Projects VSTS / TFS VSTS Extensions

Setting up TFS Build Agents fast

So you could make a script that can do the bits below but if you don’t here is how you can easily create build agents fast for TFS 2015+ or VSO.

Posted on October 16, 2015 TFS TFS Build VSTS / TFS

Load testing using Azure

So everyone wants to have the ultimate system that never breaks can handle ‘all’ the users and shows no strain when doing so. How do you accomplish something like this? Well you could hire developers that know all the best ways to do everything, experts in everything related to configuring applications to run the best that they can on the hardware and software it sits on but what’s the odds of that happening. The other option is to have a bank account that is never ending and throw ‘all’ the hardware at your application to make sure it doesn’t ever have a slow day but then how are you making your money, how do you know when ‘all’ the hardware isn’t enough.

Posted on October 08, 2015 Azure Load Testing Visual Studio Team Services

Browsing localhost with the Microsoft Edge Browser

So if you using windows 10 and doing some web development you would probably have noticed that you can't browse localhost for some reason. And there is a couple of feedback items for it in the Windows Feedback app.

Posted on July 04, 2015 Fiddler Microsoft Edge Windows 10

A 'Hello World' for VSTS Extensions

So if you haven't heard yet VSO Extensions are now in a private preview where you can sign up to get into the preview on extensions integration site. These extensions in the shortest sentence a supported way of doing customizations to VSO that will replace any of the "hacky" extensions that you may be playing around with at the moment like Tiago Pascal's Task Board Enhancer or maybe you have even created your own following similar steps to what I show in my TFS 2013 Customization book.

Posted on June 18, 2015 Azure Free Stuff Getting Started GitHub Projects Grab Some Coffee Rangers Research Visual Studio Team Services VSTS / TFS VSTS Extensions

Creating Iterations in VSTS

This post is part of an overall Series on Visual Studio Online.

Posted on May 25, 2015 Visual Studio Team Services VSTS / TFS VSTS Series

Connecting Test Manager to VSTS

This post is part of an overall Series on Visual Studio Online.

Posted on May 22, 2015 Test Manager Visual Studio Team Services VSTS / TFS VSTS Series

Connecting Visual Studio to VSTS

This post is part of an overall Series on Visual Studio Online.

Posted on May 18, 2015 Visual Studio Visual Studio Team Services VSTS / TFS VSTS Series

Creating your first VSTS Team Project

This post is part of an overall Series on Visual Studio Online.

Posted on May 15, 2015 Visual Studio Team Services VSTS / TFS VSTS Series

Create a new VSTS account

This post is part of an overall Series on Visual Studio Online.

Posted on May 11, 2015 Visual Studio Team Services VSTS / TFS VSTS Series

They said Select * was bad but...

So speaking to any smart database people they will generally tell you that the SELECT * FROM ... is a bad idea and should not be used. Today (well would of been if I didn't procrastinate) I spent many hours debugging something from the wrong places because I used SELECT *. Below is what I found out =). Rennie Moodley helped me understand what was happening after I figured out where the problem was, helped me create the sample code below and then the 2 of us and Christopher Swart poked at and improve the sample and found some more weirdness which you'll also see below.

Posted on April 09, 2015 Data Grab Some Coffee SQL Server T-SQL

Cleaning up the Taskbar on Windows 10

The number 1 thing voted for under Taskbar currently is to hide the new Search bar and task view buttons

Posted on March 26, 2015 Tips Windows 10

Fixing The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070020)

I had some "Weird" things happening with IIS on one of my developer machines. After trouble shooting for a while I decided that was definitely not winning and removed all features from my pc that were even the slightest related to IIS, my pc required a restart so I did. When it came back I re-enabled all the features as I would normally do and then attempted to put my dev site in IIS. For some reason all the sites were stopped and when trying to start them I received the message

Posted on January 21, 2015 IIS Skype

How to Enable Alternate Credentials in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)

Ok so obviously the first you need is to have a VSO account. If you have one already, awesome, continue on and skip this section.

