Tag: General
All the articles with the tag "General".
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Optimizing calls to Azure storage using Fiddler
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… On May 12th, we all of a sudden saw usage of our service double in an instant. Ouch! Here’s what Google Analytics told us:
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Speeding up ASP.NET vNext package restore
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.
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Building .NET projects is a world of pain and here’s how we should solve it
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.
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NuGet Configuration File inheritance is awesome
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.
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Windows Azure Storage magic with Shared Access Signatures
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! Keeping blobs secure is pretty easy on Windows Azure Blob Storage, but it’s also sort of an all-or-nothing story… Either you make all blobs in a container private, or you make them public.
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Source Control considered harmful
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... Still, many people go for source control: Source Control and a central repository solve all implications of using a USB drive, so why not use source control?
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Pro NuGet second edition is out
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! PS: Thanks to our excellent reviewers (the NuGet team) and everyone at Apress! There is a lot of people involved in getting a quality book out there. Thanks!
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A new year's present: introducing Glimpse plugins for Windows Azure
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. Today, we are happy to announce a first public preview of two Windows Azure tabs in Glimpse: the Glimpse.WindowsAzure package displaying runtime information, and Glimpse.WindowsAzure.Storage collecting information about traffic from and to storage.
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Visual Studio Online for Windows Azure Web Sites
Today’s official Visual Studio 2013 launch provides some interesting novelties, especially for Windows Azure Web Sites. There is now the choice of choosing which pipeline to run in (classic or integrated), we can define separate applications in subfolders of our web site, debug a web site right from within Visual Studio. But the most impressive one is this. How about… an in-browser editor for your application? Let’s take a quick tour of it. After creating a web site we can go to the web site’s configuration we can enable the Visual Studio Online preview. Once enabled, simply navigate to .scm.azurewebsites.net/dev">https://<yoursitename>.scm.azurewebsites.net/dev or click the link from the dashboard, provide your site credentials and be greeted with Visual Studio Online.
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Developing Windows Azure Mobile Services server-side
Word of warning: This is a partial cross-post from the JetBrains WebStorm blog. The post you are currently reading adds some more information around Windows Azure Mobile Services and builds on a full example and is a bit more in-depth. With Microsoft’s Windows Azure Mobile Services, we can build a back-end for iOS, Android, HTML, Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps that supports storing data, authentication, push notifications across all platforms and more. There are client libraries available for all these platforms which can be used when developing in an IDE of choice, e.g. AppCode, Google Android Studio or Visual Studio. In this post, let’s focus on what these different platforms have in common: the server-side code.