Developing Dane

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . On several occasions I’ve had issues with the naming of my Azure resources. The most annoying of these issues was when I’d created a resource for prototyping in one subscription, deleted it and then attempted to recreate it with the same name under a different subscription only to discover that the name had been “reserved” for some period of time under the initial subscription. After I was bitten by this issue a couple times I went in search of documentation for the timings for such name reservations but came up wanting. A post to the MSDN forums confirmed that no such documentation exists so I decided to create it myself. The site listed below is my ongoing attempt to document some of these naming restrictions. http://azurenaming.azurewebsites.net/

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . Background In a  post two years ago I expressed my admiration of ClickOnce. At the time we'd experienced years of tremendous success using it as our client application's primary deployment mechanism and since that time it has not faltered. I now regret to say that over the last year I've seen evidence that makes me question continued reliance on ClickOnce. I think its life-cycle may be coming to end. Though that saddens me I understand that in the tech world all technology is transient and the best ideas don't always last as long as they should (see Silverlight). Data, however, must continue flowing. About eight months ago I started searching for alternative deployment mechanism which might provide some of the benefits we'd leveraged with ClickOnce. That search came up mostly wanting. However, one candidate identified was the open source project Squirrel.Windows . The moniker on the GitHub proj

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . I'm a HUGE fan of Visual Studio. In my opinion it is the best IDE available by a wide margin. I've been a heavy user of every version since VS2003 and I dabbled in several previous to that. I've anxiously awaited each new release and then migrated immediately and I'd always been impressed, until now. Put bluntly Visual Studio 2015 wasn't ready for release. I should have realized this when I was watching a video a couple weeks ago in which the presenter was using the fresh-off-the-presses VS2015 RTM. Over the course of the twenty minute video he encountered three different VS bugs he had to work around. I didn't learn from that and went ahead to install it as my primary (only) version of Visual Studio on a newly formatted Windows 8.1 machine. I've been using that machine daily now for just over two weeks and I routinely encounter issues in VS2015 Enterprise. Here are some of my concerns so fa

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . Pre-Build Just as last  year my flight from Portland to San Francisco was delayed due to foggy conditions in the bay area (note to self: no further morning flights to SFO). This year my wife Lynda accompanied me and we finally landed in SFO around 1:00 PM only an hour late. The flight was smooth and easy except the landing where the pilot gave us the hardest landing I've personally experience in a flight. Just as last year the weather in San Francisco was identical to the weather left behind in Portland. In stark contrast to last year that weather was sunny skies and temperatures in the mid 70's. As I did last year we took a take a shuttle from SFO to downtown San Francisco. It cost roughly $30 to for both Lynda and I and the boarding process took almost an hour. Right before we left PDX I saw this tweet from Scott Hanselman. A few hours later we were sitting in traffic heading into downtown and I was

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . In File Explorer hold Shift+Right-Click on any selected item or group of items and you'll find the context menu item "Copy as path". Selecting this will add the path strings for the selected items to your clipboard. For example the image below shows a folder and two files selected inside the folder C:\temp\Test. Selecting "Copy as path" adds the following to the clipboard: "C:\temp\Test\Data" "C:\temp\Test\AnImage.bmp" "C:\temp\Test\Archive.zip"

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . A quick comparison of the complexity of Web API versus Empty templates in ASP.NET Web Application creation. Values were recorded through inspection of the projects and the project folders after a successful debug compile. Empty template, Web API core references NuGet Packages: 5 References: 22 Files: 61 Folders: 33 Size: 12.3 MB Web API template, MVC and Web API core references NuGetPackages: 34 References: 48 Files: 374 Folders: 157 Size: 62.3 MB

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . Abstract Currently Azure SQL allows you to configure your database in one of three service tiers, i.e. Basic, Standard and Premium. The service tiers each allow you to select one of several performance levels. In all you have eight possible performance levels; Basic, S0, S1, S2, S3, P1, P2, P3. The goal of this exercise was to provide some quantification of these performance levels. Setup Test System: Azure VM with Windows Server 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2014. Database: SQL database with a complex history table (many columns) which held ~250K records. Client: SQL Server Mangment Studio (SSMS) hosted on the Test System. All test runs utilized a copy of the Database. For tests labeled "Local" the Database was hosted on the Test System. For all other tests the Database was hosted as an Azure SQL database under the labeled performance level. All queries were executed from the Client. Reported query executi

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . I recently attended the seminar CloudFest Azure Workshop at the Microsoft offices in downtown Portland, OR. The event was hosted by  Northwest Cadence and the Marquam Group  and had two tracts, Dev/Ops and Azure Active Directory. I attended AAD and ended up leaving half way through the day very disappointed. Despite my disappointment with the event as a whole, the opening presentation by Northwest Cadence's Steven Borg  was good and he gave a story that blew my mind. He described an Azure seminar he'd recently attended where the subject of big data was discussed. In that seminar he met an engineer form Boeing who told him they have engines with IoT devices collecting 1 TB of data per hour of operation. That's 1 TB per engine, per plane, per hour in flight. That's quite simply a crazy amount of data. The gentleman was then asked what Boeing did with all that data. His response, "nothing yet