.Net Development, Azure, DevOps, Ideas and Life...

H ardware is essentially a vehicle for Software.   With many projects requiring very specific hardware requirements, such as printing without  start-up  time, artificial intelligence, and more  controversial  projects like Bitcoin Mining, the route to market could be significantly improved with a more agile and iterative approach.        -  open-source hardware  Project Olympus   One of the goals  behind P roject Olympus is to close the gap of the average 1.5 years of  development cycle for hardware and get closer to the  typical  increments being achieved for  software development.        the incompleteness theorem    Microsoft's rationale for sharing an incomplete design is that "open source hardware development is currently not as agile and iterative as open-source software. ... By sharing designs that are actively in deve...

Coming up with a branching strategy that works well can be challenging when working with multiple developers and managing release cycles. A simple approach is presented here to manage release cycles, with a small to medium sized team of developers while still being able to react to production issues and fix bugs. The primary goal being to isolate work streams without impacting development progress. Background Git does not enforce any particular strategy when it comes to branching which is partly what makes it such a great and flexible repository. The problems start to arise though as you move into different stages of your development process. As an example, you have a release almost complete but don’t want to impede progress on the upcoming release cycle which is where the majority of effort is required. The Basic Approach The focus is around producing a release while still being able to react to hotfixes or production issues without impacting on going development of featu...

A feature that caught my eye is the App Service Editor , a preview addition to the  Development Tools  section of the navigation bar of your app in the Azure Portal. ☁ In essence it is a  web-based editor for App Service. That's right, you can edit and save your web site LIVE with a clean, easy to use, web editor! We have already come to love the Visual Studio Team Services code editor, which allows code and config edits pre-deployment but this feature is production level, post deploy / release. Cannot stress how useful this is for quick fixes and post deployment edits which would otherwise mean re-deploying or falling back to FTP. Project  Kudu  has been around for a while now but great to see it appearing as a first class citizen in the portal. The underlying functionality is provided by the  Monaco Editor , which powers Visual Studio Code . It is worth noting that if Continuous Integration (CI) has been enabled for your application, that t...

While aiming to test whether a SQL connection is succeeding between an Application server and a remote Database Server, it is often not possible to install SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or Microsoft Command Line Utilities (MsSqlCmdLnUtils) due to the locked down nature of the targets, particularly in test and production environments. A lightweight approach that worked for me recently, makes use of components that have been a part of windows boxes for a long time, albeit different levels of database driver support as the components have evolved, the Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC). MDAC provide a Universal Data Link, which can be configured using a common user interface for specifying connection properties as well as testing the connection.  Data Link properties dialog box At Assemblysoft we specialise in  Custom Software Development  tailored to your requirements. We have experience creating Booking solutions, as we did f...