T4MVC A friend of mine recently informed me of T4MVC, a great little T4 template that generates some helper classes that allow for strongly referencing ASP.NET MVC controllers, actions, and views without those nasty hard-coded magic strings I detest. ReSharper helps validate those magic strings but I prefer to eliminate them entirely wherever possible. The…
Twitter Link Shortener Annoyances
<Rant> A few minutes ago I post this tweet using the Silver Bird Chrome extension: A moment later I receive this error: So I try pasting the tweet into twitter.com and it tells me I am 5 characters over the limit though Chromed Bird showed I had 8 characters remaining: Okay so how long was…
Installing Jenkins CI on Windows
Replacing Cruise Control This afternoon I decided to start the process of trying out Jenkins Continuous Integration. We have a large application that has been using Cruise Control for years and while it has worked well, it is time for an upgrade. I have heard good things about Jenkins but I have been a bit…
Uploading SSRS Reports with PowerShell
The existing SSRS report deployment process I have been working with uses SQL Server’s RS Utility along with a custom app that creates RSS input files that rs.exe reads. Both applications are used by a PowerShell script that serves as the driver. In setting up a new machine at work I had neither tool installed…
Batch Download SSRS Reports with PowerShell
Lately our continuous integration process has encountered some errors with automatic SSRS report deployments to our Test environment when reports are merged to the appropriate branch. Unfortunately when this fails the process makes no attempt to re-deploy the reports on the next build. Those CI failures left me with a need to mass download the…
Start Scheduled Task and Wait On Completion with PowerShell
Some of our application servers have scheduled tasks to deploy a staged build of our application to the current app server. In the past when I wanted to manually run the task I would do one of the following: Remote desktop into the app server and run the task from Scheduled Tasks Use Computer Management…