Demystifying The Code

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Beta 2 – Available Today

admin — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:31:38 +0000

Today is a big day for developers. We released Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Beta 2 to MSDN Subscribers (it will be available generally on Microsoft.com later in the week). Please visit the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 landing page here to download. Happy coding…

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Patterns-Based Silverlight Development Blog / Screencast Series Index

RobBagby — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:16:00 +0000

I am in the midst of putting together a blog / screencast series illustrating developing Silverlight 3 application, taking advantage of various design patterns. Some of the patterns we will cover are the Repository, the Pipeline, the Service Agent and Model View ViewModel. I will be building a Sample HelpDesk Application along the way (see below).

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Patterns-Based Silverlight Development – Part III – Pipeline Pattern

RobBagby — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:48:51 +0000

In yesterday’s post, I build our Repository interface and the implementation, as well as added some server-side validation, following a simple pattern. I also added a test project and wrote some tests to test the our validation logic. In this post I will implement the Pipeline pattern. I will then implement a fake repository and use it to test our Pipeline.

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Patterns-Based Silverlight Development – Part II – Repository and Validation

RobBagby — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:59:54 +0000

Introduction In this post I will provide a brief overview of the Repository pattern, implement a Repository in our sample application, establish our server-side validation and add our test project. Acknowledgements Most of what you will see in this post follows very closely with the code ScottGu implemented in his NerdDinner tutorial. In fact, I would highly [...]

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Patterns-Based Silverlight Development – Part I – Getting Started

RobBagby — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:35:00 +0000

Introduction During the summer I put together a session on Patterns-Based Silverlight Development that we delivered across the West Region as part of MSDN events. The session was structured around building a Silverlight application from the ground up that illustrated the use of the following design patterns: 1) Repository, 2) Pipeline, 3) Service Agent and 4) [...]

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Introducing Parallelism into your programs

RobBagby — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 23:16:12 +0000

Overview A little over a month ago, I volunteered to develop a session for the Windows 7 / Windows Server R2 launches that are being delivered across the country and beyond The session I worked on I affectionately call “An Introduction to Parallel Programming”. In that session I wanted to illustrate various approaches you can take when introducing parallelism to your applications: 1) Fine-grained parallelism, 2) Structured parallelism and 3) PLINQ. The approach I chose was to start with an a sequential application and parallelize it using each of the 3 approaches. The application I wrote simply creates a thumbnail image for every image in a specific directory. This post provides a link to a screencast I did on this subject, provides a brief overview of each approach and illustrates how my sample program looks with each approach.

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Taking My Medicine

RobBagby — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 06:22:00 +0000

I woke up this morning from a terrible dream. A dream where I had punted a presentation in front of all of my peers. Laying there in bed, I started thinking to myself ‘how could I punt a presentation? I’ve done hundreds of presentations in front of tens of thousands of people. It must have been a dream’. Or was it? I crawled out of bed, walked across the hall into the office and cracked open my laptop. Much to my dismay, when I looked down, there it was. The residue from a single tear. Not just any tear. The presenters tear. The purest of all tears. A tear that can only be shed after punting a presentation in front of one’s peers. Here is my story…

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Working with Azure Table Storage from PHP

RobBagby — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:26:47 +0000

Introduction Windows Azure Table Storage is a non-relational structured storage system in the cloud that offers massive scalability, durability and high availability. The service is exposed with a RESTful API. As such, it is easily consumable from a variety of platforms, including PHP. In this post, I will illustrate how to consume Azure Table Storage via the RESTful API. It is important to note that on July 31, 2009 we will reach Milestone 2 on the PHP SDK for Windows Azure. Milestone 2 focuses on support for Azure Table Storage. Accordingly, in all of the code you see in this blog post and the accompanying screencasts (Part I and Part II) illustrate accessing Azure Table Storage the “hard way”. Much of the work I had to do by hand in the accompanying example here will be taken care of for you by the SDK. That said, let’s dig in…

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Hosting a PHP Application in Windows Azure

RobBagby — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:53:00 +0000

Introduction At MIX ‘09 we (Microsoft) announced support for FastCGI in Windows Azure. FastCGI allows us to host applications like PHP both safely and performantly (warning – performantly is not a real word). In this post, I will begin with a very brief overview of what Windows Azure is and why you might consider hosting your PHP apps on Windows Azure. I will then provide you with a couple of resources that you can use to easily publish your PHP application to Windows Azure, including a link to a screencast I created that illustrates just how to publish a PHP application to Windows Azure.

