I’ve been speaking about Azure at a number of events recently. One of the biggest challenges that I have had each time is due to local firewall restrictions. Firewalls will block port 1433/1434 outbound and this a major hassle to get changed, especially for a 20 minute demo. These ports are generally restricted due to the SQL slammer and SQL snake viruses (http://www.grc.com/port_1434.htm) from a few years ago. SQL Azure uses port 1433 for communication, for instance when connecting from man ... [Read more]

This post should really be title: “how we (could have) migrated ScrumWall to Azure in less than 20 minutes”. But I’ll come on to that later. I’ve been speaking about Azure at a number of events recently. As part of the talks, I have given a quick overview of the developer portal for Azure and the Visual Studio tools. I’ve wrapped this up in a demo using our ScrumWall product (http://scrumwall.cloudapp.net). Winding back time conveniently to about a year ago, I explain how we could have migr ... [Read more]

In computational geometry, convex hull is the boundary of minimal convex set containing a given finite set of points in a plane. Otherwise, it is a simple closed polygonal chain encompassing all the points. As an example it looks like the following.                                                                                           In a recent Proof of Concept at the Microsoft Technology Centre, we needed to build such a polygon. Dealing with around 40 million points with each Point ... [Read more]

Scenario Recently a client had a requirement to upload documents to their SharePoint site. They wanted the ability to drop numerous files in a FTP folder and have them uploaded to SharePoint automatically. Solution We decided to solve this using a Custom SSIS Task that uploads files to the required Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) Document Library. We therefore used the Integration Services Project under the Business Intelligence Project types within Microsoft Visual Studio ... [Read more]

With the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 comes the ability to work with spatial data. This allows us to store, manipulate and visualise spatial data whilst getting all the benefits of persisting data to a SQL Server database. In this post I will be looking at the different types that are used to store this data as well as how to work with the methods associated with these types. Spatial Reference Systems To represent a geographical entity, a coordinate system is needed. There are many ... [Read more]