For the last 4 months, Matt Augustine and myself, along with Raman Narayanan, Richard Speyer, and Andrzej Turski, have been the main devs on http://docs.com . What an amazing project! My role in all of this was to bring up some very custom roles inside...

I’ve been working with Azure’s new CloudDrive capability, and today I ran into a problem with caching that I thought I would share the workaround for. The first step in using caching with CloudDrive is to define a LocalResource for the role in the csdef...

Well, it’s official -- I am moving to Redmond to work for Microsoft.  I’m very excited about the opportunity to be on the Mother Ship and work on cool stuff with my team here. Best! Brian

Have you gotten the error: InvalidInput One of the request inputs is not valid when performing an Entity Group Transaction against Development Storage? If so, read on. Recently, I’ve been working on a Windows Azure project, and it’s wonderful that...

It’s been months since I had anything interesting to blog about.  Mostly because I was working away on some new stuff I couldn’t talk about.  Anyway, now I feel like blogging again. I’m working on an Azure Worker Role which processes messages...

Paul Graham writes very useful stuff.  I respect his mind. Read his Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule essay for what I think is one of the smartest descriptions of the classic problem all programmers face. Spread this meme in your organization...

Given 10 million iterations: object y = new object (); const int iterations = 10000000; Which is faster, InterlockedIncrement: stopWatch = Stopwatch .StartNew(); for ( int i = 0; i < iterations; i++) { Interlocked .Increment( ref...

A simple and totally thread-safe implementation of IDisposable, with improved semantics over the Dispose() / Dispose(bool disposing) reference implementation.  Now updated, slightly, after a consult with someone much smarter than me, who suggested...

An invariant version of the same… /// <summary> /// Extends StringBuilder so that it has an AppendFormatLineInvariant method. /// </summary> /// <param name="value"> The StringBuilder being extended. </param> //...

StringBuilder is so useful.  Does it all.  But it’s missing a method.  Here it is: /// <summary> /// Extends StringBuilder so that it has an AppendFormatLine method. /// </summary> /// <param name="value">...

Here’s a useful extension method for the object type: /// <summary> /// Extends object to have a ValidateArgumentNotNull method. /// </summary> /// <remarks> /// Validates that an object is not null. If the object is null, //...

I’ve been BUSY! I travelled to New York to take some training ( Jeffrey Richter , C# Threading), to Seattle for some more training ( Scott Bain , TDD) to Bar Harbor, Maine for some R&R, then back to Seattle for an internal engineering conference ...

Azure Ninja Part 2! (空色の忍者) In my last posting I showed you how to run an Azure Worker Role outside the Development Fabric. In this posting, I am going to show you how to run an ASP.NET MVC Web Role outside the fabric, too. No special code required...

In this posting I am going to show you how to run an Azure Worker Role outside the Development Fabric. Why would you want to do this? Because you want to be an Azure Ninja!  (空色の忍者) While testing an Azure Worker Role in the Development Fabric is...

Azure Table Storage is a “typeless” entity storage system. If you’re an RDBMS person, and learned about data storage by reading ISBN 0-201-14192-2 , Azure Table Storage is a different way of thinking about your data. In Azure Table Storage, an entity...

You have some interface, IFoo. It is implemented by two concrete classes: Foo : IFoo (what you expose to the outside world) FooEntity : IFoo (what you store someplace; it’s a superset of Foo, which implements, IFoo) And you want a simple way to copy the...

Today I was working with the ADO.NET Data Services Client, performing queries against Azure Table Storage, and I discovered that there is a bug in the URL encoding of some queries. (Though I was performing queries against Azure Table Storage, this bug...

You have some interface, IFoo. It is implemented by two concrete classes: Foo : IFoo (what you expose to the outside world) FooEntity : IFoo (what you store someplace; it’s a superset of Foo, which implements, IFoo) And you want a simple way to copy the...

Got a tight loop where you convert an array of bytes into a hex string?  Here’s an updated blambert/codesnip: /// <summary> /// Hex string lookup table. /// </summary> private static readonly string [] HexStringTable = new string...

I love extension methods.  Here’s a simple little string extension method: /// <summary> /// Validates that the input string is not null or empty. If the input /// string is null, ArgumentNullException will be thrown. If the input ///...

Got a tight loop where you convert an array of bytes into a hex string?  Here’s a blambert/codesnip: /// <summary> /// Hex string lookup table. /// </summary> private static readonly string [] HexStringTable = new string [] { ...

I’m a PC!!!

So I bike everywhere. Most places, in fact. My current weapon of choice is my Specialized Langster. Here’s a factory shot: http://www.specialized.com/bc/SBCBkModel.jsp?spid=38444 I know… No street cred because it’s bought, not made… Who cares...

In my previous two posts I showed how to setup your system for Azure and ASP.NET MVC Development and the basics of how to create an Azure ASP.NET MVC Project . In this post, I will delve deeper into how to configure and deploy an Azure ASP.NET MVC Project...

You've installed all the software you need to build an ASP.NET MVC application and run it on Azure. Now it's time to make your first application. The first step is creating the Azure project: Select File/New/Project from Visual Studio 2008. ...