General

The industry is clearly trending quite quickly towards Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Rather than building monolithic chunks of code, new applications are often constructed by combining a variety of platform services, themselves usually delivered as Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings.

Any application layers that you build above these services though, are only as good as the underlying services. And that’s where things can go very, very wrong quite quickly.

2018-05-29

For many years, I was blogging at sqlblog.com and I was a big fan of what Adam Machanic and Peter DeBetta had done there. Eventually though,  community server was on its last legs, and WordPress seemed the obvious platform for a blog. Fellow MVP Adam Machanic made it really easy for me to migrate to a WordPress site with a tool that he had created.

I headed off to BlueHost with high hopes, but those hopes just haven’t been fulfilled. I’ve had a number of times that things just stop; it’s hard to get to the bottom of what’s causing it; the support is really glacial at times (ever had a chat with someone who is having a conversation with 10 other people at the same time?); and it turned out that what’s broken was something that apparently I was responsible for but didn’t even know existed.

2018-05-15

The other day, I joined a Skype for Business call from the Microsoft Regional Director program that I’m part of.

I was using my iPhone and I chose to use the web option to connect. I’d say it must have flipped me across to using Skype for Business anyway. (It is installed on my phone).

I thought there would be a large number of people in the meeting, and that we’d be muted the whole time, so when it asked if it was OK for the app to use the microphone, I said “no”. Clearly I should have just left myself muted instead of disabling microphone access.

2018-05-08

Today, we were having trouble saving a PowerPoint slide deck as a set of PNG files.

The error message said:

Sorry we couldn’t find slide1.PNG. Is it possible that it was moved, renamed, or deleted?

After trying to copy the slides into another deck to replace the original deck, the same problem existed. Saving in PPTX format was fine. Curiously, saving individual slides was also fine.

I found a few blog posts online that said it might be to do with an embedded period in the filename. That wasn’t the case but it gave me the clue that I needed.

2018-04-16

One of the changes that has happened with Windows in recent years is the concept of forced updates. Basically, you’re going to get updates from now on, like it or not. Generally that’s a good thing. You can delay them for a little while but not for that long. In the Advanced options update Updates, you can see this:

So you aren’t going to delay them for that long.

2018-03-20

I was interested to see our old buddy Pinal Dave recently post a link to one of another old buddy Brent Ozar’s posts from 2015:

What’s the difference between a contractor, and consultant, and FTE?

Brent defined consultants as giving advice on what the client should do; whereas contractors turn up and do what they’re told. This distinction is pretty clear and I agree with him.

I always thought that was a great post but I also always thought it misses one additional category: mentor.

2018-03-06

There is an old saying about not reinventing the wheel yet this is something that I see happening at client sites every day. I see two main reasons why this happens:

Discoverability

[caption id=“attachment_2809” align=“alignnone” width=“339”] Image by Nathan Dumlao[/caption]

There are so many tools and frameworks in this industry, that you can’t be expected to know them all. I remember when I worked a lot with the .NET framework. I’d go into client sites and see them designing and building classes that were already in the framework. Worse, the framework classes were usually very well designed and tested.

2018-03-06

Many of my customers are software houses (ISVs). In almost all of them, I hear people complaining that they can’t find enough good staff. I think they are trying to tackle the wrong problem.

Most of the staff members they are trying to find are developers, and there are so many great developers out there, but you have to accept that they might not be in the location that you hope they’re in.

2018-02-27

A current trend that I can’t say that I love is constant churn within software applications. I have no interest to go back to the days where we got a new version of SQL Server or Power BI, etc. every few years.

It’s also not a case of who moved my cheese?

In fact, I thrive on change. However, I’ve now become really concerned about how anyone:

• Learns to use a complex application
• Remembers how to use a complex application when they don’t use it daily

I first really struck this issue with Azure. If I was teaching a class that used Azure, I could check every single lab on Sunday night, then Monday morning, the students would find it had all changed. That’s OK for an experienced person, but not OK for a learner.

2018-02-20

I’ve concluded that many software vendors (particularly large ones) don’t understand how much support users of their software provide to each other, and how critical that support is.

The SQL and data communities are a good example of this. When someone has a problem and are wondering how to solve it, they don’t call Microsoft or Google or Oracle (or whichever vendor) first. If they’re lucky, they ask a colleague for help. But most will simply make a Google search (or yes a Bing search) to try to find an answer.

2018-02-13