Configuring SQL Server Always On Availability Groups in Azure - Part 1

One of the coolest features in Azure is the fact that you can create Always On Availability Groups and configure a Listeners in order to provide high availability and redundancy to your back-end SQL Server solution. If you want to know more about AlwaysOn and what it can do for you, you can go here. Up until recently, Always On was a bit “hacky” on Azure as we had to use workarounds, especially for the Listener part, which is one of the most important feature as far as applications are concerned. However, the latest patches and updates to Windows Server …[read more]

Processing payments on your site using Stripe and C#

Update: The current example of processing payments is NOT PCI-compliant as the card details are posted to the server. A better approach is to use the Stripe.js to generate the token and then process the payment - thanks to Christian Bryant for raising it in the comments. Take me to the PCI-Compliant option now As a web developer you are bound to have come across a requirement to implement some form of online payment processing for a site. This can be achieved using any number of third party providers such as Sage or PayPal etc. Although most of these …[read more]

Add search to your Ghost blog with Tapir

If you have decided to use Ghost as your blog engine, you may soon realize that it's missing one vital thing and that Searching. Since I tend to use my blog as a knoweldge base and a repository of things that took effort to implement, I want to be able to search my content at any time with ease. Although I believe that the Ghost developers are actively working on integrating Search in the blog engine, there are only a couple of solutions at the moment to help you implement search yourself. One is Google Search and the other is …[read more]

Configuring custom domains for Azure Website

First off, if you don't have an Azure account, go get one! You get 10 websites for free plus a whole lot of goodies for free. I recently deployed a new site and I wanted to point a custom domain to it. However, the available documentation wasn't particularly clear. There are two ways to have a custom domain pointing to an Azure website, using A Records and CName records, but I wasn't sure if I needed both or just one etc and I wanted to use A records. This had me looking for a bit but thanks to a post …[read more]

Configure Database Mail on SQL Server Azure VM using T-SQL

Emails are an integral part for any SQL Administrator who wishes to stay on top of thins. Emails can be used to send alerts on job failures, run and report on diagnostics or return a query result set that your users may be interested in. Today we will look on how to configure SQL Server to send emails from an Azure VM. However, there is little to no difference between this configuration and an on premise SQL Server. However, Azure doesn't offer smtp servers by default so you have to use a third party provider. For this example, we will …[read more]

Setting up a new Windows 8.1 machine the easy way - using Chocolatey Nuget

I admit it! I like new, shiny things. Besides, I wanted to sync all my devices (Surface and laptop) to the same version of the OS. The Surface Pro upgrade was a breeze. Since I don’t keep any data on my Surface, it was a case of just running the upgrade. However, the laptop upgrade wasn’t as straightforward, since I’m running Windows 8 on a Mac Book Pro Retina using Bootcamp. Yes, I know, it’s wrong, but I like it so deal with it. Since the inline upgrade didn’t work and rendered my machine useless …[read more]

Working with Radio buttons and jQuery

Working with Radio buttons and jQuery Radio buttons are one of the essential HTML elements that you can find in almost any website that contains a form for users to enter data. In this blog today we will do the following: Add radio buttons dynamically using jQuery And, get the value and text of the selected radio button using jQuery First you need a standard boiler plate html page that has a reference to the jQuery library. For this example we will use the Google jQuery CDN to pull the library on our page. At this stage, you page should …[read more]