Dave Barrows Tech Blog

If you find you've changed your password on your Azure Virtual Machine, but then subsequently forgotten it (and I swear I was entering the correct password, but apparently not), then you google phrases like "recover azure vm password" etc, you may run across blog posts from Microsoft like the one found here . There are two things to note which are not entirely obvious from the steps listed there.  One is, if you don't use PowerShell every day you may launch the PowerShell command prompt and not the ISE as they suggest.  You do in fact want the ISE, not the command prompt.  For example on a Windows 2008 server machine the ISE is under Accessories... Windows PowerShell... Windows PowerShell ISE. The other thing is, if you're trying to reset the password of your VM, the VM actually has to be powered up.  (Duh!)  In retrospect this is obvious; how can you reset the password of your VM if the VM is not actually powered up?  You can't. But if it is powered...

I had one of those situations today where you're looking at various blog posts and stack overflow posts and everybody's essentially saying, "it's easy, you just add the NuGet package, issue a couple lines of configuration code, and it works."  But I was scratching my head for awhile until I connected the dots.  So I thought I'd post a small tip here in hopes of saving somebody a minute or two. So, if you want to add ELMAH to your ASP.NET WebAPI project to log unhandled exceptions, a bit of googling will quickly lead you to the elmah-contrib-webapi project, and helpful posts such as this one and this one , as well as various stack overflow posts .  I tried the stuff recommended there but for some reason couldn't get it working.  Having used ELMAH previously on an MVC project, I knew that the basic steps are: Install a NuGet package Tweak your web.config Point to where you want to log to (on my previous project it was logging to SQL Server, but ...