Developing Dane

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...

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . I spend time most weekends programming, typically in the evenings over a craft beer at my favorite pub . During these sessions I occasionally perform pressing tasks for my job but most often I use the time to explore and further my craft. Sometimes I watch videos, others I read but mostly I write code. During these exploratory development sessions I like to work with or towards a fully functional application. Hello world style apps are useful for demonstrating components and features but you never truly understand such components until you integrate them into a more full-featured application. A year ago I started the latest of of my exploratory development applications, the fourth in ten years. The new project I named RecipeBox. RecipeBox was conceived as a recipe storage application for the cloud. My wife expressed a need for a simple way to store her recipes and have them readily available from anywhere. Such an ...

Update 10/2016 - This posting is better viewed in my new blog . Getting my feet wet with Azure SQL tonight and I just created my first ever database on the platform. The first step was to create a new server instance since I did not yet have a hosting server. The second page of the creation prompts you to provide credentials for the new server. With no instructions about what to use as a "log in name" I used my gmail account as I would for almost any account name. The database created successfully but I quickly found I couldn't access it at all. I just kept getting authentication errors. I noticed in one of the errors that the user name reported in the failure was the login name I'd initially entered with the "@gmail.com" truncated. This made me wonder if Azure was understanding the "@" character as a domain indicator. I went back to the Azure portal, deleted the server and started from scratch creating another new server. This time around I ...