How To|Jun 11, 2015

Microsoft Azure Services Infographic

Microsoft has released a shiny new infographic showing all of the services available in Microsoft Azure and how they relate to each other.  If you’ve got a large wall you’d like to cover in modern “cloud art”, you can download and print the image.  If you prefer to view it on your screen, check out this…
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How To|Jun 10, 2015

Microsoft Releases WinJS 4.0

Microsoft has announced the release of the WinJS 4.0 JavaScript Framework into what is becoming a overcrowded field of UI frameworks.  But in the spirit of the new open Microsoft, the open source WinJS 4.0 framework also includes wrappers for use with AngularJS, KnockoutJS, and ReactJS.  Of course this version also carries support for Windows…
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Blogs|Jun 9, 2015

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…
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Blogs|Jun 3, 2015

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…
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Uncategorized|Jun 1, 2015

Deploy ASP.NET 5 Apps to Docker on Azure

NOTE: This post is part 4 of a series on developing and deploying cross-platform web apps with ASP.NET 5: Develop and Deploy ASP.NET 5 Apps on Mac OS X Develop and Deploy ASP.NET 5 Apps on Linux Deploy ASP.NET 5 Apps to Docker on Linux Deploy ASP.NET 5 Apps to Docker on Azure (this post)…
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How To|May 28, 2015

6 Things You Should Know About SQL Server 2016 Always On Encryption

The upcoming SQL Server 2016 release promises many new features including a “Stretch” feature which allows you to automatically archive older data to the cloud, enhanced in-memory OLTP functionality, and several new enhancements in security.  One of the most interesting new security features is Always On Encryption.  Here are 6 things you should know about this…
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How To|May 27, 2015

OAuth 2.0 Part 2 – The Four Party Diagram

Understanding the Four Party Diagram In the last post, we made it through defining the four roles represented in the four party diagram. Now we’re going to dig into the arrows that represent information flowing between the parties. Authorization Request This is conceptually straightforward. The client needs to ask the resource owner for permission to…
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Editorial|May 26, 2015

Is Microsoft Changing Azure Too Much?

Far be it for a developer geek like me complain about new toys to play with, but the breakneck rate of Azure changes is starting to make my greying old head spin.  At the recent Build event Microsoft proudly touted that there had been more than 500 releases on Azure in the preceding 12 months.  While…
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Blogs|May 22, 2015

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…
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Blogs|May 20, 2015

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…
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How To|May 19, 2015

Find the Right Machine Learning Algorithm Fast

Wondering which Azure Machine Learning algorithm is right for your problem?  This Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Algorithm cheat sheets steps you through the process of figuring out which algorithm to use to apply Azure’s Machine Learning resources effectively. Get more information and download the PDF version on the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Documentation site.
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Blogs|May 19, 2015

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…
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