Resolving SourceTree Merge Conflicts with Visual Studio

I’m currently working with a company where Git is the source control repository of choice and SourceTree is the tool to handle the interactions with the repository.

Until now I’ve been a Team Foundation Server guy, and before that a Subversion guy, and before that a Visual Source Safe guy so I’ve always (with the exception of Source Safe) enjoyed working with those repositories via Visual Studio.  Personally I really like the merge Window in Visual Studio.  I know it and I’m comfortable with it so I like to use it. Continue reading →

Downgrade a SQL Server 2014 database to SQL Server 2012 or below

After an almost catastrophic 48 hour downtime with my existing hosting provider I decided to move my business, which involved moving a number of websites and their corresponding databases to my new hosting provider.

Now, the thing that I liked about my existing provider was that they supported SQL Server 2014.  My new one doesn’t (and neither do a LOT of providers for some reason), so this meant having to downgrade my databases from SQL Server 2014 to SQL Server 2012. Continue reading →

How to target SQL Server 2014 from a Visual Studio 2013 SQL Server Database Project

I’ve just installed SQL Server 2014 and want to check what might break in my current SQL Server 2008 database when I upgrade it.

Thomas LaRock has written a great article providing a list of a dozen things to check before upgrading and I would definitely suggest making this your first port of call if you’re planning an upgrade.  Continue reading →

Adding “unknown” file types to your publication package

I’ve been making some updates to a web services project recently (I say recently it was actually months ago but for some reason I haven’t managed to publish this post until now) and the time has come to deploy it to a test environment.  This in itself brought a few challenges but the one that I want to discuss just now is the issue of including unknown file types in your publication package. Continue reading →

Mouse Lag With Citrix Windows 7 Remote Desktop

This isn’t something I’d generally blog about but this issue had been causing me problems when connecting to a physical desktop based within my client’s network.  Whilst working with the keyboard wouldn’t provide any sort of issue the mouse would be unusable as whenever I moved it the pointer would literally take around 5 seconds to move across the screen.  Very annoying. Continue reading →