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Showing posts from January, 2015

Building a simple dynamic site map

A while ago I worked on a project to improve a website indexing within search engines. The project was initiated because there was a noticeable usage downward trend for the site. The main reason was the site was not being listed within relevant searches by search engines. This was because our content didn't emphasize the keywords within the search due to our HTML layout; URL structure and crawling errors. One aspect of the project was to improve the site layout and provide more information publicly.  The layout improvements were: to include the use of headers to highlight search keywords; a simpler layout to reduce HTML errors.  Providing more information was to help increase coverage of keywords.  Another improvement made to the site was the restructuring of the site URLs.  By making the URLs more human readable and converting the site search functionality to use ASP.Net routes. A site map was introduced to enable to help the search providers index our site of our static and s

Automating SQL Server Database projects Deployment

Within this post I wish to share the methods I used to automate the deployment of my SQL Server database projects.  I needed to automate the deployment of my database projects within the build process so I could integrate the execution of my unit tests. As mentioned in a previous post: Integrating TSQLT with Team Foundation Build Services continuous build .  I also wanted to automate the deployment into the development, test and production environment for the following reasons: To empower the developers to do database deployment into the required environment and reducing the dependence on me. To reduce the complexity of deploying the database projects. To have an easy deployment process to document i.e. run this script. In a way to document the deployment of the database projects. Before I start I would like to highlight an invaluable project / solution file(s) that help with the automation.  These are "Profiles" which are used as configuration files for deployment.