The Windows Azure platform is a solid, highly available, highly scalable environment - but, like any system (on premise or in the cloud) there are risks which could threaten the desired operation of your app (what I refer to herein as the 'normal scenario...

The Windows Azure cloud platform is a solid, highly available and scalable environment, but like any system (on-premises, or in the cloud) there are risks which threaten the desired operation of your application. With Windows Azure comes the opportunity...

In certain circumstances, you might find yourself with a need to install SQL Server Express on one of your Windows Azure worker roles. Exercise caution here though folks: this is not a supported design pattern (remember, a restart of your role instance...

I ran across an interesting problem today, and I thought I’d blog about it as it may save you some time if you encounter a similar issue in the future. Scenario: you’ve deployed Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 Remote Debugging Tools to your Surface...

I'm six weeks into my new job here at Microsoft. Right now, I'm sitting on the 07.53 train from Waterloo to Andover on my way to shadow one of my colleagues as he briefs one of our customers on claims-based authentication. Yesterday, I was welcoming...

I did something apparently controversial today. I sent a mail out to our team asking if I could spend some time with each of them over the next month to learn how they sell our service to our customers; how they describe it to others and how they evangelise...

Yesterday, after spending a few hours researching, I made a little bit of an impulse decision and purchased a Samsung Navibot SR855 (a robotic vacuum cleaner). I figured that since I don’t like hoovering (and neither does my girlfriend), this could...

Back in January this year, I wrote a neat little utility library for sending template emails. Tonight, it caught the attention of fellow developer Benjamin Howarth, famous for (among other things) his Umbraco mastery. After a quick discussion, Ben decided...

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. I didn’t quite get around to blogging as much as I’d have liked during 2011, but 2012 is a new year and I’ll have a lot more things to blog about, including...

A few months ago, I mentioned that my friend and I were going to start building a UAV. It’s taken us a little while, but I’m pleased to report that over the previous bank holiday weekend we were able to take it out for our first test flight...

A long, long time ago, in a blog post far, far away, I documented some of my home tech in a piece that described how it all connected together. The article actually focused on my home network equipment, but I figured it would be useful to document the...

The ability to embed video directly into an HTML5 page is pretty awesome. As a first class citizen in the HTML5 enabled browser, video is no longer an ‘outsider’ and so you can actually do some relatively cool things without any particular...

I’ve spoken with a lot of developers recently who haven’t yet adopted the Windows Azure platform, often because they think the process is difficult, time-consuming or requires some kind of advanced ninja training to get up and running. This...

Way back on 11th June 2011, I was lucky enough to be invited to present my session – “Getting Started in .NET” – at the DDD Southwest 3 conference. I remember thinking, “gosh, I’d really love to speak at one of these...