2015 in Retrospect

The first day of the year is always special because aside from being the start of the new year, it's also my birthday. As such, it's a great time to reflect on the past year, and make my plans for the year ahead of me. Special thanks I will start by thanking my amazing and awesome wife, without whose support I wouldn't be where I am today. She's been extremely supportive and understanding, taking excellent care of our 2 young daughters. All this, while I'm flying around the world or visiting clients. I'm the luckiest man alive, so thank you …[read more]

Upgrade Ghost blog running on Azure Web Apps

I've been caught by this time and time again so it's time I blogged about it. My Ghost blog is running on Azure Web Apps and it usually runs flawlessly, unless I do something stupid to break it. And since I like shiny new things, this happens quite frequently because I like to upgrade as often as I can. However, upgrading my blog hasn't proved that easy or smooth as I would like it to be because there's a good chance I may miss a step or 2. So the best way to ensure that this doesn't happen again is …[read more]

Database deployment automation with DbUp

How do you manage your database deployments? You'll be surprised but this is one subject that seems to be a problem in many places I've worked. It all depends, of course, on how you run your deployments in general. So, what are the usual options? Manual - you copy all the files to your target server(s) manually and you deploy your database scripts by running them separately on each database server. Scripted - you use scripts, like PowerShell, to semi-automate your deployments by taking the steps from the manual process described above and running them in an automated way. …[read more]

FullStack 2015 - Retrospect and impressions

I'm currently sitting on my plane flying back from London where I spent an excellent couple of days attending the FullStack conference. FullStack is, oddly enough, a primarily front-end focused conference! Most of the talks had an element of JavaScript + a framework and/or a tool. It was all about writing cool front-end code(z). I'm sure my friend @rankida (David Rankin) would have loved it :) I was there to talk about TypeScript and how we can use it to improve JavaScript by leveraging ES6 and ES7 features. I flew in on Monday and arrived at the venue shortly after …[read more]

CodeMotion Tel Aviv 2016 - Retrospect

I'm sitting at the TelAviv airport waiting to board my flight. My ridiculously long flight that will see me going through the following airports: TLV-> CDG->LHR->GLA. All in all, it will take me over 14 hours for what should have been only 6 hours. Was it worth it? It was and then some more. This year I was fortunate to get an invite to speak at CodeMotion Tel Aviv. I missed my chance to make it at the Italian CodeMotion but I didn't care that much. I don't have any friends in Italy. On the …[read more]

Improve your unit tests with Moq and Mock.Of<>()

Spending my days writing lots of unit tests lately...You know the drill. For most of my tests, I like to use Moq, the .NET mocking library that allows you to mock objects and services. It's one of the best libraries for complementing and supporting unit tests. So today, I came across the Mock.Of<T>(). When creating a mock, we tend to use the following syntax: var mockService = new Mock<ISomeService>(); And then we setup the mock with the appropriate property values and methods in order to use it in our unit tests. So, in …[read more]

On programming tools, extensions and IDEs

If you’re involved in software development in any capacity, chances are you have your favourite toolset. If you are a .NET developer, you’re most likely using [Visual Studio [Community or Pro/Ultimate]](https://www.visualstudio.com/" target="_blank). If you are in Java-land then you get pick between [IntelliJ](https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/" target="_blank) and [Eclipse](https://eclipse.org/downloads/" target="_blank). And if you’re an iOS and OSx developer, you have [xCode](https://developer.apple.com/xcode/" target="_blank) (bless you). Web developers are more flexible …[read more]

The new Azure Powershell Resource Manager - 1.0 Preview

The new Azure PowerShell preview module is out. I use PowerShell on Azure to automate many tasks and it's something that we use in the team quite frequently. Yes, you can use the Azure Portal (website) to accomplish the same tasks but I like using PowerShell for a few reasons: Create repeatable and consistent tasks Share the files and knowledge that comes with it Automate all the things! This preview release is the first major version taking it to 1.0. Unfortunately, it brings some breaking changes with it. For this reason, it's imperative that you read the documentation before …[read more]