Issue: 2013 - January/February

Rod Paddock Jan/Feb 2013 Editorial

If we have been friends for a while, you must know my opinions about workflows in SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007. I didn’t think they were very good, especially from a performance and scalability point of view. Frankly I think Microsoft should have called them “workslows.” Though, I don’t think it was the implementation in SharePoint that was the issue, it was fundamental issues with Workflow Foundation, compounded by the nature of SharePoint that acerbated the issu...es. Well, I am happy to say that Workflows in SharePoint 2013 are something I feel quite comfortable recommending to anyone, and I hope to make that case in this article.See More

In part 1 of this article, you learned how to create a Windows 8 look and feel for your WPF applications. You were shown a high-level overview of the various components that made up the shell for navigating. In part 2 of this article you will learn to create a WPF Button user control, a Message Box you can style, and a simple Message Broker System. All of these components are used to create the “Windows 8 Style” WPF shell you learned about in part 1.

In prior articles, I have shown how to create WPF-based applications using the CODE Framework and the MVVM and MVC patterns. This enabled developers to create quality applications quickly and in a fashion that can easily be understood by developers of all skill levels. In those articles I showed how to use view-models and views to create UIs. In this article, I am going to take this concept further by showing you how you do not even have to create new views and view-mode...ls, but instead can use the ones CODE Framework defines for you out of the box.See More

In a previous article, I wrote about how simple it is to deploy an ASP.NET MVC Web Application to Windows Azure using Team Foundation Service hosted at tfspreview.com. In this article, I will build on those concepts and show you how to build and deploy a simple Node.js website to Azure using Git as the source code repository. One of Azure’s core strengths is its openness. In addition to the .NET SDK, Azure has SDKs for Java, PHP, Python and for the purposes of this artic...le, Node.js. That openness also extends to Azure hosted Virtual Machines where Ubuntu, openSUSE and SUSE Linux are supported in addition to core Microsoft server technologies such as Windows Server 2012/2008 and SQL Server. In this article, I’ll provide a brief primer on Node.js, Git and how those technologies are first class citizens in Azure. One technology you will not find in this article is Visual Studio! We’ll use Notepad as our sole developer IDE!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.

For several years, database developers have created analytic (OLAP) databases using tools such as Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. SSAS includes the MDX programming language for retrieving data and writing custom expressions. These tools remain very powerful for creating analytic applications. However, some view the tools in SSAS/MDX as difficult to learn. In SQL Server Analysis Services 2012, Microsoft has created a second model (known as the tabular model) for c...reating analytic databases. The new model brings the promise of simplified features and (in some cases) even better performance than traditional OLAP. In this article, I’ll provide an overview for this new model and will walk through a basic example of creating an SSAS 2012 tabular model database.See More

Users already have many usernames and passwords for different popular online services, and with OpenID and OAuth, you can leverage those. Why burden users with yet another set of credentials for your site if they can use their Google or Facebook account, or any other OpenID or OAuth account? In this article, I will show you how to do this with ASP.NET 4.5, but more importantly help you understand what’s going on behind the scenes.

The value of URLs for a website cannot be understated. The scheme of URLs can help give clues to visitors and machines alike regarding the structure of your website and well-crafted locations help facilitate search engine indexing, bookmarking and sharing. The role of URLs in Ajax applications becomes even more important as content is often changing on the page while the URL remains untouched.

Increasingly, we rely on NuGet Packages in our .NET Development efforts. When you need to add a library to your project, whether it is Entity Framework, AutoMapper, jQuery, etc., NuGet makes that task a simple one. What happens when you are on a plane, train, an automobile - in some circumstance where you are not online and consequently, not connected to your NuGet package source? This is where a local NuGet package source comes in handy. Locally, we can easily stand up ...an IIS-based NuGet package source. While useful, that is not the simplest thing we can do. Fortunately, the NuGet authors had the foresight and wisdom to allow us to create file directory-based NuGet package sources. This brief article will take you through the steps to create your own local NuGet package source.See More

Continuous integration (CI) has stood as one of the core pillars of the movement to agile software development best practices during the past decade.

Jan/Feb 2013 - Managed Coder by Ted Neward