Posted on January 16, 2015 Visual Studio Team Services VSTS / TFS

Windows Insider Program: Changes to Terms of Use

This is just an FYI

Posted on January 15, 2015 Read It Don't Read It Windows Insider Program

Know it. Prove it. 28 days to rock your skills.

If you haven't heard yet Microsoft Virtual Academy are running "know it. Prove it". This is a great opportunity to learn something new or extend your current knowledge in one of the 8 topics available.

Posted on January 13, 2015 #KnowItProveIt Events Microsoft Virtual Academy

Failover or Restart Results in Reseed of Identity - FIX

This post has been ported from http://www.sqlservercentral.com/scripts/MS+SQL+2012/93043/ which I then repeated on https://gbeeming.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/failover-or-restart-results-in-reseed-of-identity-fix/.

Posted on January 07, 2015 Adoption Blockers Data Old Blog Posts SQL Server

Using Azure Resource Manager

In the new Azure Portal you create all your resources in Resource Groups, there is also as part of the Azure SDK's a module called AzureResourceManager by default the module loaded for the Azure SDK is AzureServiceManagement. A blurb from one of the Azure documentation page reads

Posted on December 17, 2014 Azure Azure Resource Manager PowerShell Rangers Research

Creating a new Azure Active Directory User

Open the Azure Management Portal, login and then navigate to the Active Directory tab and click on the Active Directory resource you want to add a user to, alternatively create a new Azure Active Directory resource and then come back to this post.

Posted on December 17, 2014 Azure Azure Active Directory

Assign a Azure Subscription to a existing user

If you have logged into the Azure Management Portal and see a message like below then you need to have a azure subscription assigned to you in order to use the portal and this post is going to help you (probably your Administrator) assign a subscription to your account.

Posted on December 17, 2014 Azure Subscriptions

Application Insights for Windows Store Apps in Azure Portal

If you've been using Application Insights for a while now you would have noticed that with recent Visual Updates the Application Insights SDK had been updated to use a new version that logs AI data into the new Azure Portal. From this if you use Windows Store Apps you would probably have noticed that if you instrument a Windows Store application with the new SDK that you can't actually find your data anywhere although you can see it being logged from the Visual Studio Output window and using Fiddler. The good news is that you will soon be able to have a great experience with the new AI SDK for Windows Store apps as you do for your currently for your web applications, the better news is that below you'll see how to use the new SDK for your Store Apps and see the data in the Azure Portal.

Posted on December 10, 2014 Adoption Blockers Application Insights Azure Rangers Research

Webinar - Performance Tuning .NET & SQL Code using ANTS Profiler

Friend of Red Gate (and .NET MVP) Mitchel Sellers will be hosting it for us alongside Red Gate's APP product manager Ben Emmett. We're running it in conjunction with LinkedIn group LIDNUG (LinkedIn .NET User Group) who have over 52,000 members so we're hoping to get a big list of people signed up! Feel free to sign up yourself or let anyone know who you think might be interested in registering.

Posted on December 03, 2014 Events Red Gate Webinar

My Experience with Codealike

I have been using Codealike for a while now and thought I'd share my experience and things that I like about codealike with everyone. I did mention codealike on This Week on Ch9 when I hosted it last week with Greg Duncan.

Posted on November 13, 2014 Codealike Metrics

Pushing a new project to Chocolatey

Today my DotNet Pretty articles were featured on @coding4fun by Greg Duncan and one of the comments by Niner bc3tech (@bc3tech) requested that I share this solution on Chocolatey. I decided that this was a good idea and decided to share my experience .

Posted on October 28, 2014 Channel 9 Chocolatey DotNet Pretty GitHub Projects MyGet PowerShell

Configuring a Chocolatey Install

So yesterday I posted Pushing a new project to Chocolatey and I said I would create another post showing how to configure how the Chocolatey install runs and this is that post .

Posted on October 28, 2014 Chocolatey DotNet Pretty MyGet PowerShell

Activating your Windows 10

So you shouldn't need to do this but in my case for some reason I needed to activate windows after performing and upgrade from Windows 8.1.

