For the past 4 months I’ve been using Visual Studio 2015 rather then Visual Studio 2013 and yesterday, I hit a bug with SSRS (shows how much I love SSRS). The bug appeared when it came to deployment The error was deploying SSRS report Exception calling “CreateCatalogItem” with “7” argument(s): “The definition of this report is not valid or supported by this version of Reporting Services. The report definition may have been created with a later version of Reporting...
One of the annoying things about working with multiple languages is they each have their differences – obviously, otherwise there would only be 1 language! Although there is good reason to have these differences they still have elements that are a pain. One of the most annoying things, other then “do you require a semicolon at the end of the statement?” is comments. Comments aren’t executed or complied but they help developers read code....
Yesterday I went to investigate a problem someone had reported only to discover a butt load of releases As you can see, I have more releases then commits. A build was triggered by a commit, but this doesn’t explain why. I tried switching it up so it only builds when you put [build] in the commit message – which resulted in having to commit the yaml file as the feature isn’t available via the web interface, it does make sense to have this under version control....
So today I managed to move SIMS Bulk Import over to Appveyor. So what does this mean? Well it means I don’t have to worry about going over my Azure credit limit each month for starters! Appveyor has excellent support for GitHub, so each commit is automatically build, tested, and (when I enable it) a new release created. The next release will include Pupil username creation – you can blame\thank Andrew Mulholland for this, I saw his project PiNet and thought we can make this better....
Today, my pull request for the SSAS deployment script was merged into the Octopus Deploy Community Library. So what is Octopus Deploy and why should I care? Octopus is a friendly deployment automation tool for .NET developers. But don’t be fooled. Octopus Deploy isn’t just limited to .NET developers deploying hip new cloud based applications, it can do much, much more. I currently use Octopus to deploy Jasper reports to our 6 HR environments, I also use it to deploy our HR interfaces which are a series of SSIS packages and SQL objects which uses Microsoft SQL Server 2008....
Last night I chopped up my WIX installer project – I basically split the actual installer parts into one file – CoreMsi.wxs, the versions into a variable file – Version.wxi and the file list into a separate fragment file – SimsBulkImport.wxs. This worked. Great I thought, simple PowerShell script to generate the file list, I can even grab the main repository complied bin as a artifact dependency – got to love TeamCity....
Back in May (2014) I decided to start up a blog, again. I decided to keep it simple and just get a off the shelf hosting package rather then going to extremes like I normally do – configuring a VPS or even a Dedi server! I ended up going with CS New Media – it was just their lite Linux package which I signed up for 3 months. I was tempted to stick with what I know and go with Mythic-Beasts like I normally but I like to tinker and try new things so I went with CS New Media after a failed attempt to spend my dosh with NameCheap – when it came to entering my card details, it just failed to connect to “their” backend and their response was, well it works for me, try another browser – by the time I phoned them I had already tried different browsers, internet connections, computers so at that point I just walked away....
I’ve currently been working on a PowerShell script to build a virtual server using DigitalOcean excellent RESTful API. So far this has gone extremely well and I have been impressed with both PowerShell and DigitalOcean’s API. Today however I tried running on another machine (an important part of development) only to find it doesn’t work. The first error that appears is: The term ‘Invoke-WebRequest’ is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable progr...