Although PowerShell Cmdlets are usually written in PowerShell, there are occasions when the level of integration with existing C# or VB libraries is awkward to achieve with PowerShell. Yes, you can write Cmdlets in C# perfectly easily, but until now it has been tiresome to discover how. Now Michael Sorens shows you the simple route to writing effective C# Cmdlets.… Read more
SignalR isn't just for web applications. It can also provide the basic real-time communications for a connected Windows Universal Application or even iOS and Android applications. Christos Matskas demonstrates how to get started with creating applications across a range of platforms that require real-time communication using SignalR… Read more
In application or database development, testing is too often given secondary importance. There are advantages to the whole delivery process if testers can get involved in the initial stages of planning and design. Testers have a role throughout the development lifecycle, as Doris Robinson explains… Read more
Visitors to a website are put off by having to wait for pages to load. Additionally, Google uses the metric to rank your site. Why, when there are tools and techniques around to help reduce web page lethargy, do we still experience slow page-loads? David Berry provides the simple ways of finding and fixing the problems.… Read more
If you are still storing passwords with MD5 hashing you're doing it wrong. The .NET platform provides a Cryptography library that allows you to develop PBKDF2 user authentication to the standards of the Open Web Application Security Project. Tom Fischer explains the background, shows a solution, and discusses the issues.… Read more
Are microservices the cure for the ague of monolithic applications, or do they bring their own problems with them that monolithic architectures have circumvented? Are they capable of delivering applications that are easier to maintain and develop? How can they avoid the failings of service-oriented architectures? Once more, Robert Sheldon gets to the heart of the technical issues.… Read more
SQL-based distributed Cloud Relational databases aren't new, but Amazon's Aurora offers an alternative to SQL Azure, and, being MySQL-compatible, provides the obvious route to the cloud for hosted LAMP web applications. Is this of interest to the rest of us? Rob Sheldon investigates.… Read more
Stuart Leeks provides a great introduction to the Azure API Management service which allows you to publish your APIs to partners, employees and consumers.… Read more
Hosting a scalable application in Azure seems ideal, but what happens when things go wrong? Azure Cloud Services provide extensive disgnostics, and this feature has now been extended to Azure web sites and Azure Virtual Machines. You need to set up diagnostics on the VM, but once this is done, all your logs, traces and performance counters can be collected from many VMs in one place for easy management.… Read more
Although the Cloud gives us the freedom of using, and paying for, computing resources only when we need them, the public cloud isn't a universal panacea. Private clouds can harness all that cloud technology whilst avoiding those security and bandwidth issues, but at a cost and commitment. Can one therefore get the best of both worlds with a Hybrid Cloud? Robert Sheldon explains all the ins and outs.… Read more
Even where organisations cannot make full use of public cloud for reasons of security or because of bandwidth limitations, many of the advantages of flexibility and rapid deployment can be made by providing a private cloud where the IT department manages the service but allows users to use the resources as their requirements change. Could Private Clouds provide a new paradigm for enterprises, irrespective of the public cloud?… Read more
It is wrong to assume that moving to a managed cloud platform means never having to be concerned with upgrades to the operating system: It is important to be aware of how these updates are applied, and how they can affect the availability and maintainability of your cloud-based applications… Read more
Any IT application will suffer a failure at some point. A well-designed application can accomodate failure by reacting in such a way as to minimise the effect: to fail gracefully. Good Cloud software design should plan around mitigating the consequences of failure of any part of the system… Read more
Windows Azure Acess Control Service (ACS) provides a way of authenticating users who need to access web applications and services without having to factor complex authentication logic into the application itself. It is surprisingly easy to create a custom login page that delegates the authentication process to an identity provider… Read more
Windows Azure Blob Storage Windows Azure Storage is one of the core components in Windows Azure that offers a scalable, highly available, and competitively priced storage option. Amongst others abstractions in Azure Storage (Table Storage and Queue Storage), Blob Storage is perhaps the most widely-used service. Blob Storage allows us to store any unstructured text … Read more
It makes sense, when developing Azure applications, to offer better security than the traditional ID & password. It is better to allow customers to use some of their existing online identities such as Microsoft Live ID, Google, Yahoo or Facebook. Security tokens provide a neat way of doing this.… Read more
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