Software Development

The Versioning Problem

James Toyer — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 09:48:00 +0000

Where I work, and I’m sure in many places, versioning software has always been a problem. There were different conflicting ways used to version our frameworks and API’s, or worse using no versioning used at all. Effectively, we had our own version (excuse the pun) of DLL hell. I was recently charged with resolving, or …

CloudFormation and Chef

James Toyer — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 23:40:48 +0000

Over the past month I’ve been toying with the idea of getting Opscode’s Chef to automate the installation of applications on my server stack on AWS, but it wasn’t until last weekend that I actually bit the bullet and decided to make it work. For those of you don’t know what Chef is, it’s a …

Fighting the Phantom Restart

James Toyer — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:31:52 +0000

I was playing around with CloudFormation from Amazon Web Services (AWS) tonight (blog posts coming soon™) and remembered an issue we regularly have at work with our Windows Servers; whenever we create a new image from an AMI the machine restarts after it’s created. Now ordinarily this wouldn’t be a problem, but our application deployment …

What a difference a year makes

James Toyer — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 09:29:42 +0000

It was back in August 2010 that I joined Adfero, fresh out of University, and since I started work I’ve hardly blogged, if at all, on any of the amazing things I’ve worked on or done. So I thought it was about time I brought people up to speed, and hopefully, with future planned projects …

Keeping track of experience

James Toyer — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 20:36:11 +0000

I’ve recently discovered article on Scott Hanselman’s blog questioning why we still list apps on our CV’s. On further reading it appears Scott was not just complaining about listing apps on your CV but asking why do we not contextualise our experience properly? This got me thinking, am I properly keeping track of all the …

Salesforce ID’s

James Toyer — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:38:56 +0000

A while ago (this blog has been sitting in drafts for an age), where I work has been migrating from our in house Customer Relationship Manager(CRM) to Salesforce. This has taken a considerable strain off us maintaining an updating software however, we develop other products that link into our old CRM. At first this didn’t …

SQL CE and the Visual Studio Installer Project

James Toyer — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:29:48 +0000

For a while now I’ve been trying to deploy MS SQL Compact Edition with a Visual Studio Installer Project. I know that you can copy the .dll’s required to make it work (as explained here), but when using entity framework things all go wrong. So after what seems like an age of trawling through Google, …

Redmine and Subversion

James Toyer — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:33:43 +0000

Its been a while since I posted a blog, and things have finally settled down, so I’ve had a chance to migrate my Subversion and Redmine servers over to a fresh install of Ubuntu Server 10.04 on VPS.net. If you are unfamiliar with what Subversion is and why you might use it, well the answer …

Time Zone Data

James Toyer — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:36:05 +0000

I have been searching high and low for a listing of all the major time zone listings to using in a MySQL database. Everywhere I looked I found overcomplicated ways of listing thousands of different time zones, none of which have served the purpose I’m looking for. That is until I stumbled across this blog post …

Creating a Server Part 3: Tweaks and Administration

James Toyer — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:47:00 +0000

If you have followed my blogs so far you should have a working, and semi-secure LAMP server. The next step is to add a couple of tweaks to your system and then install some packages to allow you to administer your server. The purpose of using third party software to administer your server is to …