Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator

6th of June, 2014 / / 2 Comments

This intro is unashamedly lifted from a Microsoft article but I couldn’t say it any better: “The cloud has enormous potential to reduce operational expenses and achieve new levels of scale, but moving workloads away from the people who depend on them can increase networking costs and hurt productivity. Users expect high performance and don’t care where their applications and data are hosted” Cloud is a journey, to get there takes more than just migrating your workloads to the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Do It Yourself Cloud Accelerator”

How to install Magento on Azure Websites

23rd of May, 2014 / / 10 Comments

This blog explains in a step-by-step how to install (fresh install or migrate) a Magento package into Azure websites

Background

1. What is Magento?
Magento is an eCommerce software platform used by some of the world’s leading brands. More details could be found here on Magento.

2. Why install Magento on Azure?
There is a long list of reasons of why would somebody wants to migrate to the cloud, but few of these reasons could be 1) Cost saving 2) Load Balancing 3) Scalability 4) Less maintenance.… [Keep reading] “How to install Magento on Azure Websites”

Demonstrating Cross Platform testing with Browserstack – A beginner’s guide

16th of May, 2014 / / No Comments

This is a follow-on from my previous post on Cross-platform testing. Hope you enjoyed the realms of wandering around the way you could potentially plan your platform testing. I thought I would take some time to explain some of the concepts on cross-platform testing with examples from Browserstack.

Browserstack (www.browserstack.com) is a standard tool these days for testing your web application across multiple platforms.

The current Browserstack product family offers the following three broad service lines (The website offer a good amount of details on different products and offerings)

a.… [Keep reading] “Demonstrating Cross Platform testing with Browserstack – A beginner’s guide”

Simulate moving to the Cloud with NEWT

28th of March, 2014 / / No Comments

I’ve blogged a bit in the past about the unique challenges encountered when moving to the cloud and the unavoidable consequence of introducing new network hops when moving workloads out of the data centre. I’m currently working for a unique organisation in the mining industry who are quite aggressively pursuing cost saving initiatives and have seen cloud as one of the potential savings. The uniqueness of the IT operating environment comes from the dispersed and challenging “branch offices” which may lie at the end of a long dedicated wired, microwave or satellite link

Centralising IT services to a data centre in Singapore is all very well if you’re office is on a well serviced broadband Internet link but what of these other data centres with more challenged connectivity.… [Keep reading] “Simulate moving to the Cloud with NEWT”

Do It Yourself Fiddler Service

23rd of February, 2014 / / 2 Comments

I recently upgraded to Windows 8.1 which required a full install (upgraded from the 8.1 Preview which annoyingly didn’t support upgrades). A full install of my laptop is getting easier and easier as more of the things I use are delivered as services. The install list is getting smaller due to the combined effect of software as a service and a simpler working life.

I still had to install these:

  • Microsoft Office 2013
  • Microsoft Visio 2013
  • Microsoft Project (yes yes I know but there really is no good alternative yet)
  • LastPass
  • Visual Studio 2013
  • And…Fiddler!
… [Keep reading] “Do It Yourself Fiddler Service”

How to Link Existing Visual Studio Online with Windows Azure

6th of January, 2014 / / 4 Comments

I was trying to link my Visual Studio Online (formerly Team Foundation Service or TFS Online) tenant to my Windows Azure subscription and stumbled through some items that are not well documented. The main problem I ran into was that Visual Studio Online only used Microsoft Accounts and in my case my Windows Azure subscriptions are setup using Office 365 accounts and not Microsoft Accounts. The next problem I ran into was that account owner set on my Visual Studio Online wasn’t the account I thought it was so I need to find a way to update the account owner before I could proceed.… [Keep reading] “How to Link Existing Visual Studio Online with Windows Azure”

Do It Yourself Web API Proxy

24th of November, 2013 / / 13 Comments

I had promised a couple of blogs on dealing with the challenges of distance that are unavoidable as we adopt a variety of dispersed Cloud deployed services. The first was using a WCF Custom Channel to cache SharePoint content which is now a bit old school. This is the second.

The rate of change at the moment is astonishing. I’ve been sitting on blog number two for quite some time, but when I go to build an example and type it up, something new has come along that is a slightly better way of doing it.… [Keep reading] “Do It Yourself Web API Proxy”

Map SharePoint Libraries with local file drive – A step-by-step guide

6th of September, 2013 / / 6 Comments

There are a number of articles talking about how to map SharePoint libraries to your local drive, but few of them are in depth, especially on how to set up the prerequisites. I hope this post can provide detailed information for users who need to do this. I will also give an overview and talking about some advantages of mapping SharePoint libraries with local file drive.

Prerequisites

You need to make sure the “WebClient” service is up and running on your server.… [Keep reading] “Map SharePoint Libraries with local file drive – A step-by-step guide”

Exchange Online Inactive Mailboxes

20th of June, 2013 / / 5 Comments

In an enterprise deployment of Office 365 Wave 14, one of the recurring pain points was how to handle mailbox data retention once a user left the business and the data is required for compliance purposes. There were a number of options available to handle this:

  • Leave the mailbox in-situ and disable the user account
  • Change the license SKU to Kiosk Plan 2 as it’s a cheaper license cost and disable the user account
  • Migrate the departed user mailbox back to the on-premises hybrid Exchange platform
  • Use a 3rd party cloud archive solution

While all of these will work, on an enterprise scale they’re quite clunky and even with an identity management solution in place, they’re not particularly practical or cost effective.… [Keep reading] “Exchange Online Inactive Mailboxes”

Evolution of coding

14th of June, 2013 / / 5 Comments

Many years ago, back in Uni, I saw 2 guys in a computer lab writing a whole programming assignment without running it even once. The program was of relatively decent size written in C and consequently there were hundreds of compilation errors. That’s so silly, I thought…

After graduation I used to be a C++ programmer. The syntax sometimes was quite tricky and you would often compile after every new line of code. Sometimes, you would dare to write a whole function, just to find 10 compilation errors.… [Keep reading] “Evolution of coding”