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]

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]

Progressive zoom is a technology provided by Deep Zoom, available in Silverlight as a MultiScaleImage . This enables Silverlight developers to render images with very large resolution whilst addressing performance constraints imposed by the client / server delivery model. MultiScaleImage does not provide a reasonable way to navigate to an image and this makes implementation of many interesting design scenarios slow. We designed a MultiScaleSelection Control which is described here which addr ... [Read more]

In part 1 of this series we dealt with how to manage data in Windows Azure storage for ScrumWall. Then in part 2 we dealt with deployment of ScrumWall to Azure and in particular accessing configuration. Having completed moving ScrumWall to the Windows Azure Platform, we have encountered an issue that required additional work. ScrumWall uses Windows Live to provide authentication for users. A simple way to build Windows Live into Azure is to use the Windows Live Web Role then using the Windo ... [Read more]

Anders is another one of my Computer Science heroes. Always a pleasure to see him on video. Over the next 12 months we are going to see language query get rolled out to the masses. There are going to be fireworks; but pretty soon I hope that an application compiled with baked in SQL will be considered terrible practice. http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/archive/2007/01/26/anders-hejlsberg-on-linq-and-functional-programming.aspx My main fear with Linq is that its composability may actually dec ... [Read more]