Posted on October 06, 2014 Just longer than a tweet Windows 10

Changing the theme in Windows 10

In windows 10 when you go to Change the background and colors on Start

Posted on October 06, 2014 Windows 10

Creating a VSTS Account for Demos

I need a VSO account for Demos which needs to be separate from my personal and business VSO accounts. The problem is though if you go to the Visual Studio Online page and click Get started for free

Posted on September 26, 2014 Visual Studio Team Services VSTS / TFS

Turning "on" local cache for NuGet

My internet connection is slow or down quite a lot. One of the things Robert MacLean pointed out today in a presentation at a Microsoft Dev Day event today is that is that you can make use of the local cache from previous downloaded packages. Below is how to do this

Posted on September 25, 2014 NuGet Visual Studio

SQL Prompt 6.4 Release

I used to highlight a bunch of text (a couple of statements) then press F5 to execute that statement. With this new release you are able to easily execute the current statement by pressing Shift + F5.

Posted on September 23, 2014 Product Release Productivity SQL Prompt

Upgrade/Publish TFS 2013 Process Templates with PowerShell

I use to make a lot of TFS customizations and had to apply the template changes to multiple team projects which took a bit of time. Depending on the method you use it could be a quick or loooong process . When I first started doing customizations I used the TFS Power Tools to upload changes which is a lot of effort because you are uploading one work item definition at a time into one team project.

Posted on September 12, 2014 GitHub Projects PowerShell Rangers Research TFS 2013 VSTS / TFS

TFS Work Item Visualizers

In my last post (Introduction to DotNet Pretty) I mentioned that I would be added more visualizers to DotNet Pretty soon . Today I finally managed to get around to that and added some visualizers for TFS Work Items.

Posted on July 28, 2014 DotNet Pretty TFS Visual Studio VSTS / TFS

Creating "fake" TFS Builds

This post has been ported from https://gbeeming.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/creating-fake-tfs-builds/.

Posted on July 18, 2014 Adoption Blockers TFS Build VSTS / TFS

Introduction to DotNet Pretty

Another thing that come out of last weeks training was Visual Studio Debuggers. This lead to me finding the coolest visualizer ever called TPL Dataflow Debugger Visualizer which allows you to easily visualize your TPL Dataflow

Posted on July 17, 2014 DotNet Pretty Visual Studio Visual Studio Plugin

Organize your Music Collection

I was looking for a PowerShell script that would remove all media tags (post coming) from a folder of music that I have and along the way I came across a blog post called PowerShell - Automatically organizing your mp3-collection. Although this wasn't exactly what I was looking for right now I gave it a try and then thought to share it after I made a couple of changes to make it work on my machine and categorize a bit more . You can grab the script off GitHub Gist organise-music.ps1.

Posted on July 16, 2014 GitHub Projects PowerShell

Do you know Optional Parameters?

Up until about an hour ago I thought I knew how optional parameters worked but didn't actually. I thought (probably without giving it too much thought) that optional parameters would compile to something that would reflect having multiple overloads as when they came out I ripped out 100s of overloads across multiple libraries and replaces them with optional parameters because it replace code like

Posted on July 07, 2014 CSharp Just Coding Language Features

One year as ALM Ranger and First day as ALM MVP

So a year ago today I joined the ALM Rangers family and have recently been "promoted" into an active ALM Ranger and worked on projects like Upgrade Guide, Version Control (ex Branching and Merging) Guide and Flight Plan.

Posted on July 02, 2014 Chatter MVP Stuff

How to get your identity tokens

This post has been ported from http://gbeeming.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/how-to-get-your-identity-tokens/.

Posted on June 02, 2014 Azure Facebook Google Microsoft Account OAuth Old Blog Posts Twitter

Sys Internals Updater

During Channel 9 Live: Defrag Tools Live – Mark Russinovich, Mark Russinovich mentioned that one of the apps might not have been up to date on the machine he was showing really cool things on . So then I thought hey I never update my sys internals apps.

Posted on May 15, 2014 Cool Apps GitHub Projects Sys-Internals

Sharing code that uses Application Insights

So you have a project that uses Application Insights and want to share it with the world. Sure you just post it to CodePlex, GitHub or some other place that allows publishing of code don't you.

