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]