I’ve been speaking about Azure at a number of events recently. One of the biggest challenges that I have had each time is due to local firewall restrictions. Firewalls will block port 1433/1434 outbound and this a major hassle to get changed, especially for a 20 minute demo. These ports are generally restricted due to the SQL slammer and SQL snake viruses (http://www.grc.com/port_1434.htm) from a few years ago. SQL Azure uses port 1433 for communication, for instance when connecting from man ... [Read more]

Logging diagnostic information plays a key part for any application. The .Net framework provides a number of Diagnostic features, which can be used to provide logging functionality in your application. However, in Windows Azure, the diagnostic API available in early CTPs was very limited. In the November release of Windows Azure, a new feature for  Windows Azure Diagnostics was launched. I will not delve into details of how to use the Azure diagnostic API. You can read about this here and al ... [Read more]

Read more about work on an Azure utility, which had to deal with the XML responses provided by the Service Management REST API: http://www.dotnetsolutions.co.uk/blogs/markrendle/archive/2010/02/17/working-with-namespaces-in-linq-to-xml/ on Mark Rendle’s new blog here: http://www.dotnetsolutions.co.uk/blogs/markrendle. ... [Read more]

This post should really be title: “how we (could have) migrated ScrumWall to Azure in less than 20 minutes”. But I’ll come on to that later. I’ve been speaking about Azure at a number of events recently. As part of the talks, I have given a quick overview of the developer portal for Azure and the Visual Studio tools. I’ve wrapped this up in a demo using our ScrumWall product (http://scrumwall.cloudapp.net). Winding back time conveniently to about a year ago, I explain how we could have migr ... [Read more]

I worked with Visual Source Safe for many years but around 4 years ago started using Subversion and team foundation server for some projects before switching full time to team foundation server since joining Dot Net Solutions. At the moment though I’m working at a customer site and once again using Source Safe. I am becoming a worse developer every day. The first little step was when Visual Studio crashed during a refactor. A little investigation showed this now occurs every time a refacto ... [Read more]

In computational geometry, convex hull is the boundary of minimal convex set containing a given finite set of points in a plane. Otherwise, it is a simple closed polygonal chain encompassing all the points. As an example it looks like the following.                                                                                           In a recent Proof of Concept at the Microsoft Technology Centre, we needed to build such a polygon. Dealing with around 40 million points with each Point ... [Read more]

Companies use Agile methods like Scrum and eXtreme Programming (XP) to deliver business value through software. Agile methods adopt an incremental approach where large complex projects are broken down into simpler mini projects that are delivered in iterations. These iterations can be one to four weeks in duration. The business person responsible for driving the project (known as the Product Owner or Customer) can align features with his/her business' strategy by prioritising them for deliver ... [Read more]

Scenario Recently a client had a requirement to upload documents to their SharePoint site. They wanted the ability to drop numerous files in a FTP folder and have them uploaded to SharePoint automatically. Solution We decided to solve this using a Custom SSIS Task that uploads files to the required Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) Document Library. We therefore used the Integration Services Project under the Business Intelligence Project types within Microsoft Visual Studio ... [Read more]

Two of Dot Net Solutions’ very own have recently been busy writing a book on Azure, which has just been published. Dan Scarfe and Marcus Tillett teamed up with Stephen Parker to write one of a new series of “Thinking of” books. The table of contents gives a brief flavour of the book, which is written in a very condensed style. Giving as much information, as quickly as possible. 1 Major players in IT are spending billions on the Cloud – why? 2 Could I have a platform in the sky? Sure th ... [Read more]

A new application we are currently building was occasionally throwing an UnauthorizedAccessException exception. Using the ASP.NET health monitoring we became aware of this very quickly. Having used the health monitoring for several past projects, we generally find it a very effective way to get information about problems, such as the exception message and stack trace. Unfortunately, the health monitoring event raised by the UnauthorizedAccessException exception did not contain any informatio ... [Read more]