October 2011 - Posts
A few weeks ago at the Future of Web Apps London (great conference, by the way!), I gave a presentation about how to get the most out of a cloud platform. At the end of the talk, I showed a brief demo of http://twoenglishes.com (source on GitHub ), a Node.js app deployed in Windows Azure. The demo was interesting in a few ways: It’s kind of entertaining. It translates between American and British English. (Try typing “color” or “aluminum” on the left side, or type “colour” or “aluminium” on the right.) It’s deployed to two data centers (one in the US and one in Europe), and Traffic Manager routes incoming traffic to the nearest data center. This has a noticeable effect in terms of latency. The images (logo and flags) are served via the Windows...
This is the fifth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on ASP.NET 4.5. The next releases of .NET and Visual Studio include a ton of great new features and capabilities. With ASP.NET 4.5 you’ll see a bunch of really nice improvements with both Web Forms and MVC – as well as in the core ASP.NET base foundation that both are built upon. Today’s post is the third of three posts in the series that talk about the new Model Binding support coming to Web Forms. Model Binding is an extension of the existing data-binding system in ASP.NET Web Forms, and provides a code-focused data-access paradigm. It takes advantage of a bunch of model binding concepts we first introduced with ASP.NET MVC – and integrates them nicely with the Web Forms...
I'm in the process of moving the Orchard documentation site from ScrewTurn Wiki to a Mercurial + Markdown system, where revisions are managed through source control tools instead of a fully online wiki. We see quite a few advantages in doing that, but that's a story for another post. Today, I just want to post on that quick and dirty tool that I've built to translate the ScrewTurn Wiki markup into Markdown. It's not a masterpiece in any way, it's not exhaustive, but I thought it may be useful to others, so here it is… https://bitbucket.org/bleroy/screwturn2markdown/src Read More...
I just published https://github.com/smarx/packanddeploy , a simple scaffold for deploying an executable as a Windows Azure application. That code runs, as an example, mongoose (a web server). It uses the new ProgramEntryPoint in a worker role to launch a batch file, which then launches the executable. I did it this way because I wanted to pass the address and port as command line parameters (so environment variable expansion via a batch file was a good option). The project does not use Visual Studio. It simply uses the cspack and csrun commands from the Windows Azure SDK to package the app for local or cloud deployment and to run it locally. This should be a good starting point for people who just have an executable they want to get running...
I've written several times before about image resizing in .NET and how the various built-in solutions (GDI, WPF and WIC) compare in terms of quality, speed and size. I'll put the links to my previous articles at the end of this post for reference. Several readers have since pointed me to the imageresizer library, which is pure .NET and thus has no problems running in medium trust. Medium trust is an issue that has plagued existing options, preventing many people from using the best available approach. I was doubtful though that a purely managed library could come anywhere near the native Windows libraries in terms of performance. The best way to find out, of course, is to run a benchmark. Fortunately, I still had the code for my previous...
Orchard 1.3 was released yesterday night with some really neat features that I will outline in this post. I will come back in depth on some of those with full-length posts. Let's start with the simple but super-useful ones… 1. Draft Preview Once you've created and saved a content item, there will now be a "Preview" link next to its summary: Previously, it was impossible to view unpublished contents. This was one of the most requested missing features, and there it is. 2. Delete Content Types and Parts Speaking about features high on the wish list, you can now delete the custom content types and parts that you built. 3. Markdown Not everyone likes editing contents in Wysywyg editors, for various reasons. There has always been...
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