27 Jun 2012

Code Camp Talk: RavenDB vs MongoDB

This past weekend at SoCal Code Camp I presented a session along with my friend Nuri Halperin entitled “Battle of the NoSQL Databases: RavenDB vs. MongoDB.”

I represented the RavenDB team, having used it in production now for a couple of months (and ditched Mongo to do it.) I’ll blog more about the specifics of RavenDB and what it’s awesome at some point in the future, but nevertheless I wanted to post my slides here so you could see the bullet-by-bullet comparison between the databases.

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08 Jun 2012

Managing Your Windows Azure Services from OS X, Linux, or Windows Using the Command Line Interface (CLI)

A lot of exciting things were announced at today’s Meet Windows Azure event, and one of the things I wanted to share with you is how you can now use our cross-platform Windows Azure Command Line Interface (CLI), part of our Node SDK, to administer your hosted services,...

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17 Apr 2012

How to Build a Real-Time Chat Service with Socket.IO, Express, and the Azure SDK–Part 2: Setting Up Express and Session-Handling

So if you read part 1 of this series, then you’ve had a chance to grok the requirements for our little chat service and see all of the NPM packages and front-end tools we’re going to use for building it. In this portion I’m going to explain how to...

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16 Apr 2012

How to Build a Real-Time Chat Service with Socket.IO, Express, and the Azure SDK–Part 1: Setting Up

This past weekend I ran a Node Bootcamp on behalf of Microsoft and in partnership with the fine folks at Cloud9 IDE – the goal of these camps is to help teach newbies Node.JS and to get some Node.JS-on-Azure business from attendees who have a good experience.

So...

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12 Feb 2012

Building a Node + MongoDB Powered Blog on Windows Azure

This is a simple blog engine that I wrote in about three days time. I wanted to show off the power of Node.JS on Windows Azure, and also take advantage of our recent support for MongoDB in Replica Sets on Windows Azure.

Here are some of the tools I...

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10 Feb 2012

How to Do Business with Extremely Busy People

Big Picture

The bottom line when working with busy people is to preempt as much of the mental overhead of working with you as possible; all it really takes is some brevity and thoughtfulness on your part. If you form the eight behaviors I list below (and others I may...

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06 Feb 2012

How to Use the Azure npm Package Locally without the Azure Compute Emulator

One thing that is a little dicey about the Windows Azure SDK for Node [footnote:“azure” is the name of the associated npm package] is that it by default it depends on being run inside of Azure itself or the compute emulator.

The Azure npm package looks for environment variables...

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03 Feb 2012

Code Camp Talks: Intro to Node.JS and Building Web Apps with Express

This past weekend at SoCal Code Camp I gave two presentations back-to-back on Node.JS: “Intro to Node.JS” and “Building Web Apps with Express.”

I don’t have much to add on what I did at the sessions other than to mention just how surprised I was at how enthusiastic people...

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17 Jan 2012

How to Automatically Utilize Multicore Servers with Node on Windows Azure

One major advantage of developing Node applications for Windows Azure is the ability to have your Node apps managed directly by IIS via iisnode.

You can read more about the benefits of iisnode here, but I want to call out these two points specifically from the iisnode wiki:

...

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14 Jan 2012

Troubleshooting “500 Internal Server Errors” in the Windows Azure Emulator when Working with Node.JS

On my primary development machine, where I have tweaked and prodded IIS multiple times for many projects over the past couple of years, I get the following 500 – Internal Server Error message when I try to fire up even the simplest “Hello World” Node.JS project included in the default...

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