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Howard van Rooijen - Co-Founder

Howard, an expert in Microsoft's roadmap, identifies core issues and guides you to optimal solutions. Schedule a brief chat for strategic long-term planning.

Meet Howard

Howard spent 10 years as a technology consultant helping some of the UK's best known organisations work smarter, before founding endjin in 2010. He's a Microsoft ScaleUp Mentor, and a Microsoft MVP for Azure and Developer Technologies, and helps small teams achieve big things using data, AI and Microsoft Azure.

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Observe File System Changes with Reactive Extensions for .NET

Observe File System Changes with Reactive Extensions for .NET

Howard van Rooijen

Use Reactive Extensions for .NET to transform FileSystemWatcher events into a powerful and easy-to-use event stream to deal with file system idiosyncrasies.
ASP.NET Core + Razor + HTMX + Chart.js

ASP.NET Core + Razor + HTMX + Chart.js

Howard van Rooijen

How to combine ASP.NET Core, Razor, and HTMX to power interactive Chart.js visualisations.
adr - A .NET Tool for Creating & Managing Architecture Decision Records

adr - A .NET Tool for Creating & Managing Architecture Decision Records

Howard van Rooijen

Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) capture context, options, decisions, and consequences. dotnet-adr is a .NET tool for managing ADRs.
Learn Reactive Programming for FREE: Introduction to Rx.NET 2nd Edition (2024)

Learn Reactive Programming for FREE: Introduction to Rx.NET 2nd Edition (2024)

Howard van Rooijen

Learn Reactive Programming with our free book, Introduction to Rx.NET 2nd Edition (2024), available in PDF, EPUB, online, and GitHub.
Using the Playwright C# SDK to automate 2FA authentication for AAD and MSA

Using the Playwright C# SDK to automate 2FA authentication for AAD and MSA

Howard van Rooijen

Learn to configure AAD or MSA 2FA profiles for UI automation testing with Time-based One-Time Passwords.
How to Monetize APIs with Azure API Management

How to Monetize APIs with Azure API Management

Howard van Rooijen

Explore monetizing APIs with our guide. We offer strategies, videos, and code via Azure API Management to fast-track your business model.
How to use SQL Notebooks to access Azure Synapse SQL Pools & SQL on demand

How to use SQL Notebooks to access Azure Synapse SQL Pools & SQL on demand

Howard van Rooijen

Wishing Azure Synapse Analytics had support for SQL notebooks? Fear not, it's easy to take advantage rich interactive notebooks for SQL Pools and SQL on Demand.
How can I contribute to the Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library?

How can I contribute to the Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library?

Howard van Rooijen

The Azure CNAB Quickstart Templates we've created are only half the story. Much of the work we've done over the last few months involved the authoring, contribution and DevOps pipelines required to support an open source project. The project is inspired by the original Azure Quickstart Templates - which over the last 5 years has grown to over 850 templates. In this post we're going to explain how you can author CNAB templates and contribute them.
An Overview of the Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library

An Overview of the Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library

Howard van Rooijen

The Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library helps you get up and running with CNAB and Porter. We've built quickstarts covering solutions like WordPress, Ghost, Mattermost, and data platforms like Apache Airflow, SQL Server AlwaysOn clusters and Kubernetes features like an nginx ingress controller and an Azure AD enabled OAuth2 Proxy. We've condensed all our learnings from the past 9 months of working on the project and turned them into a 10 minute video which explains all the key concepts. We hope this video helps accelerate your own CNAB & Porter epiphanies!

Survey: Expression Trees use cases in .NET

Howard van Rooijen

Expression Trees are one of .NET's super powers; but they are hugely overlooked and misunderstood. They can be used for on-the-fly code generation; building DSLs, and producing high performance computational algorithms. I'm trying to gather evidence about how you are using them, to make a case for future investments in the Expression Tree subsystem in .NET Core / .NET 5.0
Rising Stars - Cloud Apprentice & Apprentice Engineer of the Year

Rising Stars - Cloud Apprentice & Apprentice Engineer of the Year

Howard van Rooijen

Both of endjin's apprentices won in their categories of Apprentice Engineer and Cloud Apprentice at the Rising Star Awards.
Endjin is a Snowflake Partner

Endjin is a Snowflake Partner

Howard van Rooijen

Snowflake is a cloud native data warehouse platform, that enabled data engineering, data science, data lakes, data sharing and data warehousing. Endjin are very excited to announce our partnership.
Agile Architecture: Painting by Numbers

Agile Architecture: Painting by Numbers

Howard van Rooijen

Creating a architecture in an iterative and incremental solution delivery is challenging. I've evolved an approach akin to Painting By Numbers, and am inspired by a quote from the artist and film maker Dave McKean.
Announcing Power BI Weekly!

