Code Buckets

Buckets of code

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Choosing between Visual Studio Team Services and On-Premises TFS

A few days ago I bit the bullet and upgraded our on premises Team Foundation Server from TFS 2015 to TFS 2015 Update 4. As I sat there, after hours, watching the update spinner with the IT department on speed…

Lightning Talk at Leeds Sharp

I’m doing a lightning talk at Leeds Sharp user group tomorrow. It’s going to be 10 to 15 minutes about how to write more robust SpecFlow tests – subtitle ‘how I stopped worrying about my Specflows and started living life…

A web.config implementation for AngularJS

It’s said that when learning a new language or framework it is best to approach it fresh, with no preconceived ideas from other languages. So completely ignoring that advice here is my implementation of an ASP.NET web.config file in AngularJS….

Dealing with invalid js characters in VS Code

Even though mental stability is core personal principle that is rarely violated, here is something that was driving me mad recently. The Problem I was using VS Code do write a demo AngularJS application and I kept getting this error…

Better Numeric Range Input with ASP.NET MVC, HTML5 and JQuery

The Sin I recently wrote this horrible code to generate a drop down box to select any number from 1 to 12. Html.DropDownList(“ddlClockHours”, new List<SelectListItem> { new SelectListItem {Text = 1.ToString(), Value = 1.ToString()}, new SelectListItem {Text = 2.ToString(), Value…

Why Doesn’t My Visual Studio Solution Build? A Troubleshooting Guide

I’m pretty good at getting Visual Studio projects building correctly – I’m a bit of a Visual Studio whisperer. In one job I could get the ‘flag ship’ application up and running on a new machine in half the time…

10 Beautiful Software Development Haikus

In my day job I send a lot of very routine emails announcing new deployments or pleading with people to fix the continuous build. I’ve started to amuse myself by sending them as haikus (3 line poems with 5, 7…

The Worst Thing About Microsoft Exams

I’ve long been a bit of a fan of Microsoft exams – shiny new exams that give the veneer of professionalism to a CV. Lovely. I did a fair number at the start of my career and a few thereafter….

Troubleshooting blank pages and render failures in AngularJS.

An odd thing happened this weekend when I was tinkering with some code while pointedly ignoring my daughter and parenting responsibilities generally. The Task Put in a new directive to implement a reusable panel to display error information. Not ground…

T-SQL Random Data Generator

I’ve often had the need to populate database tables with chunks of random data for testing and so forth and this random data generator stored procedure does the trick for me. I’ve had it knocking round in my sock draw…