While you cannot yet use SpecFlow with netcore or netstandard projects, you can use new-style (dotnet) test projects that target net461, and reference netstandard projects-under-test from there. We like to use XUnit as the underlying test provider in this scenario, and we do the following: Install the current SpecFlow VS 2017 extension into VS 2017 […]

Hello everyone. Before Christmas I played around with SQL Server 2017’s inline Python integration capability. This capability was announced early last year, with the corresponding integration with R already being possible for a number of months. The main benefits from this are the abilities to: Eliminate data movement (having to transfer data samples from a database to […]

Hello again, everyone. For those who read my blog a couple of months ago, you may well have been expecting to hear from me a little sooner. Well – I was hoping that would be the case, but it turns out my body had other ideas. I was off for 8 weeks after my appendix […]

One of the great benefits of Azure (and the Cloud in general) is the simplicity with which you can create and scale resources. The downside to this is that you can easily lose track what you’ve got deployed, or accidentally create expensive items and leave them running. We wanted a way to track our spending […]

We’re very excited to announce that at Future Decoded on 01 November from 11:30 – 12:30 in L3 – Session Room 11, we’re going to be sharing our experiences with Cosmos DB! Co-presenting with Microsoft’s Phil Harvey, endjin’s Director of Engineering, James Broome and Engineer Mike Larah are going to provide an overview of Cosmos […]

Over the last few week’s I’ve been catching up on my reading backlog and serendipity meant that I read Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action” which was published in 2009, shortly followed by Satya Nadella’s “Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future […]

A little over 10 months ago I wrote a blog which reflected on my summer internship at endjin. Now, a little over 10 months later, I’m sitting in the same office one month into my Software Engineer Apprenticeship after having completed my Maths degree and choosing to come and join the team here, for good. […]

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 […]