Tag: General

Somewhere last year (I honestly no longer remember when), I saw a few tweets that piqued my interest: a crowdfunding project for the Tessel, “an internet-connected microcontroller programmable in JavaScript”. Since everyone was doing Arduino and Netduino and JavaScript is not the worst language ever, I thought: let’s give these guys a bit of money! A few months later, they reached their goal and it seemed Tessel was going to production. Technical Machine, the company behind the device, sent status e-mails on their production process every couple of weeks and eventually after some delays, there it was!

NOTE: While the content is this blog post will still work, JetBrains now has a plugin that is the recommended way of working with TeamCity and build agents on Azure. Please check this blog post to learn more about it. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me in several stages of anger at Java. After two weeks of learning, experimenting, coding and even getting it all to compile, I’m proud to announce an inital very early preview of my Microsoft Azure cloud plugin for TeamCity.

Last week, Xavier and I were really happy for achieving a milestone. After having spent quite some evenings on bringing Visual Studio Online integration to MyGet, we were happy to be mentioned in the TechEd keynote and even pop up in quite some sessions. We also learned ASP.NET vNext was coming and it would leverage NuGet as an important part of it. What we did not know, however, is that the ASP.NET team would host all vNext preview packages from MyGet. But we soon noticed and found our evening hours were going to be very focused for another few days…

TL;DR: If you have multiple NuGet feeds configured on your machine, it may be worth to do some tweaking in the NuGet.config file shipping with your project. Last week, the ASP.NET team released a preview of “ASP.NET vNext”, a first step in the good direction for solving the pain building .NET projects is, but more than that a great step towards having an open and cross-platform ASP.NET that is super developer friendly. If you haven’t checked it out yet, do so now.

During the past few weeks, I’ve been working on and off on setting up a build agent that can build as many open-source .NET projects as possible in an effort to learn how hard it is to do. Allow me to open this blog post with a rant… One which will feel very familiar if you’ve recently installed a build agent yourself.

One way to remove friction from using NuGet in multiple projects is by making use of NuGet Configuration File inheritance, probably the awesomest unknown feature in there. By default, all NuGet clients (the command-line tool, the Visual Studio extension and the Package Manager Console) all make use of the default NuGet configuration file which lives under %AppData%\NuGet\NuGet.config. NuGet can make use of other configuration files as well! In fact, NuGet can walk an entire tree of configuration files and fetch settings from those.

When building cloud applications on Windows Azure, it’s always a good thing to delegate as much work to specialized services as possible. File downloads would be one good example: these can be streamed directly from Windows Azure blob storage to your client, without having to pass a web application hosted on Windows Azure Cloud Services or Web Sites. Why occupy the web server with copying data from a request stream to a response stream? Let blob storage handle it! When thinking this through there may be some issues you may think of. Here are a few: Let’s answer these!

TL;DR: Using source control is a really bad idea. Or is it? Skip to Conclusion for the meat of this post. One of the first things I do with a new project in Visual Studio is not add it to source control. There are many reasons, but it all boils down to this: Source Control introduces more problems than it solves. Before I dive into this, I’ll share the solution with you. Put your sources on a USB drive. Yes, it’s that simple. If you’re like most other people, you don’t like that solution, because it feels inefficient: All of that is true, but then again…

Pfew! Around February 2013, Xavier and I started planning work on an update of our book. Eight months later, we’re proud to present you with Pro NuGet (second edition). It’s been a tough couple of months writing this: Xavier has become a father for the second time (congratulations!), we’ve had two massive updates to NuGet we had to work in our book, … But here it is! What’s new? Next to that there is a lot more meat in there! We would love to get your feedback! E-mail us or write a review on your blog or Amazon. Enjoy the read!

Have you tried Glimpse before? It shows you server-side information like execution times, server configuration, request data and such in your browser. At the February MVP Summit this year, Anthony, Nik and I had a chat about what would be useful information to be displayed in Glimpse when working on Windows Azure. Some beers and a bit of coding later, we had a proof-of-concept showing Windows Azure runtime configuration data in a Glimpse tab.