Devops

A while back, I received another book from my friends at PackT. It was A Developer’s Guide to Cloud Apps Using Microsoft Azure by Hamida Rebai Trabelsi. I have been meaning to get a chance to read it, and I finally did. I don’t know Hamida. I think I need to add her to my LinkedIn contacts though, as she clearly has similar interests in many areas. Hamida is a fellow MVP from Tunisia and currently working in Canada.

2024-12-16

This is yet another post in the category of “I’ll record it here so that the next time I run into it, I can remember what it was”. And if it helps anyone else in the meantime, that’s a bonus. I was trying to push some changes to an Azure Repos repository (as part of an Azure DevOps project). No matter what I tried, the Commit button in the Git window was grayed out.

2024-09-25

This post is in the category of “I’ll record it here so that the next time I run into it, I can remember what it was”. And if it helps anyone else in the meantime, that’s a bonus. I had configured a new repository in Azure Repos (as part of Azure DevOps), cloned it to a local copy, modified some files and tried to push them back to the repo.

2024-09-25

I have a varied client base. Many of my customers are traditional larger financial organizations. But I also work with start-ups and software houses. (Microsoft calls these ISVs - Independent Software Vendors). Most software houses don’t want to sell software any more. Instead, they want to repackage their solutions as services i.e. they want to offer Software as a Service. (SaaS) Converting an application to a service is not easy. Even Microsoft had false starts with moving their on-premises applications to cloud-based offerings.

2022-10-03

I’ve been working at a site that uses proxy servers for Internet access. And we were unable to clone a Git repository in Azure DevOps (AzDO) from within Visual Studio (VS). It was quite frustrating. Visual Studio has got proxy settings and I had configured those: They live in the system.net node within the settings. VS was able to get out to the Internet, and I could find and try to connect to projects in AzDO but I couldn’t clone them from within there.

2021-02-02

I’ve had a number of people asking me lately about what’s happening with SQL Server certifications. There are a number of clients that I deal with, where they require their staff to regularly update their certifications. It’s been part of their ongoing commitment to training. In particular, I’m asked When will the new SQL Server certifications be available? And the (perhaps surprising for some) answer is: They won’t be. The way that Microsoft certifies people has gone through a seismic shift.

2020-04-28

Three years back, with much fanfare at a partner conference, Microsoft announced the Microsoft Professional Degree program. It was going to be a set of courses that you could take that would lead to one of their professional degrees. Now here in Australia, you can’t just call something a degree, and I’m guessing that’s the same in the USA, so I wasn’t surprised when I noticed soon after I started with it, that the name had changed to the Microsoft Professional Program (MPP), and they’d dropped the “degree” word.

2019-07-23

DevOps has quickly become a core part of how many organizations deliver IT, and in particular, how they deliver applications. But just as quickly as it has become popular, a whole series of XXXOps names have appeared. One of the latest is AIOps. So is it just yet another almost meaningless acronym? Well as Betteridges Law of Headlines suggests, the answer is no. When I first saw the term, I was presuming this would be about how to deploy AI based systems, and I wondered why on earth that would need a special name.

2019-05-03

I’m presenting a session on Azure DevOps for SQL Server DBAs that’s designed as an intro for data people who haven’t really worked with it before, at Red-Gate’s SQL in the City events in Brisbane (May 31), Christchurch (June 7), and Melbourne (June 14). Looks like a fun lineup for the day, and it’d be great to catch up with you at one of those events. You can find more info here:

2019-04-12

I spend a lot of time on client sites and time and again, one of the mistakes that I see people making, is trying to start with large projects. I think one of my all time favorite quotes about IT is: Any successful large IT system used to be a successful small IT system. The next time you’re thinking about creating a project that’s going to have a big bang outcome, please remember this.

2019-01-18