Developing Dane

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . Rocky Start I saw the initial announcement for Azure Functions in one of the Azure newsletters. I watched two channel9 videos and read what documentation I could find. I even emailed a friend about it. I was pretty excited. My first experience with Azure Functions was a couple months back. It did not go well. I selected a C# HTTP Trigger template as my first function type and the pain began. Nothing worked as expected and I was met with frustration at literally every level. By the end of the night I'd decided the Azure Portal's Blade for Azure Functions had some significant usability and stability issues. I ended the night extremely frustrated. Two weeks later I took another look at Azure Functions. Whatever issues the Azure Functions Blade was having during my previous attempt appeared to have been resolved. Where previously the simplest change to function code would fail to be executed, changes were sudd

Until the long file name issue is fixed node.js development on a Windows machine is going to continue to suck. That is all. Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog .

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