Tom Wire's Blog

I’ve been following .NET Core since its inception, and I love the tooling support on macOS via VS Code.

There has been a bit of a furore over an article in the Guardian (and followup), describing the poppy installation at the Tower of London as “fake, trite and inward-looking – a Ukip-style memorial.”

I’m writing a little issue tracking application, and as it’s a new app I’m using the new shiny Rails 4.1.0. However, whilst the application runs fine locally using Webrick I’ve been unable to get it working when deployed onto a live (staging) environment running Passenger and Nginx (using the Ubuntu package available via the Phusion Passenger site).

If you’re getting 413 Request Entity Too Large errors trying to upload files with Nginx, you need to increase the size limit in the site configuration file (normally in /etc/nginx/sites-available). Add client_max_body_size inside the server section, where the value is the size (in megabytes) that you want to allow.

I’m not a big fan of technical challenges if I’m honest, as I don’t really agree with putting someone under pressure to see how they perform (which is always how they feel to me). I’d rather sit down and talk to them, ask them about their experiences and what gets them excited - I think getting someone to open up and get passionate about something really shows what they know far better than a contrived technical test.

More cloud fun today! I was attempting to deploy a new .NET 4.5.1 cloud service this morning, but an error stopped me in my tracks:

The feature named NetFx451 that is required by the uploaded package is not available in the OS * chosen for the deployment.

I figured its to do with the default OS version that Azure is trying to create for my project (I’m guessing 2012), but how on earth do you change the version?

Turns out, you can’t seem to access it from Visual Studio’s GUI, nor can you change it on the cloud service container in Azure (you can change the OS version after you deploy, but this isn’t much good if you can’t deploy in the firstplace).

A bit of Googling lead me to a related post, and it seems that the only way to do it is to open your Cloud Service Configuration File (.cscfg), and modify the <ServiceConfiguration/> to use the new OS Family 4 setting (either modify it, or add the attribute):

Disclaimer: I’m not a Linux sysadmin, nor have I been writing Ruby on Rails for long. This post is just what has worked for me, and there may be glaring issues with what I have done that I am unaware of. Use at your own risk!

I was having a strange issue when sending a larger-than-normal payload to a WCF service hosted over HTTP:

I was asked today to amend the settings for a bulk email application I’ve recently written - using the element in the web.config, I was specifying an SMTP server, however the requirement now is to specify a pickup directory, and to allow IIS to handle the email sending process.