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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 return to offices around the country, we’ve had a request from one of our clients to create Power BI reports to help manage hybrid working.   Harnessing Power BI to Manage Desk Space 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 had implemented a […]

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 […]

We have been busy with BizTalk 2013 recently and like all good programmers we like to test, test test! BizTalk 2010 made this quite a bit easier as you can enable unit testing on your schemas and maps. However, we hit a problem with the supplied TestableMapBase class whilst testing maps with external function calls. I will run through the process from start to finish to demonstrate the issue and the fix. We have a very simple schema and map […]

I have just been setting up some new workflow generated emails in CRM 2011. This was largely an exercise in frustration as the rich text editor is pretty flaky. Getting your fonts and spacing correct is very hit and miss. Happily, this area is getting an overhaul in CRM 2015: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Release Preview Guide The new Email editor provides marketers with the ability to select from pre-defined templates or create an Email from scratch using an interactive […]