Over 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...
Project Scaffolding for Python
Intro to Node.JS for .NET Developers
Microsoft 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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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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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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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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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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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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How to Recruit a Technical Co-Founder for Your Startup
The LA startup scene is fascinating, having lived and worked in it for a year now - it's a scene teeming with brillaint people with big ideas, and it's starting to attract some major capital from the Bay Area. It has one major issue: a big shortage of technical...
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MongoDB vs. SQL Server 2008: A .NET Developer’s Perspective
One of the first projects I put together this year was Captain Obvious, a nifty little application that runs off of AppHarbor and ASP.NET MVC3. What made Captain Obvious special for me was that it was my first time using something other than a relational database[footnote:...
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How to Securely Verify and Validate Image Uploads in ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC
One of the more interesting things I had to do as part of building XAPFest was handle bulk image uploads for screenshots for applications and user / app icons. Most of the challenges here are UI-centric ones (which I resolved using jQuery File-Upload) but the one security challenge...