Coding with Titans

so breaking things happens constantly, but never on purpose

Xiaomi HotSpot (tethering) not working

Yet, Internet connection sharing is an easy-to-use feature on my Xiaomi Redme Note 5 phone that has wasted me whole evening to get it right. Funny thing, really, since as a user I was supposed to enter Settings, navigate to Mobile Hotspot, define password and swipe to enable it. Also from that point of view, that’s all you can do, due to lack of any other configuration options. But as it turned out, there is a subtle “bug”, that causes it not to work on any Xiaomi phone (with MIUI and without). Read more →

HowTo: Setup SSIS via TeamCity – fixing problems

Some time ago I have shown how to configure automatic build of SSIS projects (SQL Server Integration Services). Unfortunately they require full version of Visual Studio installed on a build machine as it’s an overwhelming plugin (not only a toolset), what potentially could hit me back. And well, of course it failed and hit me after 30 days! Turned out Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition expired and was refusing to cooperate more, producing this nice error log: Read more →

HowTo: Custom fields in ApplicationInsights

Recently, I have shown, how to enable Application Insights within own WCF server application (look here). It might similarly work in other kinds of apps, so we won’t bother with further demystification of this procedure. But as you might suspect (or already stepped on), you will quickly require more metadata transmitted than it is done by default. My scenario is pretty simple. The WCF server is installed multiple times, in multiple physical locations across the whole country. Read more →

HowTo: Azure ApplicationInsights into my WCF server

Here I would like to present a small recipe, that will let you enable monitoring of WCF server-side calls with Microsoft’s ApplicationInsights service. It might help you in analytics of: what services are used mosts what hours users are active what are the response times what is called far too often and needs optimization and probably most important thing - what crashed, why, when with the callstack! It’s pretty straightforward and I split it into two parts. Read more →

Windows 10 Wake up on LAN

After recent upgrade to Windows 10 Fall Creators Update my wake-on-lan feature of the desktop PC stopped to work. It was not very surprising, as most of the settings during such a big OS update usually goes to defaults. Here are two simple steps to restore it. Only two - as I already had it enabled in my UEFI BIOS on the motherboard and also installed drivers for my build-in Intel network card 82579V. Read more →

Remove Visual Studio 2010 SP1 without ISO-DVD

And also preserving the machine’s role in the company! Recently I discovered that on my build server resides Visual Studio 2010 with SP1. It occupies tremendous amount of space and at the first glance it was totally unnecessary to be there at all. So I had this brilliant though and immediately went to Control Panel and hit Uninstall. Which of course failed miserably after 20 minutes of processing. Then destroyed the hard drive even more with finalization that rolled back the whole procedure… Read more →

Enable SSL in Qt 4.8.6

By default any calls done by Qt over HTTPS will fail. This is because the OpenSSL it relies on is not included into the distribution that was installed. All you have to do, to make it work, is to download OpenSSL 1.0.xxx library for Windows from here and install to any folder (for example: “C:\OpenSSL”). The tiny 3MB package is enough. Then copy the libeay32.dll and libssl32.dll into developed applications folder (the output one) and it will be automatically picked up during startup. Read more →

Configure Qt 4.8.6 in QtCreator 4.5+

Latest version of QtCreator out of the box installs only Qt 5.0+. That’s rather obvious, but what if someone wants to play a bit with previous edition? Yeap v4.8, the one that is almost 4 years old! It is still doable and I will shortly show the way. Move to TL;DR if you are not interested in the background story. You could ask why I wanted to do that in the first place, so here is the reason. Read more →

DataGrip connect to MS SQL

Recently I had some problems connecting with DataGrip to my Microsoft SQL Server 2012 instance provided as part of purchased web hosting plan. By some reason my connection was always rejected with following error message: The driver could not establish a secure connection to SQL Server by using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. Error: “sun.security.validator.ValidatorException: PKIX path building failed: sun.security.provider.certpath.SunCertPathBuilderException: unable to find valid certification path to requested target”. Microsoft’s documentation (available here) turned out to be very helpful. Read more →

Laptop for a developer (2017)

It’s been quite a while since I upgraded my machine for daily development. Till four months ago I was still using my 2011’ MacBook Pro with some additional upgrades done down the line (described them here and here). Nevertheless it was more often seen it became older and older and somehow the speed and work comfort was insufficient anymore. Once decision was made, for the first time in my life I wanted to buy my next laptop wisely. Read more →