SonarQube 5.6, LDAP 2.0 plugin and Active Directory

With the recently released SonarQube 5.6 LTS, also the updated LDAP 2.0 Plugin is required (Plugin Version Matrix). If you have used Active Directory in the past to authenticate against SonarQube you’ll will hit very early a breaking change with the LDAP plugin.

If you were using those advanced Active Directory features, you must uninstall the LDAP plugin and install the new Active Directory one instead (available as a community plugin).

As with this version Active Directory authentication is no longer integrated into LDAP plugin but separated out into a new plugin called Active Directory Plugin. At the time writing this post, the new plugin was not yet released and not listened on the plugin library which means you have to download the release candidate from github yourself and deploy it manually to your server.

There is also a small change required when using the new Active Directory Plugin in your existing LDAP configuration stored in your sonar.properties file.

before SonarQube 5.6

# LDAP configuration sonar.security.realm=LDAP

starting with SonarQube 5.6

# LDAP configuration sonar.security.realm=ACTIVE_DIRECTORY

Getting ready for ASP.Net on Ubuntu 14.04

There are multiple ways how you can get ASP.Net running on Ubuntu. The classical way would be installing .Net Core and ASP.Net 5 by hand inside a virtual machine. This is handy if you also want to develop on Linux. Coming from Windows, using Visual Studio as my daily driver, changing to Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu is a new interesting development experience.

If you just want to have a server for testing and hosting your stuff I recommend using Docker.

• Installing ASP.NET 5 On Linux
• Using Docker

Ubuntu virtual machines on Hyper-V

Have you ever tried to running Ubuntu inside a Hyper-V virtual machine? If not but you are interested check the following links for a quick start:

• Quick start running Ubuntu 14.04 in a Generation 2 VM
• Technet: Ubuntu virtual machines on Hyper-V

Not enough free disk space on /boot partition, Ubuntu on Hyper-V Gen2

Yesterday my Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine declined to install updates because /boot partition was full.

After some time I found an old forum entry(link) discussing the same problem.

Finally the solution was to run the following command to cleanup old dependencies and kernel versions

sudo apt-get autoremove

sudo apt-get clean

Let's make taking pictures in OneNote more productive

Let's make taking Pictures in OneNote more productive

Not all of us can own a Surface Hub and I can think of some scenarios where it won't fit as an electronic whiteboard and use of a classical whiteboard is required. But still lots of us use OneNote as their note tacking app and want to add photos of classical whiteboard notes in a fast, instant and non-interruptive way.

OneNote is also my favorite note tracking app, but:

Why is it that hard to add a "good" photo of your whiteboard notes or drawings to your OneNote notes?

Today, I have to take out of my pocket my mobile phone, have to select a photo taking app like Office Lens, take a picture, maybe crop and rotate it, store it on some cloud drive (in office lens you can select the OneNote section where it should be added) and wait until it is synced to your note taking device. If this is your primary device I can imagine this is fine for you. I'm using my Surface Pro 2 or Lenovo ThinkPad notebook for notes.

We have hard- and software ready to take good pictures but I think the overall process can be streamlined to make it more productive.

 

OneNote (Desktop)

We can insert pictures and create live screen clippings, even we can record video and audio but I haven't found a way to take a picture …

 

OneNote Mobile

Inside OneNote Mobile we already have good old "Camera" but …

How would it be if we had the full power of Office Lens inside OneNote (UWP, Windows Desktop, IPhone, Android, Web)?

Let's vote for it

Updated 17.11.2015: fixed uservoice entry and link

Use IIS redirect for TFS

By default the TFS setup creates on your IIS Default Web Site an application named TFS. In most setups I’ve seen so far, the used IIS is only used by TFS so why not use HTTP Redirect for your TFS application?

The typical scenario looks somehow like this:

TFS is installed on a virtual machine, inside Default Web Site, nothing else installed on Default Web Site.
DNS-Name is something similar to https://tfs.<domain>.com
TFS webaccess Url is similar to https://tfs.<domain>.com/tfs
If you browse https://tfs.<domain>.com you’ll get an 403 error, not authenticated.

Would be fine if the default domain would redirect to the TFS application like this:

On your Default Web Site go to Http Redirect:

In the screenshot below you can see how the redirect should be configured

MSBuild–Visual Studio project template

Based on the ide of Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi’s blog post about “Hijacking the Visual Studio Build Process” I’ve created a small Visual Studio project template for custom MSBuild based projects which you can find in the Visual Studio gallery.

Why should I care about it?

• Build/Rebuild/Clean inside visual studio without switching to the command line
• Easier to maintain files inside a project than inside “solution files”
• IntelliSense
• Source control integration
• Visual Studio editor experience
• …

The first screenshot is showing you how the project experience will look like. You can see the green + sign which indicates that this project was added to source control but not yet committed/checked-in.

The second screenshot shows you how IntelliSense can look like, I’m using ReSharper so maybe on your machine it can look a little bit different. 

VSGallery: MSBuild Empty Project Template