Posts Tagged ‘web development’

I talk about Windows Azure at several events, such as: SQL Saturdays, Code Camps and User Groups in my region. One thing I hear about when people sign-up is that they don’t want to supply a credit card just to try the services. Now MSDN subscribers are no longer required to provide payment information. MSDN […]

If you have used Windows Azure Cloud Services for any length of time, one of the features you would have wanted is AutoScale. AutoScale allows you to scale your applications based on usage and performance. Being able to dynamically scale your applications based on performance and other factors is a now a reality, as AutoScale is […]

If you have used Windows Azure for any length of time, one thing you should have noticed is the rate of change. When I say change, I’m not referring to things being taken away either. The change is almost always improving what already exists or adding more capabilities. The new SDK adds support for the […]

Over the past few years, I have had the privilege of working with some of the world’s largest companies in a variety of industries. One thing in common with all of these engagements was using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) as the tool of migrating data for the companies’ business intelligence collateral. I have developed […]

So, have you heard about Power BI yet?  The whiz-bang new cloud-centric BI front end tool from Microsoft?  Well, this video from the 2013 WPC breaks down the story — in a very entertaining manner…  So, having watched, let’s assume we all remember Mariah’s chart-toppers and instead review the greatest hits of the Power BI […]

Windows Azure Web Sites have been around for a while now, and one of the great features about them is deployment via source control. You have several options for source control deployment as well: you can use GitHub, CodePlex, TFS or even DropBox to keep your sites integrated and up to date. In this post […]

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 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 […]

    I was given a task recently to have an application generate and send an email. The requirements were straight forward, the email should contain some customer information along with a list of products. My first thought was to use StringBuilder to handle the task, but something about that bothered me. In 2013, am I still […]

This is a quickie, but can be useful for those accessing SharePoint Managed Metadata from the Client Side. Often when you’re pulling back data from SharePoint lists, you’ll get a full-fledged object back rather than a single field value (and yes I ran into this while working on some fancy calls in a Display Template). […]

Let’s say you do something fancy with your publishing site that changes the page hierarchy and would like the Bread Crumbs to account for those changes. You could create your own Bread Crumbs control but there is a quicker and more supported way that will allow your changes to affect the OOB Bread Crumbs control. […]

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 […]