Posts Tagged ‘application development’

With the newly released Xbox One, Microsoft has been very up front with their quest to take over your living room.  One of the main marketing pushes for the Xbox One is that it does more than play games.  It integrates with your cable box, it can multi-task  by snapping apps to the side (similar […]

I gave a presentation about Windows Azure the other day, and got some great questions that I would like to address with this blog post.  Here they are in no particular order, with some answers I hope are useful to you:  “We have multiple Operating Companies who may want to leverage the features of Windows […]

There’s really nothing quite like being part of a top national systems integrator.  I’ve found that one of the coolest, most rewarding aspects of this job is working with so many bright, talented people from all across the country.  The sheer breadth and scope of the expertise brought to bear by the ladies and gentlemen […]

“Start-up” and “Microsoft” are usually not said in the same sentence.  Microsoft has historically been synonymous with expensive licensing costs which is precisely why most start-ups have gravitated towards Linux.  It is free, it is stable and it is powerful.   While Windows and Windows Server may never be free, Microsoft has narrowed the gap […]

Last week Microsoft released Project Monaco which is essentially Visual Studio as a service.  An IDE in the cloud.  Visual Studio has long been regarded as one of the premier development environments for Windows based and Web development.  It integrates perfectly with the entire Microsoft stack and its debugging features are second to none.  It […]

Lately there has been no shortage of great discussions in the groups I associate with on LinkedIn. The one that caught my eye for this blog was a discussion post in LinkedIn’s Semantic Technologies Group -> https://www.linkedin.com/groups/What-CMS-would-you-recommend-138726.S.5797983861472251904 So it starts with a simple question –“What CMS would you recommend?” in the context of being a […]

Facebook has been one of the software pioneers when it comes to Big Data.  They have an continuously increasing amount of data that constantly needs to be indexed and queried in a fast, efficient manner.  Facebook originally developed Hive which is a distributed data warehouse that allows for querying and managing of large data sets.  They released […]

Web Sites are by far one of my favorite features on Windows Azure. As a developer, I didn’t like having to manage the infrastructure. Web Sites allow me to focus on my application and data and let the platform manage the rest. In the last couple of updates there have been a few improvements to […]

A client of ours is performing a migration of their old site content onto their new Sitecore instance. The old site contained vanity URLs for their product catalog that they wanted to utilize for the new site. They wanted to send a 301 redirect for SEO and then display the new Sitecore item representing the product […]

There are many things developers hate about JavaScript.  You can see this with all of the different ways people are trying to “fix” JavaScript.  Here are a couple of the ways: CoffeeScript is a language which is syntactically similar to JavaScript and attempts to expose the “good parts” of JavaScript Google went ahead and wrote […]

As a best practice, I do my project work outside of my Sitecore directory. I also as a best practice, segregate my Sitecore assemblies for my project compilation by copying them to a folder included in the solution. There are some times that I don’t always get to follow my preferred best practices. On more […]

A Brief Background In my previous posts I have walked through setting up Hadoop on Windows Azure using HDInsight.  Hadoop is an extremely powerful distributed computing platform with the ability to process terabytes of data.  Many of the situations when you hear the term “Big Data”, Hadoop is the enabler.  One of the complications with […]