Sage Global Hackathon 2018

On Wednesday I had fun in leading a team in the 12 hour Sage Global Hackathon 2018, with teams competing globally in the UK, South Africa, France, Canada, Brazil and Spain. The main theme of the event was: "Delivering or consuming APIs, to improve product interoperability and extensibility, and drive associated efficiencies and growth". On …

Amazon Alexa Workshop

Today I was lucky enough to join an Amazon Alexa workshop in Newcastle ran by Jamie Grossman and Andrea Muttoni from Amazon AlexaDevs, covering some great topics including Render Templates, state and session management, Alexa Voice Profiles, Alexa for Business, localisation and the long awaited notifications (we may be waiting a little longer for this.... 🙂 ) As …

New features in MongoDB 3.6

MongoDB Europe 2017 This week I had front row seats at the MongoDB Europe 2017 conference in London to find out the exciting new features that have been added to the latest release 3.6. The new features have been grouped into the following categories by MongoDB: Speed to Develop: Change streams, retryable writes, tunable consistency, greater …

ODP.NET hang on Insert with return value within a Transaction

Introduction So, you are finding that ODP.NET seems to be hanging on a second insert within a loop which is part of a transaction.. and it's driving you crazy yeah? The only thing that you notice is that it is essentially the same insert statement each iteration of the loop for a valid business reason; …

How to create an IoT/AI Slack Chat Bot

So what is IoT, AI, Slack & Bots anyway?.... Let's get started with a quick breakdown of what each of these are: IoT - According to Wikipedia IoT is defined as "The internet of things (IoT) is the network of physical devices, vehicles, buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity …

Upgrading to Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 2.1

How to upgrade an on premises Team Foundation Server to version 2015 update 2.1 Recently I had the task of upgrading our on premises TFS solution from TFS 2013 Update 5 to TFS 2015 Update 2.1. This article discusses the upgrade steps, how long the process took, as well as some of the pitfalls with …

Henge Docks Review: Macbook Air Vertical docking

Clawing back more desk space for the design savvy For me personally I can't work with a cluttered, untidy desk, with little space and more cables visible than a train station; which is why I thought about docking my Macbook Air and connecting it to my Dell monitor. Having spent some time researching the best …

Working with Sass in Visual Studio 2015

Introduction Sass is the perfect modern solution for maintaining many large complex CSS files, and keeping the CSS code DRY; with many developers using Sass now to overcome these maintenance problems. If you have never heard of Sass and want to learn more then look at the sections below. The official Sass website describes Sass as: Sass …

Dependency Injection and IoC in .NET with Unity

Introduction Dependency Injection in .NET is not a complicated concept to understand and implement; however when working on projects with other developers I often see them using the new keyword to create a dependant object (i.e. concrete class), rather than using the dependency injection design pattern alongside interfaces, and its a code smell to me personally when I see …

SSIS MySQL to Azure SQL using Visual Studio 2015

Introduction Recently I had the pleasure of using SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) to transfer a database from a remote MySQL database to an Azure SQL database in the cloud. This post describes the steps in transferring the data using SSIS through Visual Studio 2015 and the integrated BI Data Tools. What is SSIS? Microsoft …