A recent episode of The Big Bang Theory struck a chord with me. Having attended a Dale Carnegie (who wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People) course I found it interesting how the character Kripke handled a difficult situation in the show. Kripke...

So far in this blog I've experimented with several different ways of writing code snippets. My favorite way was to use XtractPro's syntax highlighter . Unfortunately, the latest version of Telligent seems to resist my efforts by removing all the newlines...

ETW has many uses. Filtering allows you to get only the events you want and an out-of-process consumer can listen for those filtered events. ETW can also be used for profiling native and managed code. It can sample stacks and mark context switches. That...

During a forward integration, it is helpful to get a report of what changes occurred during that time period. This started out being done by hand but programmers hate doing by hand what should be easy to automate. There were many ways to produce the report...

Here is an interesting WCF exception you may have encountered before. In my case we were looking into a performance issue for a client. Environment This setup is pretty common. A set of load-balanced web servers is talking to a load-balanced...

One night I'm working at my desk with my computer off. Suddenly my computer turns itself on. I've disabled mouse and keyboard inputs from waking it up. The only thing that should wake it from sleep is when I press the power button. Luckily there is a...

This post is about how I created a utility that allows me to send PowerShell commands to a specific Azure instance without the need to publicly expose a port or use Azure Connect. First, I think I should explain why I did this. In performance analysis...

Previous posts covered how to make a custom WCF transport channel that used the file system as the transport mechanism. This post covers how to use Azure tables as the transport. The full code is available here: https://github.com/dmetzgar/azure-table...

The custom transport channel has been configured in code only so far. In order to make it configurable via app/web.config, there are a few additions required. This post covers how to add those. Click here to see all the posts in this series. All the...

As part of a startup task, I sometimes have to install programs that are not part of the Azure role. For instance, I have a monitoring system that logs ETW and perf counter events. My intention is to keep this as a separate Windows service so that it...

In a previous post I showed how I updated one of my helper classes for accessing table storage to the new Azure SDK. I saw some questions online about how to use TPL with the new SDK so here is a rewritten version of my helper class. This is designed...

Auzre SDK 1.8 is out and you can now target .Net 4.5 and use Windows Server 2012 in Azure. I wanted to upgrade my code but I found very little guidance on how to do it. So here's a quick example of some table storage code I had written and how I changed...

In the previous post, I simply gathered the code for creating a custom WCF transport channel from Nicholas Allen's blog and updated it for .Net 4.0. The sample is a good start but the client and service code is a bit contrived. They are written specifically...

Nicholas Allen has an excellent series of blog posts on how to create a WCF transport channel. The last post in the series has links to all the previous posts: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/drnick/archive/2006/05/08/592110.aspx Click here to see all the...

Not too long ago, Microsoft released two free games for Windows Phone 7: Sudoku and Minesweeper. More info here: http://www.winrumors.com/sudoku-and-minesweeper-released-for-windows-phone-7/ The Sudoku app has this notion of "power-ups" which are little...

From the perspective of a WCF developer, the interaction between WCF and ASP.NET can be a black box. But to understand the performance of a system, it is necessary to know how all the components interact. This post covers how threads work when a request...

Our team just got back from a fun trip to Portland, OR to attend the Portland Code Camp . Glenn Block did a great job of putting this together and it was an exciting opportunity to meet developers outside of the Microsoft bubble. A fairly large group...

The WCF Web API is a pretty exciting new offering from our team. The simplicity of creating and consuming a service is quite compelling. Especially considering that you can take advantage of the infrastructure surrounding HTTP and the web. One of the...

A few customers have noticed an issue with WCF scaling up when handling a burst of requests. Fortunately, there is a very simple workaround for this problem that is covered in KB2538826 (thanks to David Lamb for the investigation and write up). The KB...

There has been a lot of uproar over Red Gate's recent decision to charge for the .Net Reflector tool. As a Microsoft employee that spends a lot of time with performance and debugging tools, Reflector is essential. When Red Gate bought the rights to Reflector...

WCF services that are hosted in IIS can take advantage of compression without making any special encoder changes . In Windows Server 2008 R2, IIS compression is actually turned on by default and WCF as of .Net 4.0 supports decompression by default. So...

Last night I ran into an issue where I couldn't print from IE9. However, I could print from other programs. If the webpage initiated the print, then I got the following script error: Line: 2107 Char: 1 Error: Invalid procedure call or argument...

The "Server too busy" error is a common one that causes a lot of confusion when related to WCF. It is possible for WCF to respond with a server too busy fault when a quota is exceeded in the security layer. However you wouldn't get this when you hit a...

WCF performance has many aspects. In the previous series I explored how using GZip/Deflate compression can increase performance in areas with low network latency. However, the penalty is that the CPU utilization is much higher. Therefore, it does not...

The aim of compressing the messages sent from a WCF service is to reduce the amount of traffic on the wire. You could be doing this because you're in a hosted environment such as a cloud service and you have to pay for bandwidth. The tradeoff for compression...