Welcome to Andy Heathershaw

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.

Server maintenance – 1st/2nd November

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.

Miscellaneous Read more


Walt Disney World to close for Matthew’s arrival

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


Sky become the first UK ISP to enable IPv6

Sky – who provide broadband and digital TV services to UK residents and businesses – have recently enabled IPv6 to their consumer broadband customers.

Miscellaneous Read more


OneDrive storage is no longer unlimited

... 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


A weekend afternoon in Autumn

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.

Reflections Read more


MariaDB 10.1 is Generally Available

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


Microsoft launch Windows 10 developer qualification

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


Migrate an SVN repository to TFS

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.

DevOps , Software Development Read more


Linode: Why I chose them to host my website and applications

This post explains why I chose Linode to host my new website (this one) and other web applications I use in my day-to-day work – and why I’d fully recommend them to anyone who needs a virtual server (VPS.)

DevOps , Software Development Read more


Overcoming anxiety

I struggle with anxiety of varying degrees. Sometimes it just stops me having a good time with new people because I’m worried about what they make of me, other times it takes hold over weeks or months, ever-present at the back of my mind.

This weekend was one of the latter.

Health & Wellbeing , Reflections Read more