Announcing Power BI Weekly!

Howard van Rooijen

Power BI has become more successful than anyone anticipated. We've decided to spin out the Power BI category from the Azure Weekly Newsletter into it's own publication - Power BI Weekly.
ML.NET, Azure Functions and the 4th Industrial Revolution

ML.NET, Azure Functions and the 4th Industrial Revolution

Howard van Rooijen

There is a lot of hype around AI & ML. Here's an example of using ML.NET & Azure Functions to deliver a series of micro-optimisations, to automate a series of 1 second tasks. When applied to business processes, this is what the 4th Industrial Revolution could look like.

Good Reads in 2018

Howard van Rooijen

Here's a list of books from my reading list; some technical, some business, some focusing on personal development. All were worth reading.
Cosmos DB - Request Units charged for processing a Gremlin API request

Cosmos DB - Request Units charged for processing a Gremlin API request

Howard van Rooijen

If you're using the Gremlin API for Cosmos DB, you can now see how much each operation costs in Request Units.
Thoughts about .NET, The Cloud, AI, ML, and teaching software engineers

Thoughts about .NET, The Cloud, AI, ML, and teaching software engineers

Howard van Rooijen

Ian Griffiths recently joined endjin as a Technical Fellow. We had a long fireside chat, which has been broken down into a 5 part series covering .NET, the Cloud, AI, ML, teaching software engineering, and why he joined endjin.
OpenAPI Document Converters for Visual Studio 2017

OpenAPI Document Converters for Visual Studio 2017

Howard van Rooijen

The OpenAPI SDK based OpenAPI document converters extension has been updated to support Visual Studio 2017.
OpenAPI code generators for Visual Studio

OpenAPI code generators for Visual Studio

Howard van Rooijen

Using the recently Open Sourced OpenAPI SDK, we create a Visual Studio extension from converting OpenAPI specificaitons between YAML and JSON formats.
We're talking about Cosmos DB at Future Decoded 2017!

We're talking about Cosmos DB at Future Decoded 2017!

Howard van Rooijen

We have lots of experience working with Azure Cosmos DB, and we're sharing some of our knowledge at Microsoft's Future Decoded event.
Simon Sinek's "Start With Why" is the prequel to Satya Nadella's "Hit Refresh"

Simon Sinek's "Start With Why" is the prequel to Satya Nadella's "Hit Refresh"

Howard van Rooijen

Having read Simon Sinek's 'Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action' back to back with Satya Nadella's 'Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone' I realised there was a lot of synergy between the two books.
Kickstart your API proposition with the API Maturity Assessment

Kickstart your API proposition with the API Maturity Assessment

Howard van Rooijen

Explore the importance of API strategy, governance, security, and design in Digital Transformation projects.
How to plan your cloud transformation journey

How to plan your cloud transformation journey

Howard van Rooijen

We've been helping customers adopt Microsoft Azure since 2010, we have produced a lot of thought leadership to help people think about the steps required, the risk involved and how to plan a successful adoption.
Best of the Recorded Azure Sessions at BUILD 2017

Best of the Recorded Azure Sessions at BUILD 2017

Howard van Rooijen

There were so many good sessions at Microsoft BUILD 2017, we selected our highlights of sessions that you should make time to catch up with.
10 ways working with Microsoft helped endjin grow since 2010

10 ways working with Microsoft helped endjin grow since 2010

Howard van Rooijen

Microsoft recently shot a video interviewing endjin co-founder, Howard van Rooijen, and Director of Engineering, James Broome, about how Microsoft has helped endjin grow over the past decade. This posts the top 10 ways in which Microsoft helped - from providing access to valuable software and services, to opening up sales channels, to helping to navigate the minefield of UK Financial Services regulations around cloud adoption.
2 Day Microsoft Bot Framework Hackathon with Watchfinder

