I thought I would take a break for a while from Hadoop and put together an F# .Net implementation of a Priority Queue; implemented using a heap data structure. Conceptually we can think of a heap as a balanced binary tree. The tree will have a root, and...

I recently had an issue where a website, secured with Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 (ADFS), was referencing images stored in another website, secured by the same instance of ADFS. This meant that if a user logged into the main website without...

Over the past month I have been working on a framework to allow composition and submission of MapReduce jobs using .Net. I have put together two previous blog posts on this, so rather than put together a third on the latest change I thought I would create...

An updated version of this post can be found at: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/carlnol/archive/2012/04/29/generic-based-framework-for-net-hadoop-mapreduce-job-submission.aspx If you have been following my blog you will see that I have been putting together...

Rehosting the WF designer in an application outside of Visual Studio is nothing new and since WF4, nothing particularly difficult. In fact the WF product team has gone out of its way to make rehosting the designer as easy an experience as possible and...

Lately I have been working with StreamInsight and thought it was about time to share some of my observations and key points. This is loosely based upon a requirement to aggregate Financial risk vectors and deliver changes to clients in an event based...

As mentioned in my previous post Hadoop Streaming not only supports text streaming, but it also supports Binary Streaming. As such I wanted to put together a sample that supports processing Office documents. As before the code can be downloaded from:...

As you may know Microsoft has recently announced plans for a Hadoop adoption for both Windows Server and Windows Azure . You can find out more about Hadoop and Windows Azure at Apache Hadoop-based Services for Windows Azure and Availability of Community...

This post covers the steps required to secure communication between a WCF client and a WCF data service using mutual certificate authentication. The client/service topology is depicted below: Both the client and server run on a Windows Server 2008 R2...

From the development perspective I often have to perform an analysis of a database application. More often than not this entails looking at a running system and ensuring that the application queries are behaving as expected. As such, I thought it would...

When you run the BAM data maintenance package (BAM_DM_ <activity name> ) BAM copies each partition in the BAM Primary Import database to a separate table in the BAM Archive database. You can create partitioned views in the BAM Archive database to...

It seems that several times now I have had the requirement to create a comma separated string from column values. The latest reason for doing this was to build up a list of table column names such that a view could be generated for the table. This is...

Recently I was tasked with changing our daily and Continuous Integration builds so that they would also execute our unit tests. This seemed like a straightforward task, and indeed it was. Except for one thing: every so often a build would fail because...

FSharpChart now supports binding for Stacked Charts and for modifying the Marker associated with a series. As always one can download the latest release from: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/FSharpChart-b59073f5   In previous versions of FSharpChart...

In a recent project I was using regular expressions a lot for validating string expressions such that statements like the following were true: Must be all characters Must be all alphanumeric’s and be of length 6 Must be all numeric digits (e.g. “3648...

Note : An updated version of this post can be found here . Recently I was tasked with changing our daily and Continuous Integration builds so that they would also execute our unit tests. This seemed like a straightforward task, and indeed it was. Except...

If you have been using FSharpChart you will have seen some recent activities around documentation. I am happy to say that a new code drop has been made available. This release deals with some minor bug fixes and restructures the code download, hopefully...

In this blog post I am going to walkthrough the steps required to secure a WCF service with ADFS 2.0, as well as how to call this service from a client. The aim of this article is to provide an outline of the general principals and steps, not to explain...

After further experimenting with the Kinect SDK, it became obvious what needed to come next. If you were to create an application using the Kinect SDK, you will want to be able to control the application using gestures (i.e. waving, swiping, motions to...

The Kinect for Windows SDK has finally arrived, and we couldn’t wait to get our hands on it! After downloading, installing, and actually getting a Kinect with a USB connector for our PC’s, we were good to go… Step 1 – What does the SDK give us? When we...

If you are like me and often use console applications for a variety of purposes you would have found the F# template not much use (in fact a blank code file). As such I decided to put together a more complete Project Template that I could use. The template...

Following on from my previous posts on html5 animation and reflection effects, I thought I'd put it all together and create a carousel. Firstly, I create a JavaScript pseudo class called CarouselImage. This takes an image url and draws it at a given co...

In all the previous discussions around FSharpChart, samples have been shown within F# Interactive. I wanted to spend a few moments and demonstrate how FSharpChart can be consumed within a WinForms application, and how chart properties can be modified...

With the addition of the SQL Server date and time types, I have often found myself needing to create a datetime (or datetime2) value based on the addition of a date and a time value. However, there is no built-in function for such an operation. There...

Recently I have been working a lot with the Task Parallel Libraries. In doing so, in F#,  you will quickly learn that one has to perform quite a bit of casting. As such I have found it useful to define some wrapper members that abstract these casting...