Articles filed in category 'Distributed Computing'

John explains the dependency graph and the layer diagram tools in Visual Studio. Once you see how they work and what they can do, you’ll use them as part of every project.

Rick illustrates the benefits and shortcomings of using NodeJS, and also builds a handy tool for making shortened URLs while he’s at it!

You already know that using Visual Studio 2013 streamlines building business apps. Beth shows you how to use its Cloud Business App project template to improve collaboration between Office 365, SharePoint, and all your mobile devices.

With Sync Services for ADO.NET, developers can easily optimize their online experience by caching data locally within the easy-to-deploy SQL Server Compact embedded database engine.In this article I’ll cover how Sync Services for ADO.NET was designed to fit the growing developer needs for caching data locally in online-optimized, offline-enabled applications.

Stefano explores using containers for reusable components and patterns to simplify making reliable distributed systems. He leans on microservices to place all functionality within a single application.

You might have heard some things about NoSQL; how Google and Facebook are using non-relational databases to handle their load. And in most cases, this is where it stopped. NoSQL came about because scaling relational databases is somewhere between extremely hard to impossible.

In 2007, Microsoft unveiled a new vision called “Software + Services” that would fundamentally change the way that both Microsoft and their customers build software and have a gradual, yet marked ripple effect throughout the software giant’s entire strategy.

You might have heard about Node.js and always wanted to try it. With Ben’s guidance, you can get a simple Node.js app up and running, and learn about some other useful tools as you go.

Modern applications are no longer isolated, stand-alone applications, limited to a single process or machine. Distributed applications allow you to put components in close proximity to the resources they use, allow multiple users to access the application, enable scalability and throughput, and increase overall availability and fault isolation. Component-oriented programming is especially geared towards distribution because it is all about breaking the application into a... set of interacting components, which you can then distribute to different locations. .NET has a vast infrastructure supporting distributed applications and remote calls. This article focuses on just a single aspect of .NET remoting: the different object activation models available to a distributed application.See More

My first experience with AWS was building a prototype for a website called Attachments.me. My friend Jesse Miller and I built the site over several weekends, and hosted it on a single EC2 instance. Two years, dozens of EC2 instances, and hundreds of thousands of users later, we’re still on AWS.

In our service-oriented world, users need the same experience on any device, whether mobile phone, office PC, or Internet café. Moreover, they want the same experience any time they access applications, offline or online. For developers, this means tackling multi-tier, distributed, and concurrent programming. LINQ 1.0 radically simplified multi-tier programming with unified query and deep XML support. TESLA is a broad engineering program by the authors to extend the succ...ess of LINQ with external relationships, reshaping combinators, assisted tier-splitting, and join patterns.See More

When I was a kid, I loved baseball. I lived it 24/7. In the summertime, happiness meant a pickup game during the day and a Phillies doubleheader at night. I’m still a kid at heart and I still love baseball - and I also love SQL Server. And right now, happiness means seeing all the cool new features in SQL Server 2012. There are so many of them that I can’t list them in a single article. So, I’m penning a two-part Baker’s Dozen. The first part of this “twin-bill” (yes, ex...pect a few baseball analogies!) will be 13 new T-SQL and database engine features in SQL Server 2012. The “night-cap” in the next issue will be 13 new features in SQL Server Integration Services and the new Business Intelligence Semantic Model.See More

This installment of "The Baker's Dozen" presents a Windows Forms database application that demonstrates some of the primary attributes of a distributed architecture. These attributes include authentication and connectivity, data management, business objects, user-interface modules, and reporting. The featured application is a job-costing and invoicing application for a Masonry company, and is available for download. The application contains many functions that are requir...ed in most business applications. This article steps through the construction of these key pieces and provides classes and methodologies that you can apply to your next application.See More

Maarten explores containers, especially in regard to an ASP.NET Core application, and uses JetBrains Rider as an IDE to build and debug apps in a Docker container.

XML is becoming the messaging standard of choice, and one of the key issues in this architecture is the conversion and transfer of data between client and server sides.In this article, Rick looks at a tool that easily converts Visual FoxPro tables and objects to and from XML, and demonstrates the concepts of XML messaging in a live e-Commerce application.