admin

By Christian Waters, Director, Delivery at TrueNorth In the early 90s, during the push to develop the Windows NT operating system in record time, the engineers at Microsoft started to use early versions of the system itself. This gave them immediate feedback on any issues, and added to the motivation to stabilise the system as quickly as possible. This is a famous example of an organisation using its own products or services, which has become known as “eating your own […]

By Christian Waters, Director, Delivery at TrueNorth The TrueNorth office is open again after being closed since March. After firing up the computer and dealing with five months’ worth of Windows updates, I was greeted with these poignant messages from the 16th March! The other offices at Tower Works remain mostly empty, but the incredible amount of building work continues at pace in the Leeds South Bank regeneration area. Are these apartments and offices going to be white elephants as […]

By Christian Waters, Director, Delivery at TrueNorth Password management, and the communication of new passwords, is something we consistently see people struggling with. Here we discuss some common pitfalls and give some tips on how to do this securely and with a minimum of fuss.   “One Password to Rule Them All” Password managers are essential tools for modern working. We have all heard of (and seen) the Post-It note on the monitor, but with the rapid growth of online […]

As employees start returning to offices around the country, we’ve had a request from one of our clients to create Power BI reports to help keep their staff safe during this period.   Harnessing Power BI to Track-And-Trace Power BI is Microsoft’s offering for visualizing the data that is at the core of many successful businesses. It allows interactive reports and dashboards to be rapidly produced that draw on data from many different sources. For this particular assignment, our client […]

Recently, several of our clients have expressed an interest in Power Automate. This Microsoft service, previously called Flow, allows users to integrate applications to automate processes and tasks. Pre-built connectors to a wide range of applications, from SharePoint to Salesforce, enable you to create automated workflows and simplify your task management. You also have the option to build your own custom integrations to automate everything from small tasks to large systems. The advantages include improved productivity and increased accuracy, making […]

At TrueNorth we are well versed in working remotely, and indeed we are ‘digital by default’. With more and more of us using online video and screen sharing, we thought we’d share a few of the key tips we’ve learnt over the years.   Visuals Lighting is by far the most important factor is getting a decent webcam image. Even a standard laptop webcam can produce a decent image with good lighting. Set up your workspace so that the available […]

We recently had a requirement to add a custom http header to messages being sent on a BizTalk basicHttpBinding send port. If you want to add SOAP headers, this is supported by the biztalk adapters. You just simply set the WCF.OutboundCustomHeaders context property on your outgoing message and they get added in. I was expecting a similar context property to be available for the Http headers, WCF.HttpHeaders being a good candidate, or maybe Http.UserHttpHeaders. After much testing and frustration, neither […]

Here at TrueNorth like most developers we make use of FREE open source components. Even if when you start creating something you intend to make it reusable, you cannot just make it open source and useful to someone. Just being on GIT or CodePlex does not necessarily mean people can reuse it without much help.   Open sourcing modules and components does take time. We have written a Authentication module for MVC sites that allows you to store user credentials […]

A couple of times recently we have had a requirement to lock on a named item. We have not required a distributed lock (either between app domains or between servers), simply an in memory lock on a specific item. There is no standard way to achieve this in .Net and getting the details correct is surprisingly difficult (as with all multi-threaded code) so I will share the two versions we came up with. Version 1 uses a standard Dictionary of […]