Practical Development

When talking to long time .NET developers about application domains ( AppDomains ) they often understand the high level concepts but not necessarily how or why they would use them. My goal of this article is to help clarify some of the scenarios where...

In the previous post “ Windows Azure Startup Tasks Part 1 ” we learned about the basics of start-up tasks and how they can enable you to realize solutions that may otherwise have been outside of the scope of PaaS. This powerful feature offers...

I find myself several times a week having conversations with people around the ability to install and configure additional software on Windows Azure™ Web and Worker roles. This key piece of functionality provides a mechanism for you to setup the...

Quite often I meet with new Windows Azure™ developers around how to setup X509 certificates for their development environment. Setting up the certificates for your first time can be a bit confusing so I decided to create this how to post. The remainder...

As you can probably agree, very few applications, short of “Hello World”, do not have some form of storage. The use of storage can range from core repositories to scratch disks, but regardless of the use it typically plays a critical part...

Overview In order to ensure the benefits of this post are maximized I will level set by defining what roles and instances are as well as how they relate to each other. A role in Windows Azure is really a blueprint that describes what an individual...

As a developer first looking at diving into Windows Azure Development it is important that you are familiar with a few concepts. Windows Azure is for Everyone When adopting Windows Azure as a development platform people are often concerned about...

When we start looking at Windows Azure there are several key workloads that come to mind, the ones that are pretty much slam dunks for being a fit. Workload 1 - On and Off On and Off typically represents applications or web sites that are needed...

Prior to evaluating a cloud solution it is important to understand the various taxonomies available in the vendor ecosystem today. Without understanding the strengths, weaknesses and targeted mindsets of each taxonomy you may not select the appropriate...

It has been several months since I started my ramp on the Windows Azure Platform and am now ready to write about it. While I worked through the material and guidance it was evolving and growing which often changed my mindset on techniques to handle various...

A couple questions have come to me recently around the use of WinDBG extensions. 1) Why do I receive an error when trying to load or execute commands with my WinDBG extension? 2) Why do I have to prefix my commands with the name of the extension...

Over time many developers have been caught by someone leaving the debug=”true” set in their production environment. To work around this some development shops implement a formal release process and set the retail=”true” element...

For years I have struggled with the typical developer decisions when building their workstation. Do I make this a dual boot machine and how much space should I leave to each partition if I do? With Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 I have finally been able...

When looking for the root cause of a crash collecting the memory dump is only the first step. This posting assumes that you already have a properly configured version of WinDBG along with a memory dump of a managed process. In order to highlight the...

Properly collecting a User Mode memory dump is only the first step in uncovering the cause of a crash or hang. The remainder of this post will assume that you have already configured WinDBG correctly and captured a memory dump using the techniques outlined...

In order to successfully and effectively analyze a dump file it is very important to ensure your environment is configured correctly. The first step is to ensure symbol paths are setup. This is extremely important to have a successful analysis session...

A user mode memory dump is a file typically with a DMP extension that contains a portion of virtual memory and CPU registers. Two important items captured by the memory dump include the call stack for each thread and the exception record. This information...

Throughout my career in software development I have come across issues that are tough to capture or only seem to occur in production. Each time I encountered these situations I would say to myself, there has to be something better. Post Mortem debugging...

My Blog Policy The opinions and comments in this blog reflect my own personal perspectives. This blog does not necessarily reflect the opinion of my employer or any group with which I am currently affiliated or with which I have been affiliated in the...