Kyle Burns

In what at this point feels like a previous life, I did far more work automating Microsoft Excel with Visual Basic for Applications or from within Windows applications than I would care to admit. In those days the rendering performance of Excel was horrible and any time work was done that would modify the visible […]

I have to admit – I’m not always great at spotting whatever is going to be the next great thing.  This is evidenced by the fact that I bought an HD-DVD player because I was certain that format would beat Blu-ray, but more important to my professional life was the skepticism with which I originally […]

One of the keys to Microsoft’s strategy to make Azure a clear choice for customers of every size is the idea that you get massive scalability to meet demands, but only have to pay for capacity that you’re actually using at any given point in time. Until today, that statement has always come with its […]

One of the things that I have been caught complaining about from time to time with the way Sitecore handles assignment of data source in presentation details is that the data source is stored as a string path, making it necessary to update every instance of presentation details that references an item when it is […]

With the recent movement from preview to release of features such as Virtual Machines and Networking (along with a promise to match any price drops from Amazon’s AWS offering), Microsoft’s Windows Azure has been getting a lot of attention lately. One of the keys to the success of the product has been the cost at which […]

I know that in my last post I promised my next post would be focused on getting runtime information from your application, but I really felt that it was important to share an event that’s coming up in a couple of weeks (I really will get around to writing the post I intended next). April […]

One of the more frustrating things to deal with when supporting a production application is “flying blind” when trying to determine what went wrong and how to fix it.  In today’s post, I will discuss some commonly used techniques for handling exceptions in .NET code that prevent visibility into the real source of error and […]

When dealing with any product that has been around for a while, it’s not uncommon to observe a progression of common tasks becoming less clumsy as the tools mature. In this post, I take a look at how pagination has evolved with SQL Server resultsets in order to highlight TSQL features introduced last year in SQL […]

Being a frequent user of beta software, I often have to stumble through discovering things the hard way. Last fall when I moved from the Release Preview of Windows 8 to the final product on my Samsung Series 7 slate, I selected the “Keep Nothing” option during the install and was surprised to find when […]

Most anyone who has worked with me for a while has probably heard me say “it’s not about what you know, but what you can prove”. I am often referring to automated testing, but this also can be applied to communicating the steps to reproduce a problem (repro steps) encountered by a tester or end […]

When I’m not delving into Microsoft technologies, I enjoy making music. A Christmas gift that I received turned out to be an unlikely trigger to make me think about usability. That gift was a book with transcriptions of some popular sax solos and included Money by Pink Floyd. This song is a bit unique in […]

Both Sitecore and ASP.NET MVC both provide a development model that allows for distinct boundaries to be created between data, application logic, and presentation logic.  The purpose of this post is to describe the manner in which these capabilities can be utilized within a Sitecore MVC solution to provide content authors with the ability to […]