Angular2 Databinding is Fast!

I’ve been working with the Angular2 alpha ever since ng-conf 2015, and it has been pretty awesome to see how the framework is shaping up. I’ll be the first to admit that the bleeding edge tax is high, but it has been worth it to see just how powerful the next version of Angular is…

Azure Bits #3 – Adding a Message to an Azure Queue

In Azure Bits #2 – Saving the Image to Azure Blob Storage, we were able to save our image to Azure Blob Storage and verify that this all went according to plan after re-publishing our site to Azure. In this Azure Bit, we will take a look at the Azure Queue service and we will…

Pooling Buffers for Better Memory Management

Occasionally, you need a more robust solution to solve a problem. In my last post, I wrote about the horrors of this small code snippet: One way to alleviate the memory pressure that can be caused by frequent creation and destruction of large objects is to tell the .Net garbage collector to compact the Large…

Deploying an ES6, JSPM, NodeJS Application to Azure

I have a simple NodeJS application that I want to deploy to Microsoft Azure. Fortunately, there already exists detailed instructions, on how to accomplish this. But I want to add a couple of extra things. The Node application will be written using ES6, the latest version of Javascript, and also use JSPM, a newer generation…

Azure Bits #2 – Saving the Image to Azure Blob Storage

Creating the Azure Storage Account In Azure Bits #1 – Up and Running, we got a skeleton in place for our web application that will allow the user to upload an image and we published our Azure Image Manipulator Web App to Azure.  Our next task is taking this uploaded image and saving it into…

Lighting up Native Platform Features in Xamarin Forms – Part 2

In the previous post I implemented a custom attached property to be used in Xamarin Forms XAML when a built-in accessory view is desired on a table cell. In this follow-up we will continue and build out the iOS renderer that is responsible for actually enabling the feature in our running application. What about Android…

Lighting up Native Platform Features in Xamarin Forms – Part 1

In my last few posts I introduced a simple app that lets you browse the various built-in font variations supported by Xamarin Forms. If you recall, the application adopted a “stack navigation” design, which is quite common in mobile applications. However, there is one small flaw with our implementation so far – on the iOS…

Hey, Who Stole All My Memory?

Sometimes a little piece of seemingly innocuous code can cause a significant amount of trouble: Doesn’t look like much, but I’m sure we have all written something like this and paid it no mind. In fact, most of the time, code like this isn’t a problem. This little method becomes a problem when that object…

Combining F# and Xamarin Forms to Create Mobile Applications

While we certainly have been busy getting our hands dirty with Xamarin I’ve been doing some of my own. However, I’ve been messing around with using Xamarin with F#. I mentioned in a previous post that F# can be used very well for enterprise applications. Here’s an in depth look at F# with Xamarin for…

Azure Bits #1 – Up and Running

  As Steve Porter mentioned in his blog post, How Wintellect Uses Microsoft Azure, we are making pretty heavy use of many offerings in the Azure toolset for our internal and client-facing web properties here at Wintellect and have been doing so from the early days of Azure. As we continue to experiment with new…