When Software Attacks!

Speaking on DevOps at Future Decoded

I am now going to speaking on the DevOps track at Future Decoded. I’ll be channelling Richard to talk about how our dev-release pipeline is constructed at Black Marble and how the various Microsoft tools that we use could be swapped out for alternatives in a heterogeneous environment.

Whilst this isn’t an area that I usually speak around, it’s something that I am very involved in as Richard and I constantly look to improve our internal practices around development, test and deployment. Big thanks to Susan Smith for inviting me to participate.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, November 6, 2014

A week with the Surface Pro 3

Robert unexpectedly (gotta love him!) gave me a surprise present in the form of a Microsoft Surface Pro 3. I’ve now been using it for a week and I thought it was time to put my thoughts into words.

You’ll pry it out of my cold, dead hands

Overall, this is a fantastic bit of kit and it’s the device I have used most at home, for meetings and even sometimes at my desk. The only reason it hasn’t replaced my stalwart ThinkPad X220T is that it has neither the memory nor the storage to run the virtual machines I still need. It’s light, comfortable to hold, has great battery life and the screen is gorgeous.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Saturday, July 26, 2014

Automating TFS Build Server deployment with SCVMM and PowerShell

Richard and I have been busy this week. It started with a conversation about automating the installation of new build servers. Richard was looking at writing PowerShell to install and configure the TFS build agent, along with all the various SDKs that we use across all out projects. Our current array of build servers have all been built by hand and each has a different set of SDKs to build specific project types. Richard’s aim is to make a single, homogenous build server configuration so we can then scale out for capacity much more quickly than before.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 17, 2014

SharePoint 2013: Creating Managed Metadata Columns that allow Fill-In Choices

This is a relatively quick post. There’s a fair bunch of stuff written about creating columns in SharePoint 2013 that use Managed Metadata termsets. However, some of it is a pain to find and then some. I have had to deal with two frustrating issues lately, both of which boil down to poor sharepoint documentation.

Wictor Wilén wrote the post I point people at for most stuff on managed metadata columns, but this time the internet couldn’t help.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, July 17, 2014

Safely modify SharePoint 2013 Web.Config files using PowerShell

One of the things we learn early in our SharePoint careers was not to manually edit the web.config files of a web application. SharePoint involves multiple servers and has its own mechanisms for managing web.config updates.

Previously, I’ve created xml files with web.config modifications and copied those to each WFE. Those changes are merged into the initial web.config by SharePoint.

I’ve always been vaguely aware of there being a better way, but never needed to track it down from an IT point of view. Last week, however we wanted to change a setting to enable blobcache on the servers hosting a particular web application so decided to use the opportunity to figure out a ‘best way’ to do this.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, July 1, 2014