10 Jan 2012

Node.JS on Windows Azure Part 1: Setting Up Your Environment

Following Microsoft’s announcements regarding first-class Node.JS support on Windows Azure, I thought it would be helpful to walk newbie Node.JS and Windows Azure developers through the process of getting their Node.JS development environment set up, building their first simple Node.JS application, and then learning how to take advantage of...

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10 Jan 2012

Node.JS on Windows Azure Part 2: Building a Basic Web Application with Node.JS on Azure

In the last post in this series on working with Node.JS in Windows Azure I showed you how to set up your development environment for working with Node.JS and Windows Azure. In this post I am going to show you how to write and deploy a simple web application...

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22 Dec 2011

New Windows Phone 7 App: Lolcats Professional Pro Plus

localcatsproplus-icon-largeIn addition to my regular work for Microsoft and the open source...

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18 Dec 2011

Project Scaffolding for Python

 python-logo.pngOver the summer I went through Zed Shaw’s Learn Python the Hard Way in an effort to broaden my horizons and start learning languages beyond C#.

Learn Python the Hard Way is a book...

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14 Dec 2011

Intro to Node.JS for .NET Developers

Node.js darkMicrosoft announced out-of-the-box support for Node.JS on Windows Azure on Tuesday; we pushed both an official Node.JS SDK for Windows Azure services (table storage, blob storage, and queues) and some tools for creating...

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02 Dec 2011

How to Modify Machine.config on Windows Azure Web Roles

Earlier this week I spent some time helping a company troubleshoot some performance issues with Windows Azure – their ASP.NET request queue was growing longer than the maximum amount of queued requests supported by default in IIS (5000) during bursts of high activity, so I had to help them find...

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29 Nov 2011

How to Migrate Data between On-Premise SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Azure Without Getting a Migraine

I love my job at Microsoft, but there are some times when we simply make it really damn hard for people to do business with us. Migrating data from an on-premise SQL Server to SQL Azure is sadly one of those lapses where, for whatever reason, we’ve left people who...

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19 Nov 2011

Rise of the Popped Collar Programmer

I am frankly disturbed by a trend that I’ve seen both in-person and all over Hacker News / Reddit through the past year, and I am going to finally give it a name: “popped collar programming.”

Popped collar programming is the hipsterization of software development, and it’s happening in a...

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16 Aug 2011

How to Use Dependency Injection (Ninject) with WCF Services

I spent a lot of time late last week trying to figure out exactly how to set up dependency injection for a WCF service I was developing on Windows Azure; there’s some documentation out there on how to do it, but it’s not nearly as helpful as I would like...

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14 Aug 2011

New Open Source Project: MVC.Utilities

I announced this on Twitter late last week, but I open-sourced a number of common helpers and service interfaces that I use throughout all of my production ASP.NET MVC applications and wrapped it into a project I call MVC.Utilities.

MVC.Utilities has a number of helper classes for the following:

...

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