Things I think and say
At LivingLens we have the somewhat dubious blessing of using MongoDB as our database. Historically we used to use LogEntries for our logging and it worked pretty nicely but these days we’re using Application Insights. One of the great features of application insights is the Application Map which generates a visual representation of your application and its dependencies. In the screenshot below you can see a browser application talking…
This here blog’s been living happily on a VM in the cloud for years with a nother VM hosting MySQL for it. They both required very little maintenance but I wanted them to require less so I figured why not fire up a simple hosted solution in Azure instead. So here goes let’s see how long that takes. First I logged into the Azure portal, click the New…
Looking at the latest Visual Studio 2015 CTP release I noticed the new Smart Unit Tests feature. This is an evolution of Microsoft Research’s Pex project and to quote Microsoft: Smart Unit Tests explores your .NET code to generate test data and a suite of unit tests That sounds pretty amazing so I fired VS 2015 to have a look. I grabbed a piece of sample code that I…
IIS Express is great, no need to install IIS and mess around setting up sites it’s there ready for you with your Visual Studio installation. Unfortunately out of the box your IIS Express sites are only accesible from the local machine, fortunately with only a few steps you can easily give external devices access. For this example I have a web application named Sample.Website configured to run on…
I was recently asked by a client to look into an issue they were having with a WCF web service. The application was generating a large number of errors, filling a 5MB log file every 5 minutes, and the performance of the underlying database was so bad that a simple query such as: SELECT COUNT (*) FROM Address would take up to a minute and a half to return. Checking the…
ASP.NET SignalR WebSockets let you have bi-directional communicationbetween the browser and the server. SignalR lets you use WebSockets with ASP.NET and falls backgracefully if they’re not available as well as providing some other nifty RPC functionality. http://typesetinthefuture.com/moon/ Taking a second look at free fonts Smashing magazine are re-evaluating free fonts and seem to have nice things to say about some of them.…
Ionic Like bootstrap for building HTML 5 apps http://ionicframework.com/ check out the getting started video then dive into the great quality docs. TypeLITE Do you want to automatically generate TypeScript Interfaces from your C# classes. So did I and I was going to have to write a T4 template to do it, fortunately someone far more awesome than me has already done just that, open sourced it,created…
I use JavaScript on a pretty much daily basis so as I haven’t blogged about anything recently I thought I’d help promote the great (as in comprehensive) JavaScript docs that the Mozilla foundation provide. Right now this is being pushed via the http://promotejs.com domain which will hopefully make it more likely that anyone searching for JS docs will find good quality, in depth docs easily. The…