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Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Easily add config transformation files to a Console App project

This is a very short post. Not digging into a theory of config transformations just add this add-on Configuration Transform to your Visual Studio and you'll be able to right click on an App.config file and see "Add Config Transforms" in the context menu. Works just fine.

Friday, October 30, 2015

Using Google Tag Manager to deploy Azure Application Insights client-side monitoring

If your web application is hosted on Microsoft Azure and you are using Application Insights for monitoring you'll have to add a piece of JavaScript on web pages to collect client-side statistics like page load time, JavaScript errors, users and sessions analytics, etc. The script can be found on Azure portal when Application Insights is enabled for a web application.

Thursday, June 11, 2015

WebDav Client for Windows

Recently I've been involved in migrating JIRA Server to JIRA Cloud and one particular required step was to upload exported JIRA data files on to Atlassian cloud storage. Atlassian supports WebDav protocol but they have no suggestions about what client software to use most likely because of the large diversity of what operating systems their customers use.

I was working on Windows 8/Server 2012 and did not have previous experience nor preference for a particular WebDav client. Google search returns a number of choices on the first page but it's hard to pick one based just on reading so I ended up installing and trying a number of different software packages. Without further ado to save time to someone who is facing similar exercise my tool of choice happened to be BitKinex. Extremely easy and intuitive to use, works immediately with no additional configuration, and provides familiar Windows Explorer user experience with drag and drop support. Thumbs up!


Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Controlling console output from a windows task

Windows tasks continue to be very handy especially for automating batch operations that do not require constant human attention. But even such operations may require occasional human interference to troubleshoot problems.

Most of the Windows tasks execute command line programs that do not have graphical user interface but produce output in form of log files or console messages. While monitoring of log files can be relatively easy automated via different kinds of log collection services, the console output that is mostly meant for human eyes and could provide helpful information is usually lost as by default Windows task does not save console output anywhere.

There is however a relatively easy way to save console output produced by a Windows task in a text file. Windows command line environment provides with a function to redirect standard program output to stdout or stderr to a file using redirection commands '>' or '>>'. The first one redirects that output to a file and replaces the file if it exists with a new version and the second one appends the output to a file if it exists.

In order to use output redirection a Windows task action should be configured to execute a CMD shell instead of an actual cl program. So instead of

>myprogram.exe > output.txt

it should be configured as

>CMD /C "myprogram.exe" > output.txt

In the first example of direct calling a program Windows task will ignore output redirection and the entire output will not be saved. In the second example the redirection will be executed not by a Windows task but by a CMD shell instead and the output will be saved in a file.