2 Day Microsoft Bot Framework Hackathon with Watchfinder

Howard van Rooijen

We ran a two day hackathon with Watchfinder and Microsoft to build a conversational experience to automate the 'sell your watch experience'.
Top Gadget Purchases of 2016

Top Gadget Purchases of 2016

Howard van Rooijen

In a reflective blog post, I detail some of the recent gadget purchases I've made and am shocked at how many of them are Amazon products.
Microsoft Azure Most Valuable Professional 2016

Microsoft Azure Most Valuable Professional 2016

Howard van Rooijen

It is with a huge amount of honour to announce that endjin co-founder, Howard van Rooijen, has been awarded an Azure MVP award for his contributions to the Azure ecosystem.
Guest Blog Post: Hello World! I'm Adanma and I'm doing work experience.

Guest Blog Post: Hello World! I'm Adanma and I'm doing work experience.

Howard van Rooijen

Adanma spent a week with endjin gaining work experience, to see if a job in the world of Tech is something she'd like to do.
TeamCity MetaRunner for creating Release Annotations in Azure Application Insights

TeamCity MetaRunner for creating Release Annotations in Azure Application Insights

Howard van Rooijen

Meta-Runners allow you to easily create reusable build components for TeamCity, in this post I demonstrate how to create a Meta-Runner to create Azure Application Insights Release Annotations.
Embracing Disruption - Financial Services and the Microsoft Cloud

Embracing Disruption - Financial Services and the Microsoft Cloud

Howard van Rooijen

We have produced an insightful booklet called "Embracing Disruption - Financial Services and the Microsoft Cloud" which examines the challenges and opportunities for the Financial Service Industry in the UK, through the lens of Microsoft Azure, Security, Privacy & Data Sovereignty, Data Ingestion, Transformation & Enrichment, Big Compute, Big Data, Insights & Visualisation, Infrastructure, Ops & Support, and the API Economy.
The 100 Year Start-up: Embracing Disruption in Financial Services

The 100 Year Start-up: Embracing Disruption in Financial Services

Howard van Rooijen

Hymans Robertson was set up in Glasgow in 1921 and is one of the longest established independent firms of consultants and actuaries in the UK. Hymans Robertson soon realised that the computational requirements of their models exceeded the capacity of their on-premise datacentres and that the most cost effective solution would be to use the cloud to perform their Big Compute. But before they could harness the cloud to help them solve their Big Data problems, the business needed to understand the ramifications of moving to the cloud; everything from regulatory, risk and compliance concerns,  to how their internal Ops team would need to evolve and adapt, and how to deal with moving data from on-prem into the cloud.
An experiment to automatically detect API breaking changes in .NET assemblies and suggest a Semantic Version number

An experiment to automatically detect API breaking changes in .NET assemblies and suggest a Semantic Version number

Howard van Rooijen

Exploring the creation of a tool to detect accidental .NET API changes for accurate SemVer in NuGet packages.
ILMerge Meta-Runner for TeamCity

ILMerge Meta-Runner for TeamCity

Howard van Rooijen

Meta-Runners allow you to easily create reusable build components for TeamCity, in this post I demonstrate how to create a Meta-Runner to wrap ILMerge functionality.
Endjin.Licensing now supports SHA256

Endjin.Licensing now supports SHA256

Howard van Rooijen

Microsoft have added SHA256 support to Signed XML, and Endjin.Licensing has been updating to take advantage of this breaking change.
Azure Weekly turns 1 & we're celebrating by giving away 5 Windows IoT Raspberry Pi 2 starter kits

Azure Weekly turns 1 & we're celebrating by giving away 5 Windows IoT Raspberry Pi 2 starter kits

Howard van Rooijen

We've reached our first milestone - a whole year of publishing Azure Weekly. To celebrate we're giving away stuff!
Spinning up 16,000 A1 Virtual Machines on Azure Batch

Spinning up 16,000 A1 Virtual Machines on Azure Batch

Howard van Rooijen

We recently completed a technical proof of concept to see if the new Azure Batch service could scale to meet the demands of a Big Compute workload.
Reduce Merge Conflicts in .NET Solutions with PowerShell based Git Hooks

Reduce Merge Conflicts in .NET Solutions with PowerShell based Git Hooks

Howard van Rooijen

Git has powerful extensibility points, which you can harness to automate your dev inner loop. In this post we examine how to use Git Hooks to reduce the occurrence of merge conflicts.
SpecFlow Extensions for Azure Storage Emulator

SpecFlow Extensions for Azure Storage Emulator

Howard van Rooijen

We use SpecFlow to write integration tests against Azure. In this post we share an Open Source SpecFlow extension for the Azure Storage Emulator.
Azure Web Apps: Package Restore against a private NuGet Feed

Azure Web Apps: Package Restore against a private NuGet Feed

Howard van Rooijen

If you have private NuGet feeds, restoring packages during a CI/CD process can be a challenge. This post provides a solution when working with Azure App Service.

Want to work smarter, grow faster and be happier? endjin is hiring!

Howard van Rooijen

We're always looking for good people to join endjin. If you like what we blog or talk about, it might be worth getting in contact.
25 useful steps missing from SpecFlow

25 useful steps missing from SpecFlow

Howard van Rooijen

We're huge fans of SpecFlow. We harvested 25 reusable steps from our various open source projects into a new extension that you can use to reduce your own boilerplate.
Extending Endjin.Retry with custom Retry Policies

Extending Endjin.Retry with custom Retry Policies

Howard van Rooijen

Endjin.Retry is our simple .NET library for handling transient errors, to make your Cloud applications more resilient and reliable.
Endjin.Licensing - Part 5: Real world usage patterns

Endjin.Licensing - Part 5: Real world usage patterns

Howard van Rooijen

We've open sourced a lightweight .NET based licensing framework we've been using internally over the last couple of years; in this post I'm going to highlight some real world usage scenarios.
Endjin.Licensing - Part 4: How to implement custom validation logic

Endjin.Licensing - Part 4: How to implement custom validation logic

Howard van Rooijen

Endjin.Licensing is our .NET based licensing framework; in this post we highlight its extensibility features, demonstrating how to add custom license validation logic.
Endjin.Licensing - Part 3: How to create and validate a license

Endjin.Licensing - Part 3: How to create and validate a license

Howard van Rooijen

Endjin.Licensing is our .NET based licensing framework; in this post we show how to create and validate a license using C#
Endjin.Licensing - Part 2: Defining the desired behaviour

Endjin.Licensing - Part 2: Defining the desired behaviour

Howard van Rooijen

We've open sourced a lightweight .NET based licensing framework; in this post we flesh out the behaviours we want the framework to support using Gherkin flavoured BDD specifications.
Endjin.Licensing - Part 1: Why build another licensing system?

Endjin.Licensing - Part 1: Why build another licensing system?

Howard van Rooijen

We've open sourced a lightweight .NET based licensing framework we've been using internally over the last couple of years. In this post I explain why we created it in the first place, rather than using existing offerings.
Send Data into Azure Event Hubs using Web Api's HttpClient

Send Data into Azure Event Hubs using Web Api's HttpClient

Howard van Rooijen

This post shows how to send data directly into Azure Event Hubs using a HTTP request via C#'s HttpClient API
TPL Dataflow by Example code samples for LINQPad

TPL Dataflow by Example code samples for LINQPad

Howard van Rooijen

TPL Dataflow, a potent yet lesser-known .NET framework, is ideal for high-performance data processing.
Have you signed up for the Azure Weekly newsletter?

Have you signed up for the Azure Weekly newsletter?