Posted on May 14, 2014 Application Insights Azure My View Rangers Research

Using Application Insights with an existing Windows Store App

If you haven't heard or read about Application Insights you should go to MSDN and read up on all the awesomeness that you can get by using this new feature of VSO. You can also take a look at the Channel 9 series on Application Insights for Visual Studio Online by Charles Sterling.

Posted on May 12, 2014 Application Insights Azure Rangers Research Windows Store App

Hubs.tt will save your life

Updates have been made, see the end of the post

Posted on April 24, 2014 GitHub Projects SignalR TypeScript Visual Studio

Easily download Ch9 videos

I watch and download a lot of videos from Channel 9 and because I’m a developer and always looking for ways to speed up anything I do I searched for a PowerShell script. I eventually found one (can’t remember where) and immediately set it up to download This Week on Channel 9 and Ping Show. Over time I have added many other shows, events and series. The initial script I was found with some modifications was

Posted on April 10, 2014 Channel 9 PowerShell

TF400917: The current configuration is not valid for this feature. This feature cannot be used until you correct the configuration

UPDATE: This has been identified as a bug and will be fixed in the next release for on-premise

Posted on March 27, 2014 TFS TFS 2013 TFS Error Codes VSTS / TFS

Packt Publishing Celebrating 2000 Titles

Have you heard about the campaign that Packt Publishing is running at the moment? They are celebrating 2000 published titles, below are just 3 of the titles that you can get. For more info see http://bit.ly/1j26nPN.

Posted on March 24, 2014 Chatter Packt Publishing

Increase the value of your dashboard with TFS 2013 Update 2

Did you hear? Somasegarblogged that Team Foundation Server 2013 RC is a go-live release. What does that mean for you and your customers? One word

Posted on March 03, 2014 Pinned Items TFS TFS 2013 VSTS / TFS Work Item Charting

Visual Studio Hangs + SystemCertificates + Fiddler

For the last while I have been experiencing weird hangs with Visual Studio 2013. To try identify what was causing the hangs or at least where about the problem was I ran ProcMon.exe on devenv.exe and the point where Visual Studio hung I was getting the below output recursively

Posted on February 25, 2014 Fiddler System Certificates Visual Studio

Using Application Insights with a new Windows Store App

If you haven't heard or read about Application Insights you should go to MSDN and read up on all the awesomeness that you can get by using this new feature of VSO. You can also take a look at the Channel 9 series on Application Insights for Visual Studio Online by Charles Sterling.

Posted on February 18, 2014 Application Insights Azure Windows Store App

Download #MVA Content with PowerShell

So I'm starting to go through some of the content on Microsoft Virtual Academy but I don't have time to do this when I'm by a good internet connection and at the same time don't have time when by the good internet connection to run though all the content I need to download it to watch in my spare time.

Posted on January 24, 2014 Microsoft Virtual Academy PowerShell

TF400324: Team Foundation services are not available from server...

This post was originally found on my old blog at http://gbeeming.wordpress.com/2013/06/28/tf400324-team-foundation-services-are-not-available-from-server/.

Posted on January 21, 2014 Old Blog Posts TFS TFS Error Codes VSTS / TFS

Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 Released

Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 has been released and as usual you are able to use the /layout argument to download all the files so you can share them locally instead of everyone downloading them. As mentioned in Brian Harry's blog here there is no update for TFS this time round but good things are coming for TFS Update 2.

Posted on January 21, 2014 Visual Studio Visual Studio Update

Getting start with a Team Explorer Plugin for VS 2013 Part 1

In these posts we will be going through creating different elements that can be found in the Team Explorer, the aim is to give you the ground knowledge required to extend Team Explorer your way. For an example of some great Team Explorer plugins that demonstrate how much you can do take a look at Team Rooms for Visual Studio 2013 and News which were created by Utkarsh Shigihalli and Tarun Arora for Team Explorer in Visual Studio 2013.

Posted on January 16, 2014 Getting Started Plugins Team Explorer Visual Studio Visual Studio Plugin

Getting start with a Team Explorer Plugin for VS 2013 Part 3

In Getting start with a Team Explorer Plugin for VS 2013 Part 2 we created a Team Explorer Navigation Item and we will be using that item in this post and therefore assume that you have been through it already and created the navigation item.

