I was working on a Web App which uses a SQL database and EntityFramework. The app is hosted in Azure. I spent some time fixing up the csproj file so that the build and release pipelines work correctly i.e. once the code is committed to the repository, a build is kicked off and deployment takes place. So far so good. However on visiting the site I see this error: Error : The underlying provider failed on Open. Stack Trace : at System.Data.Entity.Core.EntityClient.EntityConnection.Open() at System.Data.Entity.Core.Objects.ObjectContext.EnsureConnection(Boolean shouldMonitorTransactions) ...

New Year’s resolutions don’t always seem to stick, when you visit them in February. So this year I’ve waited till the end of January to make mine. I was inspired by this post The Ultimate Guide to your best year ever which breaks it down real nice. Here are a few gems: decide this will be your best year…ever. Will you do your life’s work (programming) starting this year? adopt a growth mindset, adopt an abundance mindset, adopt a mastery mindset “Who do you need to become, to be the kind of person you want to be?” “Who do you want to be, and what experiences do you want to create?” Word for the Year: Epic Daily habits, set Goals and Inspired actions A attitude of Gratitude “Don’t Let Yesterday Take Up Too Much of Today” - Will Rogers What a fantastic post, and it is written by none other than J.D.Meier of Getting Results the Agile Way fame. I purchased that one a while ago. ...

[Updated 14 Feb 2020] In addition to weight loss and mental clarity, some people have reported being able to reverse type 2 diabetes with a keto lifestyle. My personal benefits have been: higher energy levels mental clarity I have been on this journey since Aug 2016 and have benefitted from non-scale victories. To get started with keto [a low carbohydrate high fat diet], begin by listening to this podcast Getting started. There are over a hundred episodes in this podcast, so take your time and at a minimum, listen to the first 13. ...

For a while, I have been using the Windows bash shell to run the blog locally while I edit and then used the bash shell to commit my changes to Github. I’ve now started using VS Code to edit and deploy my blog, all from VS Code. How do I do this? Launch VS Code ( Visual Studio Code) and open up the folder of the blog e.g. D:\RichardBorges.github.io In the terminal window ( in VSCode ) ensure that you have a wsl terminal ( Windows Subsystem for Linux). I’m running Windows 10, i.e. a Windows bash shell. Read more here Type bundle exec jekyll serve in the terminal window and this will build and launch the site locally at http://127.0.0.1:4000. ...

On my DevOps learning journey, I came across this useful resource azuredevopsdemogenerator containing templates with pre-made build and release pipelines. Once the selected project is loaded into your Azure Devops organisation ( I created my own personal organisation there, separate from the work one, as a sandbox in Azure Devops) you can see the prepopulated Boards, Pipelines, Repos etc. You can now build and deploy to your own instance. Bonus: They even have a Parts Unlimited package of ‘The Phoenix Project’ fame. So if you have read the book, this makes it real. Nice.

Who would have thought DevOps could be so interesting? I read a version of this about 5 years ago and recently found that there is a Kindle version avaialble. The book is The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win Kindle Edition by Gene Kim (Author), Kevin Behr (Author), George Spafford (Author) A wonderful read and very relatable.

Macrium Reflect Free Edition to clone an existing disk This helped me immensely, when I added an additional 1TB SSD to my rig.

These are my notes on upgrading elasticseach from v5.3 to v6.4.2. This was done on Windows Server 2016 with 32GB RAM and 500GB hdd. The source data was about 300GB in size. Steps Download elasticsearch + kibana from downloads. After extracting to my local drive, I used NSSM to run these as windows services. You should now be able to visit http://localhost:9200 (elasticsearch) and http://localhost:5601 ( kibana ) Copy across the 5.3 data using robcopy. Install elasticsearch 5.3 ( update elasticsearch.yml ) to run 5.3 at http://localhost:8200 ( as 6.4.2 is running on port 9200) Create the new indices on 6.4.2 Migrate the data from 5.3 to 6.4.2 using reindex Additional resources Upgrade Elasticsearch

Attended NDC sydney and quite enjoyed it. This is a 3 day conference held at the Hilton in Sydney CBD. They even organise a childrens coding camp before the start of the conference. Thats a nice touch. Attended quite a few talks over the 3 days. The sessions The ones that stand out for me were ASP.Net Core 2.1 - the out of the box benefits Using Async-Await correctly in C# Team culture ( e.g. no blame retrospectives ) React + GraphQL + Docker

I had some binary data in a table in SQL and wanted to save it locally. The data was emails (msg files). I could have done this using powershell and the Invoke-SqlCmd commandlet, but for whatever reason, invoke-sqlcmd refused to work on my machine. After spending a few hours trying to get that to work, I gave up and jumped on stackoverflow to find another solution. Linqpad to the rescue I happened on this link Script to save varbinary data to disk which was just the solution I was looking for. Download LinqPad 5 (the free version is fine) and then ...