Howard van Rooijen

Azure Weekly is our FREE weekly newsletter containing a round up of all the news and interesting blog posts about the Azure ecosystem.
Jasmine MetaRunner for TeamCity

Jasmine MetaRunner for TeamCity

Howard van Rooijen

Meta-Runners allow you to easily create reusable build components for TeamCity, in this post I demonstrate how to create a Meta-Runner to wrap Jasmine BDD Framework test runner.
Guest Blog Post: End of Week Two Work Experience (2014)

Guest Blog Post: End of Week Two Work Experience (2014)

Howard van Rooijen

Jack, 15, is spending two weeks gaining work experience at endjin. In his final post, he reflects on the past two weeks.
Guest Blog Post: Week Two – Day Four of Work Experience 2014

Guest Blog Post: Week Two – Day Four of Work Experience 2014

Howard van Rooijen

Jack, 15, is spending two weeks gaining work experience at endjin. This post covers his reflections on his fourth day.
Guest Blog Post: Week Two - Day Three of Work Experience (2014)

Guest Blog Post: Week Two - Day Three of Work Experience (2014)

Howard van Rooijen

Jack, 15, is spending two weeks gaining work experience at endjin. This post covers his reflections on the 3rd day of his second week.
Guest Blog Post: Week Two - Day Two Work Experience (2014)

Guest Blog Post: Week Two - Day Two Work Experience (2014)

Howard van Rooijen

Jack, 15, is spending two weeks gaining work experience at endjin. This post covers his write up of the second day of his second week.
Guest Blog Post: Start of Week Two Work Experience (2014)

Guest Blog Post: Start of Week Two Work Experience (2014)

Howard van Rooijen

Jack, 15, is spending two weeks gaining work experience at endjin. This post covers the start of his second week.

Guest Blog Post: End of Week One Work Experience (2014)

Howard van Rooijen

Jack, 15, is spending two weeks gaining work experience at endjin. This post covers his reflections on his first week.
Guest Blog Post: Third Day of Work Experience (2014)

Guest Blog Post: Third Day of Work Experience (2014)

Howard van Rooijen

Jack, 15, is spending two weeks gaining work experience at endjin. This post covers his reflections on his third day.
Guest Blog Post: Second Day of Work Experience (2014)

Guest Blog Post: Second Day of Work Experience (2014)

Howard van Rooijen

Jack, 15, is spending two weeks gaining work experience at endjin. This post covers his reflections on his second day.
Create a custom TeamCity PowerShell MetaRunner to Notify NewRelic that new deployment has occurred

Create a custom TeamCity PowerShell MetaRunner to Notify NewRelic that new deployment has occurred

Howard van Rooijen

You can easily notify NewRelic that a deployment has occured. In this post I demonstrate how to turn a script into a reusable TeamCity Metarunner.
Guest Blog Post: First Day of Work Experience (2014)

Guest Blog Post: First Day of Work Experience (2014)

Howard van Rooijen

Jack, 15, is spending two weeks at endjin doing work experience. In this post he describes his experience of his first day.
End of Month Research Roundup – June 2014

End of Month Research Roundup – June 2014

Howard van Rooijen

We have a culture of sharing information at endjin; here are our highlights of interesting content shared in June 2014.
End of Month Research Roundup – May 2014

End of Month Research Roundup – May 2014

Howard van Rooijen

We have a culture of sharing information at endjin; here are our highlights of interesting content shared in May 2014.
End of Month Research Roundup – April 2014

End of Month Research Roundup – April 2014

Howard van Rooijen

We have a culture of sharing information at endjin; here are our highlights of interesting content shared in April 2014.
End of Month Research Roundup – March 2014

End of Month Research Roundup – March 2014

Howard van Rooijen

We have a culture of sharing information at endjin; here are our highlights of interesting content shared in March 2014.
A Step by Step Guide to Connecting to an Azure Virtual Machine with PowerShell Remoting

A Step by Step Guide to Connecting to an Azure Virtual Machine with PowerShell Remoting

Howard van Rooijen

Learn how to use PowerShell Remoting to connect to an Azure Virtual Machine; a useful technique for managing servers like cattle, not pets.
Azure Tip: Cannot connect to Virtual Machine after changing Virtual Machine Size

Azure Tip: Cannot connect to Virtual Machine after changing Virtual Machine Size

Howard van Rooijen

A quick tip on fixing a 'remote desktop could not connect' error on Azure Virtual Machines.
Building an Epic Dev Rig for less than £1600 (2014 Edition)

