Migrating MS-SQL 2008 to 2012

Pre-migration Update the new servers to have the latest updates for both OS and MS-SQL Setup Windows Failsafe cluster Setup Always-On availability group, replicas and listener Setup shared folder for storing backups from the old database servers Setup shared folder for storing backup/synchronization data for the new database servers Create a copy of the stored procedures used by jobs, and update them to work with availability group Script the SQL server logins If you want to change the databases to read-only mode, remove existing mirroring functionality for the databases Migration Put up App_Offline.

ASP.NET vNext, a quick look into the future

MVC Controllers and WebAPI Controllers are now merged to form single controller class No need for physical folders for Areas, just decorating a Controller with [Area(“AreaName”)] gets you the desired result. But the problem is rendering engines still look for Views in Areas/{area name}/Views/{controller} path. So I guess you are better of placing your Controllers also in Areas/{area name}/Controller folder for better organizing them Route mapping looks a bit better now with the following syntax 1 2 3 4 5 // MVC 6 route routes.

Evolution of Visual Studio, a lot to love about!

A pleasant thing I noticed in the last few years regarding Visual Studio is it’s attitude towards supporting various open source languages and platforms. You would have felt the same if you were looking to improve your IDE experience when trying to work on projects not based on the Microsoft .NET family. It may have been PHP or Python (with Django) or the D Language. It is quite nice to have the option to use a single IDE which you are familiar with to work on various language and platforms.

Robin McLaurin Williams, 1951 – 2014

Thank you for all the laughs and entertainment, RIP. Robin Williams

Cmder and Visual Studio 2013 (Developer Command Prompt)

I am a regular user of Cmder, a very nice command line emulator for Windows. Cmder is internally using ConEmu for the command prompt emulation and has a very beautiful Monokai color scheme. Since Cmder uses ConEmu internally, we can setup custom Tasks (like loading PowerShell and Visual Studio developer command prompt) for adding additional functionality to the command shell. The below is the my Task setup for loading Visual Studio 2013 Developer command prompt from inside Cmder:

How to start a movement

Largest collection of FREE Microsoft eBooks

From Eric Ligman (Microsoft): FREE Microsoft eBooks! Who doesn’t love FREE Microsoft eBooks? Well, for the past few years, I’ve provided posts containing almost 150 FREE Microsoft eBooks and my readers, new and existing, have loved these posts so much that they downloaded over 3.5 Million free eBooks as of last June, including over 1,000,000 in a single week last year (and many, many more since then).