Azure Performance test Azure Web Apps Microsoft Azure has many great offerings in the PaaS space, one of which is Azure Web Apps that allows one to easily host or create any web app built with any technology for any platform. The recent update to the new Azure Portal (in preview) brings not only a more
Work Item Management in Team Foundation Server & Visual Studio Online ALM MVP Colin Dembovsky joins us to talk about how certain features of Work Item Management have evolved in previous to current versions of TFS & Visual Studio Code Visual Studio Team Services. It's the little things that make great solutions! Watch it here. Follow @colindembovsky or visit http://www.colinsalmcorner.
Push notifications in Chrome Extensions using Azure Notification Hubs In the past couple of months, I've been co-organizing a monthly user group called Fixxup, to create a community platform for techies out there to share their knowledge, listen to their peers or even just enjoy the social living by having a beer or two. Fixxup also has a website
.NET 2015: The next generation open ecosystem We go on a journey on what's new in .NET 2015 and explore all the various components available on the platform like .NET Core, .NET Native, .NET 4.6, Roslyn, ASP.NET 5, C# 6 and others.
Poking around in Power BI In this episode I talk to Cecil du Toit about Microsoft Power BI. We poke around and explore what this Business Intellegence offering from Microsoft has to offer.
WebApiProxy Update It's been a long wait but the time has finally come for more interesting features on WebApiProxy. This video briefly outlines some of the many great features that were added to WebApiProxy in the past couple of months. You can read more on this project by going to this introductory
An update on WebApiProxy This project initially started as a proof of concept but quickly grew into something very useful. For the past year or so it became quite popular and plenty of bugs came out of the cracks, but also useful feedback for features too! You can download the packages straight from NuGet:
Fiddling around with XML responses My year started with new challenges, first of which is malformed and unformatted XML. One of the requirements of a new project I'm working on is to read a simple XML response from a web service and do something with the data. How hard could it be? Like any other
2014 Rewind: My year in review About this time last year I started blogging more often and made a decision to spend a little more time giving back to the community and completely re-branded myself to be more efficient in what I do. Oh boy was it a year! Looking back on 2014 brings back both
AngleSharp with Florian Rappl There are a few good HTML & CSS parsing libraries out there, but AngleSharp definitely stands out among them by giving .NET developers all the same possibilities of modern browsers using JavaScript. In this fifth episode of GeekFest, Florian Rappl takes us through what AngleSharp actually is and why it is
Custom Emmet Snippets In this episode we briefly see how easy it is to create your own custom HTML snippets for Emmet. I really found this useful and hope this can save someone plenty of time
Break the barriers and tweet longer It's been a while since I found a decent time to post something useful. As the saying goes: There isn't any better time than the present. So while on my way on a super long flight, to rainy Seattle for the MVP Summit, I've got plenty of time to kill.
For the lazy programmer: Using Excel as a code generator As a 'lazy' programmer, I tend to find creative ways to generate code. One of today's challenges required me to create Enums (each with a description) from code & description pairs of unit measures found inside an Excel spreadsheet containing millions of records (okay I may be exaggerating). Immediately, my brain
Setting up continuous integration from GitHub to NuGet using MyGet It's been a while since my last blog post so I decided to dust of my good ol' Blogger account and get to it. I recently relocated from sunny South Africa to begin my brand new career in the beautiful Netherlands and I must say that I'm absolutely loving it!
.NET Talking basic F# In this episode of GeekFest I talk to F# enthusiast Huw Simpson about the basics of F#. He gives us the run down on why functional programming is becoming the new kid on the block and how easy it is to start learning a new language like F#. I've wrote
Web API Proxies with WebApiProxy In this second installment of GeekFest we explore a little project called WebApiProxy I've been working on that allows us to create WCF-like proxies for ASP.NET Web API in JavaScript and C#
Introducing WebApiProxy: Providing JavaScript & C# proxies with Intellisense including documentation for ASP.NET Web API WebApiProxy extends your ASP.NET Web API service with a proxy endpoint, providing a ready-to-use JavaScript client as well as metadata, exposing the types used in the service. If you are using the documentation provider from ASP.NET Web API Help Pages, the usage documentation is also included inside the
Clouds in my CoffeeScript The "mystery language" CoffeeScript has been around for about 5 years now and I only recently started to play around in it. Like TypeScript, I must add that it's a bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, it's smooth sailing from there. I've promised
Introducing GeekFest: Screencasts for developers For quite some time I’ve been meaning to start a video blog (or vlog) on interesting subjects and people so I’ve decided to waste no more time and get to work on a new series called GeekFest, a screencast for developers by developers. 1 – Schedulers in WAMS The
A Windows Phone app from zero to store in 5 easy steps For those savvy developers out there, who have great ideas for apps but not enough time to implement it, this comprehensive how-to guide will come in quite handy. The Windows Phone App Studio is an online WYSIWIG app builder designed to get you going in a snap. It allows you
How T4 templates can help you with maintainable multi-page apps in JQM We can utilize the power of T4 templates to generate a single HTML page which comprises of multiple separate HTML ‘children’ pages and a layout page, making multi-page apps more maintainable. I’ve been playing around with the new recent release of JQuery Mobile which brings plenty of cool features
Leverage the power of Twilio from Azure Mobile Services Ever wanted to send a simple text message from your web app? Well, now you can by using Twilio - an awesome cloud-powered API for voice calls & text messaging. Okay, I know that statement sounds like something out of an infomercial, but I recently had a simple need to send
How RESTful is your service? Web services are everywhere these days, from social media platforms to enterprise line-of-business solutions. It is extremely important to be able to expose APIs for your solution, in order to reach more external consumers on multiple platforms. As a modern trend, we see that more and more APIs are surfacing
Using the Twitter REST API v1.1 from Azure Mobile Services Since the retirement of the Twitter REST API v1, I have been having trouble doing a simple query using the new search API introduced in version 1.1 from Azure Mobile Services because it now requires a signed authentication header in the request using the OAuth 1.0 protocol. I
Creating a proxy for ASP.NET Web API using T4 One of the coolest new features of ASP.NET is Web API, which allows you to build powerful RESTful services exposed over HTTP. HTTP is not just for serving up web pages, but it provides a platform for building APIs that expose services and data. It is simple, flexible, and