Building an Epic Dev Rig for less than £1600 (2014 Edition)

Howard van Rooijen

In this post, we show how we created bespoke gaming desktops to provide an excellent developer workstation for endjineers.
Configuring TeamCity and YouTrack to use Office 365 for Email Notifications

Configuring TeamCity and YouTrack to use Office 365 for Email Notifications

Howard van Rooijen

This post shows how to use your Office 365 SMTP relay to enable email notification from TeamCity and YouTrack hosted in Azure.
End of Month Research Roundup – February 2014

End of Month Research Roundup – February 2014

Howard van Rooijen

We have a culture of sharing information at endjin; here are our highlights of interesting content shared in February 2014.
End of Month Research Roundup – January 2014

End of Month Research Roundup – January 2014

Howard van Rooijen

We have a culture of sharing information at endjin; here are our highlights of interesting content shared in January 2014.
Equipping a kick-ass meeting room for less than £1500

Equipping a kick-ass meeting room for less than £1500

Howard van Rooijen

In this post I kit out our new meeting room for £1500 and turn it into a collaboration and meeting space that we use on a daily basis for solution design & pairing sessions, conference calls with our clients, partners and remote workers as well as lunch time brown bag training sessions
End of Week Research Roundup

End of Week Research Roundup

Howard van Rooijen

We have a culture of sharing information at endjin; here are our highlights of interesting content shared in November 2013.
Reclaiming Space after updating to Windows 8.1

Reclaiming Space after updating to Windows 8.1

Howard van Rooijen

A quick tip of how to reclaim up to 10GB of space after updating to Windows 8.1

Making the move from iOS to Windows Phone 8

Howard van Rooijen

I've been a long term Smartphone user, and early iPhone adopter, but I've become fatigued by Apple and wanted to migrate to the new Windows Phone platform.
A Step by Step Guide to Automating TeamCity Backups

A Step by Step Guide to Automating TeamCity Backups

Howard van Rooijen

In this blog post, I provide a how-to guide for automating your TeamCity backups using a PowerShell script.
A Step by Step Guide to Migrating a TeamCity Instance from One Server to Another

A Step by Step Guide to Migrating a TeamCity Instance from One Server to Another

Howard van Rooijen

Migrate your TeamCity instance with this guide, covering the step-by-step process when in-place upgrades aren't viable.
Guest Blog Post: Work Experience at endjin – Week 2

Guest Blog Post: Work Experience at endjin – Week 2

Howard van Rooijen

Joshua, 15, is spending two weeks at endjin doing work experience. In this post he reflects on his second and final week.
Guest Blog Post: Work Experience at endjin - Week 1

Guest Blog Post: Work Experience at endjin - Week 1

Howard van Rooijen

Joshua, 15, is spending two weeks at endjin doing work experience. In this post he reflects on his first week.
PowerShell Best Kept Secrets: Splatting

PowerShell Best Kept Secrets: Splatting

Howard van Rooijen

Splatting is one of the most powerful, yet underused features of PowerShell. In this post we cover a walk-through of how to use this feature.
A Step by Step Guide to using GitFlow with TeamCity – Part 4 – Feature Branches in TeamCity

A Step by Step Guide to using GitFlow with TeamCity – Part 4 – Feature Branches in TeamCity

Howard van Rooijen

In the final part of this series, we cover how to use TeamCity's feature branch abilities to support the GitFlow process.
Templify 0.7.0.25 is available.

Templify 0.7.0.25 is available.

Howard van Rooijen

A new version of Templify has been released, which includes a huge performance improvement contributed by the Open Source community.
A Step by Step Guide to using GitFlow with TeamCity – Part 3 – GitFlow Commands

A Step by Step Guide to using GitFlow with TeamCity – Part 3 – GitFlow Commands

Howard van Rooijen

This post finally covers the nitty-gritty of how you use the GitFlow extensions to drive the workflow.
A Step by Step Guide to using GitFlow with TeamCity – Part 2 – GitFlow - a Branching Model for a Release Cycle

A Step by Step Guide to using GitFlow with TeamCity – Part 2 – GitFlow - a Branching Model for a Release Cycle

Howard van Rooijen

In this post we show you how to get up and running with GitFlow.
A Step by Step Guide to using GitFlow with TeamCity - Part 1 - Different Branching Models

A Step by Step Guide to using GitFlow with TeamCity - Part 1 - Different Branching Models

Howard van Rooijen

Adopting Git means creating an entirely new mental model about how to version control your source code. Once you make the jump, there's no going back.

