The diversification of .NET technologies – from Windows Desktop Applications using WPF and WinForms, UWP, ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core, “portable” libraries, the various flavours of .NET Standard, .NET Core (and portable executables on MacOS and Linux) – have brought with them incompatibilities, and a huge problem with older (but well-used) libraries that aren’t built for […]

Digital Transformation is the buzzword of the moment; organisations are trying to reconfigure themselves to operate in the digital age. One of the key enablement strategies involves putting APIs at the heart of the organisation to centralise access to data, logic and value, while removing those traditional barriers that prevent collaboration between organisational silos. APIs […]

This week I received an email from someone who asked how they could use our free Thought Leadership content to help their organisation move to the cloud. I realised that although we’ve released a lot of content, we’d never talked publicly about the rationale behind them and how they are all interconnected. Our Thought Leadership […]

A couple of years ago we put together the Azure Tech Selector – a handy poster which walks you through the technology choices you can make for common cloud workloads. Now, two years later, the number of services provided in the Azure ecosystem has multiplied (and the types of workload have become more sophisticated). Revisiting […]

For this week’s edition of our Azure Weekly Newsletter, I reviewed all the Azure related sessions from BUILD that are now available on Channel 9 and categorised them into the standard grouping we use for Azure Weekly. If you’re not a subscriber, I’ve included the list below: Compute Container apps on Azure App Service are […]

At the start of 2017 James Broome, endjin’s Director of Engineering was asked to give a talk to the latest Collider cohort about how Microsoft can help start-ups via the BizSpark programme. After the event we were asked by the Microsoft UK Small and Medium Business team if we would like to be interviewed about […]

Jonathan Gill CTO, Watchfinder Jonathan Gill is CTO at Watchfinder. Watchfinder buys watches from members of the public, returns them to as new condition, warranties them, and sells them back to the public via their website and retail stores. They have grown to 120+ staff, and turnover £70 million per year. On the 3rd of […]

This month, I’ve completed my three year apprenticeship at endjin – a big landmark in a journey that started with enrolling on a computing MSc several years ago. Endjin’s apprenticeship is a custom programme which aims to bridge the gap between new entrant and competent developer. The scheme was set up in recognition of the […]

This post explains how to create a PowerBI report which sources data from two separate Azure SQL Databases. PowerBI offers two data access mechanisms; Import and DirectQuery. DirectQuery provides a range of benefits, the chief of which is that data is automatically refreshed. DirectQuery doesn’t import any data into PowerBI, instead it queries the data […]

Guest Blogger – Barry Smart IT Director & Partner, Hymans Robertson Barry is IT Director at Hymans Robertson, the largest independent firm of consultants and actuaries in the UK. He is responsible for leading the firm’s technology strategy. The firm is turning increasingly to technology to enhance and extend the services it provides to clients. […]

TLDR; Yes. But its successor is still called JavaScript, except when it isn’t. The long, slow death and resurrection of JavaScript Back in my 2015 programming languages post I observed that, while JavaScript had pushed its way back into the top 10 programming languages, over at TIOBE, it was still a dead language walking. My reasoning was […]

TLDR; I’m surprised how much Amazon based hardware I’ve purchased in 2016– they’ve become the conduit that all my entertainment comes through. Amazon Fire TV 4K Ultra HD I thought I’d end the year with a look at some of the tech I’ve acquired over the last 12 months. First up is the Amazon Fire […]

Benchpeg – Supporting the work of the Jeweller since 2006 Earlier this year endjin redesigned the Benchpeg website that had previously been hosted on a decade-old content platform that was beginning to creak and groan. One of our main aims was to halve the day-to-day workload for generating content, and streamline the process of producing a weekly […]

One very useful but little used pattern when working with Resource Manager templates, is the ability to use parameters to optionally deploy resources, constrain certain resource configurations based on other user defined parameters, or to toggle parameters based on other values. To give a couple of concrete examples, imagine we have a highly reusable template […]

London, 02/12/16 Barber Vangelos Georgiou has been cutting hair at George Gents’ Hairdresser on Bermondsey street since 1970. Over the years he’s seen dramatic changes to the neighbourhood, from factories to luxury shops and flats, with a knock on effect for his business as costs have risen and the factory workers who lived and worked […]

tl;dr – I set up automated backups of our office security camera footage and used Microsoft Flow to automate alerting if anything went wrong. At endjin HQ, we have an office security setup using multiple cameras managed by Surveillance Station, an application on our on-site Synology NAS drive. Surveillance Station handles the recording schedules and stores […]

Choosing the right cloud platform provider can be a daunting task. Take the big three, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform; each offer a huge number of products and services, but understanding how they enable your specific needs is not easy. Since most organisations plan to migrate existing applications it is important to understand how […]

Guest Blogger – Ed describes his three month paid summer internship at endjin Ed is studying a Mathematics BSc at UCL. He made contact in January because he was looking to gain some real world software development experience during his summer break, before his final year at University. During his three month internship we tried to expose him to as many different […]

If you are trying to create a package to deploy a web project from the command line using msbuild, you might be struggling with the required arguments. Simply specifying /target:package is not enough. While this will generate a zipped web package, it will only include direct references from the web project itself. Any projects the […]

For some reason, even though I left school years ago, September seems to mark the start of a new year. Probably because that’s when schools do go back after the summer, my mind is sub-consciously stuck in that cycle and importantly this year our eldest begins a new chapter in his life – of starting […]