Equinox IT has appointed David Reiss to the position of General Manager, Cloud and Auckland.

IT and the CIO role is changing significantly. New technologies, different operating models and modern experiences and expectations are changing the landscape and the CIO role is constantly evolving to meet the new reality.

This article is republished from my original Feature Toggles on a .Net Core API post on fantail.io.

This is my second tutorial on feature toggling.  You can read the first here.

There are many languages and frameworks to choose from when it comes to back ends - I wanted to make a REST service to deliver all of the Time Entries to my Angular application, and almost every language available has REST server capabilities.  I chose to use .Net Core (C#) and Java for my example app.  My background is in Java, and I was really interested to see how .Net Core works.  If you don't know, .Net Core is Microsoft's cross platform offering - it has the Windows-specific parts taken out and runs on Docker. Linux, MacOSX, and of course Windows too.  It can also be compiled on other platforms too, which is very handy.

This article is republished from my original Feature Toggles For Angular UIs post on fantail.io.

I had a chance to demonstrate a feature toggling library to a customer last week, and wanted to share what I did.  Feature toggles, in case you don't know, let you to configure how your system behaves without redeploying code. This is fantastic if you have a feature that needs to launch at a particular time, or you want to experiment with by switching off and on in different environments.  Feature toggles act like an if statement around a code of block and can be switched on or off as desired, without requiring a restart.  Martin Fowler covers this in some detail here.

This article is republished from my original Automatically Logging PowerShell in to Azure post on fantail.io.

I've been working with Azure Resource Manager templates a lot lately, as an easy, repeatable way to create deployment environments for my code.  ARM templates are a JSON description of a resource or grouping of resources and can be applied to create or update an environment.  This means you can roll out a new environment quickly and easily - perfect for quickly setting up a Dev or Test system, and you know that if you use the same templates to configure Production you won't have any surprises, or "Well, it worked in Dev..." conversations.
The best thing about ARM templates for me is how easy it is to generate them.  If you have a resource group, you can create a template by clicking on the Automation Script button: