Welcome to the personal website and blog of software developer – Andy Heathershaw.
I’m a commercial Microsoft .NET developer and open-source PHP developer based in the West Midlands, England. I live with my husband and I’m daddy to a nine-year-old Labrador called Mickey and two growing boys.
Check out About Andy Heathershaw to read more about me, or browse my blog posts below.
Saturday, 18th March, 2017
It’s rare for commercial software developers, such as myself, to get to use the software we write. We rely on our users to report problems or suggest new features for the applications we develop.
Therefore when I read about a PHP development framework (Laravel) that looked so interesting I just had to try it out, I came up with the idea of an application where you tell it all the dates that are important to you, and it will send you e-mail or SMS text messages when those dates are coming up.
And so… Simply Remind Me was born.
Simply Remind Me , Software Development Read more
Wednesday, 16th November, 2016
When you have worked with the same technology day-in, day-out for almost 15 years, it’s easy to miss some of the “under-the-radar” changes that are made without any fan-fare.
This, for me, is one of those in C#.
Software Development Read more
Wednesday, 26th October, 2016
My hosting company, Memset Ltd., have advised me they will be performing important maintenance work on their Miniserver platform.
This maintenance is to apply critical security patches to the Linux kernel of the physical servers that host the virtual servers like mine – that power this website.
It is taking place between 22:00 GMT on 1st November and 04:00 GMT on 2nd November. My server will be down for 15-30 minutes during this period.
Thursday, 6th October, 2016
The Walt Disney World resort announced on Twitter earlier today that it will be closing all theme parks, water parks, golf courses, Disney Springs and the ESPN sports complex for hurricane Matthew’s arrival.
The parks will close at 5pm local time today (Thursday) and will not open at all on Friday.
Disney , Reflections Read more
Thursday, 16th June, 2016
Sky – who provide broadband and digital TV services to UK residents and businesses – have recently enabled IPv6 to their consumer broadband customers.
Wednesday, 4th November, 2015
... after some people upload too much.
“Today, storage limits just became a thing of the past with Office 365.”
Julia White, general manager of Office 365 Technical Product Management. 27th October, 2014
Fast forward to November 2015 and storage limits have just become present again.
Software Development Read more
Wednesday, 21st October, 2015
It’s getting cold outside, the trees and foliage are turning a different shade of brown or yellow with each passing day and the dark nights are drawing in – Autumn is most definitely here.
Wednesday, 21st October, 2015
The open-source database fork of MySQL, started by MySQL’s original developer – MariaDB – have certified their latest release of the 10.1 series (10.1.8) as Generally Available.
DevOps , Software Development Read more
Thursday, 8th October, 2015
Microsoft Learning today announced a new Windows 10 developer qualification aimed at software developers who want to target the recently-released Windows 10 universal platform.
Software Development Read more
Wednesday, 7th October, 2015
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS.) It is a complete tool for managing an application throughout its lifecycle. However I was bought up (and learnt most of my programming skills) on open-source software. It’s important to me that I don’t forget my roots!
While TFS is a fantastic tool for commercial application lifecycle management, SVN (Subversion) also has its place in corporates. It’s free and has lower training overhead: perfect for companies that don’t need anything other than source control (or use other tools.)
In this article I’m going to teach you how to migrate an SVN repository (including all its history) into TFS using a Git repository.