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Posts from 2014

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Dec 17, 2014·3 min read

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.

AzureSubscriptions
Dec 17, 2014·2 min read

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.

AzureAzure Active Directory
Dec 17, 2014·13 min read

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

AzureAzure Resource ManagerRangers Research+1 more
Dec 10, 2014·4 min read

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.

AzureAdoption BlockersRangers Research+1 more
Dec 03, 2014·1 min read

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.

EventsWebinarRed Gate
Nov 13, 2014·5 min read

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.

CodealikeMetrics
Oct 28, 2014·2 min read

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 .

MyGetDotNet PrettyChocolatey+1 more
Oct 28, 2014·6 min read

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 .

MyGetChannel 9DotNet Pretty+3 more
Oct 06, 2014·1 min read

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.

Just longer than a tweetWindows 10
Oct 06, 2014·2 min read

Changing the theme in Windows 10

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

Windows 10
Sep 26, 2014·4 min read

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

VSTS / TFSVisual Studio Team Services
Sep 25, 2014·2 min read

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

Visual StudioNuGet
Sep 23, 2014·2 min read

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.

SQL PromptProduct ReleaseProductivity
Sep 12, 2014·5 min read

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.

VSTS / TFSRangers ResearchTFS 2013+2 more
Jul 28, 2014·3 min read

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.

VSTS / TFSVisual StudioTFS+1 more
Jul 18, 2014·7 min read

Creating "fake" TFS Builds

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

VSTS / TFSAdoption BlockersTFS Build
Jul 17, 2014·4 min read

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

Visual StudioVisual Studio PluginDotNet Pretty
Jul 16, 2014·1 min read

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.

GitHub ProjectsPowerShell
Jul 07, 2014·4 min read

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

Language FeaturesCSharpJust Coding
Jul 02, 2014·1 min read

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.

MVP StuffChatter
Jun 02, 2014·3 min read

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/.

AzureMicrosoft AccountFacebook+4 more
May 15, 2014·2 min read

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.

Sys-InternalsCool AppsGitHub Projects
May 14, 2014·4 min read

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.

AzureMy ViewRangers Research+1 more
May 12, 2014·4 min read

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.

AzureRangers ResearchApplication Insights+1 more
Apr 24, 2014·8 min read

Hubs.tt will save your life

Updates have been made, see the end of the post

SignalRVisual StudioTypeScript+1 more
Apr 10, 2014·5 min read

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

Channel 9PowerShell
Mar 27, 2014·4 min read

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

VSTS / TFSTFSTFS Error Codes+1 more
Mar 24, 2014·1 min read

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.

Packt PublishingChatter
Mar 03, 2014·4 min read

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

VSTS / TFSPinned ItemsTFS+2 more
Feb 25, 2014·2 min read

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

Visual StudioFiddlerSystem Certificates
Feb 18, 2014·4 min read

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.

AzureApplication InsightsWindows Store App
Jan 24, 2014·4 min read

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.

Microsoft Virtual AcademyPowerShell
Jan 21, 2014·2 min read

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/.

VSTS / TFSTFSTFS Error Codes+1 more
Jan 21, 2014·3 min read

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.

Visual StudioVisual Studio Update
Jan 16, 2014·3 min read

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.

Windows 8.1CheckPoint VPN
Jan 16, 2014·3 min read

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.

Visual StudioVisual Studio PluginGetting Started+2 more
Jan 16, 2014·3 min read

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

Visual StudioVisual Studio PluginGetting Started+2 more
Jan 16, 2014·4 min read

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.

Visual StudioVisual Studio PluginGetting Started+2 more
Jan 16, 2014·4 min read

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.

Visual StudioVisual Studio PluginGetting Started+1 more
Jan 10, 2014·3 min read

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

VSTS / TFSBrian Keller VMPowerShell
Jan 10, 2014·3 min read

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.

VSTS / TFSCheck-In PoliciesTFS Server Plugins+1 more
Jan 04, 2014·1 min read

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

Requires AdminPowerShell
Jan 03, 2014·2 min read

Cryptographic failure while signing assembly

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

Visual StudioRequires AdminTips