Agile:MK January 2013 Meeting

Howard van Rooijen

Endjin are proudly sponsoring the Agile Milton Keynes user group.
Calculating Distance using SQL Server Spatial CLR Types

Calculating Distance using SQL Server Spatial CLR Types

Howard van Rooijen

Sql Server Spatial Types Assembly is a hidden gem. In this post we show how to use SqlGeography.STGeomFromText and STDistance distance (in meters) between the two points.
TeamCity PowerShell

TeamCity PowerShell

Howard van Rooijen

To celebrate joining JetBrains Development Academy Board, we release a PowerShell modules to make working with TeamCity easier.
An Omega Geek's Guide to Learning PowerShell

An Omega Geek's Guide to Learning PowerShell

Howard van Rooijen

PowerShell is fantastic language for DevOps, automation and general scripting. Every developer should be familiar with it; here's a guide to some useful resources to help you learn it.

Dev4Good July 2011

Howard van Rooijen

We attended the two day Dev4Good hackathon in Hammersmith; and worked on digitalizing the paper based application process for the The Goldsmith Craft and Design Council awards.
On .NET Rocks! Talking about Sharp Architecture, Templify and StyleCop

On .NET Rocks! Talking about Sharp Architecture, Templify and StyleCop

Howard van Rooijen

Long time listener, first time guest. I was invited to speak on the .NET Rocks! Podcast, to talk about Sharp Architecture and various other Open Source projects I've been involved with.

StyleCop and StyleCop for ReSharper have merged

Howard van Rooijen

We've decided to combine the StyleCop and StyleCop for ReSharper code bases to make long term maintenance easier.
On Apprenticeships

On Apprenticeships

Howard van Rooijen

You don't have to have a Computer Science Degree in order to be a software engineer or work in the tech industry. In this post I talk about my career journey, from Psychology Grad, to Software Engineer, to Business Owner.
Work Smarter with Convention Over Configuration and the Endjin Composition Framework

Work Smarter with Convention Over Configuration and the Endjin Composition Framework

Howard van Rooijen

We've added convention over configuration features to our Dependency Injection library - the endjin composition framework, to help improve your productivity.

A Step by Step Guide to MongoDB for .NET Developers

Howard van Rooijen

MongoDB has been taken a large amount of mindshare in the NoSQL space. In this blog post we share a simple step-by-step guide on how to get started as a .NET developer.
A Step by Step Guide to Hosting YouTrack in IIS 7

A Step by Step Guide to Hosting YouTrack in IIS 7

Howard van Rooijen

Step-by-step guide on setting up YouTrack and using IIS as a reverse proxy for custom domain access.
A Step by Step Guide to Hosting TeamCity in IIS 7

A Step by Step Guide to Hosting TeamCity in IIS 7

Howard van Rooijen

Step-by-step guide on setting up TeamCity and using IIS as a reverse proxy for custom domain access.
A follow up to "A Short Tale of a Deceptively Slow LINQ Expression"

A follow up to "A Short Tale of a Deceptively Slow LINQ Expression"

Howard van Rooijen

My last post caused a number of responses from the community. I discuss them here and provide a little bit more context.
A Short Tale of a Deceptively Slow LINQ Expression

A Short Tale of a Deceptively Slow LINQ Expression

Howard van Rooijen

In this post I delve into some performance analysis of an expensive loop that was taking over 200 seconds to run.
Introducing Templify

Introducing Templify

Howard van Rooijen

Templify is a simple tool for tokenising and packaging entire code based solutions. It's designed to unfurl demos / quickstarts / solution templates.
Work Smarter, Not Harder

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Howard van Rooijen

Feedback loops are an incredibly powerful force. In order adopt a continuous improvement mindset, you need to set up positive feedback loops. Here's how I've internalised the 'Work Smarter, Not Harder' mantra.