How We Utilised Azure To Eliminate Alert Fatigue and Prevent False Alarms
Traditionally, configuring devices within an enterprise environment has been done by creating group policies and distributing them using active directory. Microsoft Intune provides an alternative way to centrally configure devices within Microsoft Azure.
Carl Mills
Sep 2020
How to Populate Metadata Using JSON When Converting Markdown to HTML in ASP.NET
Following on from converting Markdown documentation to HTML web pages in ASP.NET, we explore how to pass metadata into the webpage using a JSON Metadata file, a single view and a dynamic action method.
Carl Mills
May 2020
An Improved Alternative to the Native SQL Server Agent Job Failure Alerts
SQL Server Agent has a built in alerting process for when jobs fail, but the information it provides isn’t very useful – you’re only told which job, what time, who ran it and which step failed. If you want to see why it failed, you have to review the job history manually.
Sven Lowry
Apr 2020
Getting Started with Microsoft Intune
Traditionally, configuring devices within an enterprise environment has been done by creating group policies and distributing them using active directory. Microsoft Intune provides an alternative way to centrally configure devices within Microsoft Azure.
Iain Evans
Apr 2020
Converting Markdown into HTML Web Pages within ASP.NET MVC
Over at Aireforge®, we outlined some fundamental aims we wanted for the Aireforge Studio software documentation. We decided that Markdown was the file format of choice, it ticked all the boxes. This post outlines the techniques I used to achieve this in a .NET MVC web application.
Carl Mills
Apr 2020
Connecting to SQL Server with MuleSoft AnyPoint 3.9
If you haven’t used Mule before, it’s an open source ESB, which also has a paid for Enterprise version. I’ve been using it for almost four years now and have been really impressed with how quickly we can create quite complex applications.
Phil Grayson
Jan 2019
SQL Server on Linux and Transactional Replication
Many companies use transactional replication to scale out their database reads; which can get quite large and potentially expensive. As SQL Server 2017 now runs on Linux, we have another opportunity to reduce costs by removing the Windows Server licence entirely.
Phil Grayson
Sep 2017
Latest Posts
Here’s what we've been up to recently.

xTEN is now Cyber Essentials Plus certified
At xTEN security is a priority. Recently taken over by the IASME consortium (as of 1 April 2020), the Cyber Essentials certification consists of a self-assessment of 5 basic security controls which is then verified by a qualified assessor.

Tracie Binks
Apr 2020