Except for having a bad, bad experience using EasyJet on the way towards Milan, UGIALT.NET was a blast! Here's the slide deck and sample code for my session on SignalR. Abstract: "SignalR. Code, not toothpaste. (or: Using SignalR for realtime client/server communication) Today’s users are interested in a rich ... Read more »
So you have an API. Congratulations! You should have one. But how do you track who uses it, what client software they use and so on? You may be logging API calls yourself. You may be relying on services like Apigee.com who make you pay (for a great service, though!). Being cheap, we thought about another approach fo... Read more »
The Channel 9 folks seem to have released the first beta of their Visual Studio Achievements project. The idea of Visual Studio Achievements is pretty awesome: Bring Some Game To Your Code! A software engineer’s glory so often goes unnoticed. Attention seems to come either when there are bugs or when the fin... Read more »
Not this question, but a similar one, has been asked by one of our customers. An interesting question, isn’t it? Wait. It gets more interesting. I’ll sketch a fake scenario that’s similar to our customer’s question. Imagine you are building mobile applications to manage a simple to-do list. This software is availabl... Read more »
It’s almost the end of 2011. Typically a time where bloggers start to write about their past year and what they’ll do in the next. A time where the Forrester, Gartner and McKinsey-alikes make predictions about next year. I know, normally I blog about technology in its technological sense, but today I fee... Read more »
Last week, I’ve discussed Techniques for real-time client-server communication on the web (SignalR to the rescue). We’ve seen that when building web applications, you often face the fact that HTTP, the foundation of the web, is a request/response protocol. A client issues a request, a server handles this... Read more »
When building web applications, you often face the fact that HTTP, the foundation of the web, is a request/response protocol. A client issues a request, a server handles this request and sends back a response. All the time, with no relation between the first request and subsequent requests. Also, since it’s re... Read more »
It"’s been a while since I had to repave my laptop. I have a Windows Home Server (WHS) at home which images my PC almost daily and allows restoring it to a given point in time in less than 30 minutes. Which is awesome! And which is how I usually “restore” my PC into a stable state. Over the p... Read more »
Ever since NuGet 1.2, there is a great way for NuGet package authors to let their users debug into the package’s binaries. With almost no additional effort, package authors can publish their symbols and sources, and package consumers can debug into them from Visual Studio, simply by pushing a symbols package i... Read more »
When scaling out an application to multiple servers, often a form of load balancing or reverse proxying is used to provide external users access to a web server. For example, one can be in the situation where two servers are hosting a WCF OData Service and are exposed to the Internet through either a load balancer o... Read more »