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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Richard and I spend a good deal of time talking about Lab Manager and our environments. I’ve written here before about our migration to the latest versions of the various components of Lab and both Richard and I have delivered sessions at user groups and conferences.
Microsoft UK have been running technical events around the UK for a couple of years now, and it’s a great thing. Too many events are focused in the south of England and there are lots of IT pros north of the M25!
Lets get the disclaimer out of the way first: What I’ve done is absolutely unsupported by Microsoft. Just because it works for me does not guarantee it will work for you and I am not in any way recommending that you follow my lead!
My X220 is a stalwart machine. It’s built like a tank and can be upgraded in a numb of ways. Mine now has 16Gb of RAM and two SSDs which allow me to run multi-VM environments for development and demo. Unfortunately, however, there is no USB 3 on the laptop. That’s a pain if I need to copy stuff on and off via USB, or run VMs from a USB 3 pod.
It’s a busy week. I’m speaking at the [Black Marble-hosted GWAB2 event](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event= Global Windows Azure Bootcamp 2) this Saturday, along with Steve Spencer and Andy Westgarth. Richard and Robert will also be on hand which means between us we should be able to cover questions on much of the newly re-monikered Microsoft Azure.
Last week I moved our SCVMM from 2012 with service pack 1 to 2012 R2. Whilst the actual process was much simpler than I expected, we had a pretty big constraint imposed upon us by Lab Manager that largely dictated our approach.
This is part 4 of a series of posts building powershell functions to create and modify Azure Virtual Networks. Previous posts have covered functions to create virtual networks and then delete them. In this part, I’m going to show you functions that will define local networks and configure site-site VPN connectivity between a local and virtual network.
I also need to give credit to the Office 365 support team over this. They were very quick in their response to my support incident, but I was quicker!
Whilst working on an Office 365 site for a customer today I had a moment of blind panic. The site is using custom branding and I was uploading a new version of the master page to the site when things went badly wrong. The upload appeared to finish OK but the dialog that was shown post upload was not the usual content type/fill in the fields form, but a plain white box. I left it for a few minutes but nothing changed. Unperturbed, I returned to the mater page gallery… Except I couldn’t. All I got was a white page. No errors, nothing. No pages worked at all – no settings pages, no content pages, nothing at all.
This is part three of a series of posts about using powershell to script the creation, deletion and (hopefully) modification of Azure Virtual Networks. In part 1 I went through the key steps with some rough code. Part 2 showed the much tidier functions I’ve now written to create virtual network elements. This is part 3, and I will present functions to remove elements. Hopefully I will manage to get the modification functions to work which be a fourth installment!
In my previous post I talked about what was involved in creating an Azure network configuration using Powershell. In this post I’ll cover where I’ve got so so far, which is a series of functions that do the following:
I’ll be honest, I expected this task to be easier than it is. What I’m working on is some powershell that we might use as part of automated build processes that will create a new Virtual Network in an Azure subscription. What I’m after is to add a new network to the existing configuration.
This is really a follow-up to my earlier post about tips with SharePoint publishing customisations. Composed looks have been a part of a couple of projects recently. In the first, a solution for on-premise, we used code in a feature receiver to add a number of items to the Composed Looks list. In the second, for Office 365, a bit of research offered an alternative approach with no code.
I’m pleased to have been asked to speak at NEBytes again – a great user group that meets in Newcastle. I’ll be speaking about customising SharePoint 2013 using master pages, themes and search templates, along the same lines as my recent blog post.
You will recall from my earlier post how much I like my Dell Venue 8 Pro and how disappointed I was that the stylus was on back-order until March.
Imagine my surprise, then, when a package arrived at the beginning of this week with a shiny new stylus in it!
I’ve been hat-swapping again since just before christmas (which explains the lack of Azure IaaS posts I’m afraid). I’ve been working on a large SharePoint 2013 project, most lately on customising a number of elements around publishing. Getting those custom elements into SharePoint from my solution raised a number of little snags, most of which were solved by the great internet hive mind. It took me a long time to find some of those fixes, however, so I thought I’d collect them here and reference the original posts where appropriate.