Posted on January 16, 2014 Getting Started Plugins Team Explorer Visual Studio Visual Studio Plugin

Getting start with a Team Explorer Plugin for VS 2013 Part 4

In Getting start with a Team Explorer Plugin for VS 2013 Part 3 we created a Team Explorer Page and we will be using that item in this post and therefore assume that you have been through it already and created the page.

Posted on January 16, 2014 Getting Started Team Explorer Visual Studio Visual Studio Plugin

Creating a CheckPoint VPN Connection on Windows 8.1

So we use CheckPoint VPN, but the most frustrating part is that when a new version on windows is released the CheckPoint VPN client is incompatible with it and makes your computer weird when you do try use it.

Posted on January 16, 2014 CheckPoint VPN Windows 8.1

How to Enforce Check-In Policies

So one of the benefits of using Server side Plugins is that you can't override them. The problem with this is that the users don't know that the policy is in place until they check-in their code. Wouldn't it be nice if me as a user were told this is what I need to do as in see the requirements from check-in policies but then to make the administrators or business rules that require the policies to also be happy.

Posted on January 10, 2014 Check-In Policies GitHub Projects TFS Server Plugins VSTS / TFS

Download Brian Keller's VM with PowerShell

So yesterday and update for Brian Keller's VM (Visual Studio 2013 Application Lifecycle Management Virtual Machine and Hands-on-Labs / Demo Scripts) was release

Posted on January 10, 2014 Brian Keller VM PowerShell VSTS / TFS

Getting start with a Team Explorer Plugin for VS 2013 Part 2

In Getting start with a Team Explorer Plugin for VS 2013 Part 1 we setup a base to start extending Team Explorer, this post assumes you have already have the base project setup. Creating a new Team Explorer Navigation Item Add a new const to the GuidList class (in the Guids file) like below

Posted on January 09, 2014 Getting Started Plugins Team Explorer Visual Studio Visual Studio Plugin

Start-BitsTransfer : Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Today I find myself with yet another bit of functionality that only works when you are running in Administrator Mode. A while back I had Full Admin Mode always enabled, downside of this is the store apps don't work at all. Up side is your PC works as expected . I created a PowerShell script to download Channel 9 videos as described in my post Easily download Ch9 videos, this script worked perfectly but recently started breaking with the error

Posted on January 04, 2014 PowerShell Requires Admin

Cryptographic failure while signing assembly

Today I got a weird error on code that should just work.

Posted on January 03, 2014 Requires Admin Tips Visual Studio

Add work item links from check in comments

The other night while watching the Visual Studio 2013 Launch a question came up asking if the team had added support yet for automatically linking work items to the change set created when checking in as it currently is in Git. Currently this functionality doesn't exist for TFVC Check ins, at the time I didn't think anything of it but tonight for some reason I thought "hey that would be something simply to create and should hopefully make lives easier for developers". So I opened up Visual Studio and at the same time started a new project on GitHub for TFS Server Plugins. The code required for the plugin was very basic, basically just checked the comment from the check in with a regular expression and then added the links between the change set and all the IDs found in the comments.

Posted on November 16, 2013 GitHub Projects TFS TFS Customisations TFS Server Plugins VSTS / TFS

TypeScript : Emit Error: Write to file failed..

I have been playing around with TypeScript for a while and usually I just publish from my machine but today I decided to setup a CI build for the solution and found that I received the error

Posted on November 15, 2013 TFS TFS Build TypeScript Visual Studio VSTS / TFS

Visual Studio 2012 – Paste Special Feature

Generally the longest and most frustrating part of using a 3rd party API is making all the C# classes that the data will plugin to after you make requests into those API’s.

Posted on October 29, 2013 JSON Visual Studio Visual Studio 2013 XML

First post here

So this is my first post in my new blog which I should be using for quite a bit longer than I Currently have been using my previous blogs on WordPress. I am using a base that was started by Mads Kristensen on GitHub called MiniBlog. I am trying where possible or requested pushing some changes back into the project so that others can also get extra functionality.

Posted on October 22, 2013 Chatter GitHub Projects