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PHP and IIS: Running PHP under Fast CGI and Url Rewriting

RobBagby — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:23:00 +0000

Introduction You can run PHP (as well as other CGI apps) on IIS7 with high performance and reliability thanks to FastCGI. CGI is a protocol that defines how web servers launch an executable resulting from a request, pass it arguments and return the dynamic response. You have been able to host CGI applications in IIS in the past, however there have been challenges prior to FastCGI. As it turns out, the challenge is that there are certain modules (in PHP, for instance) that are not thread safe. For that reason, IIS traditionally spun up a new process for each request. This provided the reliability necessary in the face of non-thread-safe modules. However, the performance suffered due to the cost of spinning up all of these processes. Enter FastCGI. It guarantees that each process will handle 1 request at a time (providing the reliability), but it allows for process reuse by maintaining a pool of processes.

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Azure Application Part 3: Expose (REST) Web Service And Consume in Silverlight

RobBagby — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 02:14:00 +0000

This is part 3 in this series where I am building an Azure shopping cart application from the ground up. In this post, I will create a RESTful service using WCF and host it in Windows Azure. This service will source it’s data from Azure Table Storage. I will then illustrate how to consume this service from a Silverlight component hosted in Windows Azure. Giddyup. (In part 2 I illustrated how to set up and access Azure Table Storage in both the development environment, as well as in the cloud. I created a Wine table, added a few entities and retrieved them both locally and from the cloud. I did all this taking advantage of the ADO.NET Data Services .NET Client Library and the StorageClient sample application.)

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Azure Application Part 2: Access Azure Table Storage

RobBagby — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:08:00 +0000

This is part 2 in this series where I am building an Azure shopping cart application from the ground up. In this post, I will create a simplified ASP.NET version of the wine catalog. We will create a table in developer storage (the local version of Azure Storage) to store our wines and write 2 web pages: 1 to view all wines and another to add a wine. We will then access the same table in the cloud in Azure Table Storage. (In part 1 I prepared my environment by setting up my development environment, creating a Windows Azure Account and creating a Hosted Service account. I then created a Web Cloud Service project in Visual Studio and wrote a very simple “Hello, World” example. I ran this sample locally and debugged it. I then deployed it to the cloud.)

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Azure Application Part 1: Setup and running “Hello World”

RobBagby — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 07:00:00 +0000

This is part 1 in this series where I am building an Azure shopping cart application from the ground up. In this post, I will illustrate how to setup your development environment, setup your Azure Services Developer Portal, including the process of requesting a token. I will then build out a simple hello world example, run it in the development fabric, debug it and finally publish it to the cloud. If you are already familiar with these topics and are already set up, please feel free to go directly to part II (if it is published).

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Building An Azure Application From The Ground Up

RobBagby — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 06:22:00 +0000

I have decided to start a multi-part blog/screencast series on developing an Azure application from the ground up. There are 2 approaches one can take here: 1) Write the completed application first and then break it down into consumable pieces, with each piece becoming a blog post and/or screencast or 2) Write the application as you go along. I am going to use a hybrid approach. I have started an application, but will be adding and changing pieces as I move along. Part of my reasoning is that, at the time of writing this post, not all of the Azure services are available, the most interesting of which is the new implementation of SDS (See Nigel Ellis’ MIX Session for more information).

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Azure Table Storage, the REST and ADO.NET Data Services Story

RobBagby — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 08:14:00 +0000

Azure Table Storage is exposed via ADO.NET Data Services. What the heck does that mean? In this post, I will do my best to answer that question. I will start with a brief overview of REST, the architectural style underlying ADO.NET Data Services. As part of that topic, I will illustrate all we are doing when accessing Table Storage is issuing REST calls. I will then discuss the role ADO.NET Data Services plays, as well as the role of the StorageClient sample application.

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