It has been a while now that Windows Azure got released and I have been exploring it for quite sometime too. Recently I had this burning desire to try Azure Blob storage and was going through some thoughts and then I decided- Would it not be great if I can compose a Deep Zoom image and deploy it in Azure Blob storage and access it from my Silverlight application. Since I went through a bit of digging myself in doing this, I thought I would just show this in a few short and simple steps for ot ... [Read more]

This post is part of a series of posts that aims to capture a number of emerging design patterns for the Windows Azure Platform. This series will begin with emerging design patterns for Windows Azure Table storage. The Chronological Query Pattern aims to support queries that must return data in chronological or reverse chronological order. Example Looking at a standard example of blog data, stored as: PartitionKey (User) RowKey Titl ... [Read more]

This post is part of a series of posts that aims to capture a number of emerging design patterns for the Windows Azure Platform. This series will begin by tackling emerging design patterns for Windows Azure Table storage. The Starts With Query Pattern enables performance optimised begins with partial match operations. Example Provide a fast search for articles that begins with the term “Metabolis” from a list of article titles, such as those found on Wikipedia. A subset is shown below: Me ... [Read more]

This post is part of a series of posts that aims to capture a number of emerging design patterns for the Windows Azure Platform. This series will begin by tackling emerging design patterns for Windows Azure Table storage. The Transactional Master-Item Record Pattern ensures that modifications to a master record and its item records are performed in a transactional way. Example Changes to an expense record with expense line items is an set of data that needs to be managed in a transaction w ... [Read more]

This post is part of a series of posts that aims to capture a number of emerging design patterns for the Windows Azure Platform. This series will begin with emerging design patterns for Windows Azure Table storage. The Table Name Key Pattern enables the key for an entity to be extended beyond the partition key and row key, to provide faster querying or deletion/archiving. Example Data with short lifetime such as log or diagnostic data or temporary working sets, are generally only needed fo ... [Read more]

The Hash Partitioning Pattern aims to improve the performance of parallel and batch queries. Example As part of the pre-processing done for Wikipedia Explorer, the HTML/XML representation of a Wikipedia page is converted in to a set of POCO objects and the incoming and outbound links are analysed. The core data is stored in a Windows Azure Table and is used when pre-processing a page, which is a massively CPU intensive operation. As optimisations this work is done in parallel and is also fo ... [Read more]

As a little treat for the developers and customers at Dot Net Solutions we’re buying a new coffee machine. We’re a pretty diverse bunch: several people have coffee machines at home and have emotional attachments to different brands, and there are tea drinkers who may be served adequately by some of the choices, or not at all by others. Not dissimilar from the situation some of our customers are in when agreeing features for a new software system. When evaluating competing architectures for a ... [Read more]

Importing text files into a database is a common scenario. It gets more interesting though when you are required to import log files generated by ASP.NET’s health monitoring. We recently wrote a web application that receives and logs information via HTTP handlers. The logging was achieved using ASP.NET’s health monitoring. We wanted additional information to be included in the log entries however, so we implemented a custom event type by extending the WebRequestEvent base class. This allowe ... [Read more]

With the release of Azure, ScrumWall needed to be updated from the sample data access code to the new API. Cloud Storage Account The first change that we made was the addition of CloudStorageAccount to handle access to storage. Instantiating a storage account requires that a configuration setting publisher has been set. We do this with the SetConfigurationSettingPublisher method. It takes a single parameter, which is a wrapper delegate for the configuration reading and handling of the confi ... [Read more]

  Behaviors and triggers are two cool features in Silverlight 3. They allow to declaratively associate and action with an event or property value. It is implemented as a combination of a Component + an attached property. The framework provides the logic of attaching/detaching behaviors. The behavior exists as a separate piece of code and hence can be easily reused on similar components on which the behavior is authored.  Due to the integration of behaviors inside Blend, designers can easily app ... [Read more]