Random thoughts of a dev

Within the Windows Task Scheduler it is possible to fire off processes based on a lot of different triggers, both time based, and windows event based. However it seemed quite hard to fire off one scheduled task after another had completed, despite there...

I have been meaning to write a simple grep program which looks through the incoming pipe for a regex and either replaces or matches the lines found for a while.  However I haven’t had enough reason to do it up until now, when I had to process 100...

I have done some projects in the past utilizing Microsoft HealthVault ( http://healthvault.co.uk/ ), which officially is defined as: “a health application platform, a set of platform services and a catalyst for creating an application ecosystem...

For those of you who are fans of the BBC show Top Gear, you may remember the Cool Wall, and now you can get your very own Cool Wall along with the launch of IE9 beta and BBC’s Top Gear site. I have been very fortunate to be a member in the team...

Recently the Azure and security community published the “Security Best Practices for Developing Windows Azure Application” paper on download.microsoft.com: download available here Outlining the security considerations developers should consider when building...

I was posed the problem a few weeks ago that someone has a coding project where the execution engine swallows all exceptions and unless explicitly catching all exceptions (he didn’t want to put a big try catch around everything in production code) there...

Codename “Dallas” as part of Windows Azure is an Information Service offering which makes it easy to find and consume data from a number of different languages, both managed such as C# and VB.NET, and other web technologies such as javascript and php...

A couple of announcements to be made, Firstly: BBC news has written an article on Eye On Earth, my previous project with Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8499059.stm Also a proud post from Dom Green,...

If you’ve tried to use the wcf testing tool wcftestclient.exe (\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\WcfTestClient.exe) which comes with visual studio on an azure project, you will probably have come across this problem...

With .net 4.0 comes Entity Framework 4.0 which will help with data access and rapid development of database projects! (Don’t worry if you’ve only seen one version of EF before now, this is only the second release). A while back now in PDC was the session...

I don’t know how many times I have seen a method which I have been trying to debug with a whole stack of parameter checking code at the start of the method to ensure nothing weird happens with unexpected input.  This subsequently caused the nicely...

Last week I was at a brilliant .net 4.0 training session lead by Richard Blewett of Developmentor ( http://www.develop.com/ ) Along with the new features of .net 4.0 (including the long awaited Tuple classes, BigInteger (an unbounded int), extra Code...

If you have an environmental site, or would like to embed Eye On Earth to your site this can be done very easily with the following code. <iframe name="eoe_frame" src="http://eyeonearth.cloudapp.net/Default.aspx? latitude= 55.676&...

As the new Azure toolkit allows upload of certificates to be associated with the roles, and multiple web roles, it is possible to set up 2 sites (2 webroles) one which would be secure, and one which would be unsecured. The first thing you will need...

Last week during PDC the press release went out launching our project Eye On Earth (AirWatch). http://eyeonearth.cloudapp.net/ or http://eyeonearth.cloudapp.net/home.aspx if you do not have Silverlight enabled. Below shows the initial screen...

I have been playing around with the new SDK and VS Tools for Azure when I have had time and have noticed a few changes to the development experience, so thought it would be a good to note them down here. The first thing is while Azure Development Fabric...

It seems a long time since I last blogged as I have been on a long azure project which is launching soon, so watch this space… I am very excited about this! Also I hope to get some good posts going again on this blog from what I have learned during the...

Hi all, I know I haven’t posted for quite a while now, though I have been on a cool project doing some stuff with Azure, SQL Data Services, Silverlight 3 and countless other new technologies. We are just about to finish our first iteration and there...

Hi all, I have been working on a project for a while now and needed a quick converter between an integer index and the column of an Excel spreadsheet, I couldn’t find a general algorithm, so had to write one… At first I thought it was a simple base 26...

I’m glad to see that this blog is getting quite popular, so I’m going to keep the same strain for the moment and extend the MeshageBoard walkthrough once again. The code written so far for the cloud, so that all the data we were adding and viewing was...

Now to one of the most powerful items in the Mesh: ability to share the data between anyone with a live passport. So if you have been following the past few entries I have been working through the MeshageBoard Walkthrough, and the final part is to...

Hello again, last time I covered how to create and view Data Entries within DataFeeds and also said about looking into MediaResouces. Over the past week I have been creating an extension for the console application and allowing the browsing of everything...

Well on Monday I blogged about getting started with some of the Live Framework Resource Model within the developers Mesh, I have asked around but it seems that this feed is currently unavailable with the normal beta ( www.mesh.com ). One resource I did...

Technorati Tags: Mesh , Live Framework So I have just come off of a project and I’ve got some bench time… and as there are so many wonderful things out there to play with I thought I have plenty of things to do. Mesh and the Live Framework ...

Hi all, Sorry I haven’t posted in a while but I have been experiencing some alias issues, but it’s all good now :). You may have noticed that the beta for windows 7 is available from msdn subscriber downloads, and so far (from my experience) it...