I’m trying to separate out my Azure environments for local development vs. Dev, Test, Staging, and Production.

For local development I’m using the Azure SDK local storage emulator.  To do that you have some connection strings that look like this:

<appSettings>  
  <add key="StorageConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true"/> 
</appSettings>
<connectionStrings>
  <add name="AzureWebJobsDashboard" connectionString="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" />
  <add name="AzureWebJobsStorage" connectionString="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" />
</connectionStrings>

But today I ran into a non-obvious error:

No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it 127.0.0.1:10002

And found this cool post with the solution in the comment.  Basically, the storage emulator turns off after some period of disuse.  There’s a handy little batch script in there to clear out the storage and restart it.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33765141/azure-table-storage-no-connection-could-be-made-because-the-target-machine-act

Found this tool today to help tweak the notoriously hard to customize Mac OS.

http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html

Dallas TechFest is back! It’s organized by my friend and colleague, Tim Rayburn. This year you can expect excellent content focused on Bleeding-Edge Development, Wicked UX and Next-Gen Mobile Technologies. (including iOS, Windows Phone, NodejS, ASP.NET vNext and Xamarin), plus interesting insights on UX and Mobility from Jared Spool, CEO & Founding Principal of UIE. The ticket price includes the full conference and lunch. Consider attending and please feel free to pass this information on to others you think might benefit from it

I’ve delivered a talk a couple of times recently covering the Quality Tools in Visual Studio 2013 and Microsoft Test Manager.  Specifically, this talk covers:

• Unit testing
• TDD
• Automatic Test Runner
• Manual Testing in MTM
• Recorded Manual Tests
• Converting Test Recordings in Coded UI Tests (CUIT)
• Recording CUIT directly in VS
• Build automation with Tests
• CUIT Test Automation

I’m uploading my Visual Studio 2013 Quality Tools presentation here, even though it’s not that useful without the product demos to go with it.  I guess it’s primarily reference materials for those who have actually seen the presentation.  Maybe I’ll do screen-shots later and embed them to make it more stand-alone.

Today I accidentally touched the Accept button on a LinkedIn spam request.  Then I had to go searching for how to remove a contact, which is not obvious.  Here are the steps I found that worked:

1. First, select the Network tab on the top menu bar.  This shows you the list of all of your contacts.
2. Unfortunately, the list is in no particular order.  So the next step is to change the sort order by clicking the down arrow next to Sort by and selecting New.  This will put your latest connection at the top of the list.
3. Now you have two options: (1) Check the box next to the contact you want to remove, then click the arrow next to the top More option.  There you can select Remove connection from the drop-down list. (2) Alternatively, when you hover over an individual contact, a menu of options appears at the bottom of the contact item. There you can click the arrow next to the lower More option and select Remove connection from the drop-down list.

That’s it!  You have successfully removed your spam contact.