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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03 Aug 2011

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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30 Jun 2011

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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24 Jun 2011

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...

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21 Jun 2011

How I Built CaptainObvio.us

Captain Obvio.us - a place to share ideasI made a tiny splash on Hacker News a month ago when I asked for feedback on my newest side project, Read More

24 May 2011

Announcing XAPFest – A Massive Windows Phone 7 Hackathon in Santa Monica, CA on June 4th 2011

xapfest_black_logoI am pleased to announce something very exciting that Microsoft is doing in my neighborhood of Santa Monica, California: we’re putting together...

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26 Apr 2011

Geolocation Services and Bing Maps in Windows Phone 7

Tonight I gave a brief talk to WinMo LA about using Geolocation Services and Bing Maps on Windows Phone 7. I mostly covered the APIs and controls that developers can use in the current Windows Phone SDK, the steps developers need to take in order to protect a user's...

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