Ran into a small bug in the Azure deployment portal today using Firefox. The "swap" button to swap out a staging with a production environment was non-responsive. Switched to IE and it popped up an "are you sure" alert box as expected. I'm sure this will be addressed quickly but if you're trying out...

Azure Deployment Portal - Use IE →

At Wednesday's keynote by Microsoft Research VP Rick Rashid, one of the demos showed of Boku , a project designed to bring programming and logic to children in game form. The coolest part about it is that everything is graphical and the UI is a game controller - no keyboard. The gist of the "language...

PDC 2008 Keynote Demo: Boku →

Craig, Lake Quincy Media's Creative Director, updated my blog from the generic theme I'd been using today. Let me know how you like it (if you're reading this in an RSS reader, click here ). I like it but I'm a bit biased. I'm also curious, as a reader, do you prefer seeing full posts on the home page...

New Look for Blog →

It's the morning of Day 3 of PDC 2008 and as I'm waiting for the next keynote to begin, I thought I'd summarize what I've seen announced thus far this week. On Monday, Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure , Microsoft's new cloud services platform that provides scalable...

PDC 2008 Rollup After 2 Days →

So they announced the name for the Windows cloud platform, formerly code named Red Dog (and briefly Strata) - introducing Windows Azure . I like the name, personally, although even during the keynote at PDC there were issues with pronunciation (AZ-ure or uh-ZHOOR), the fomer being the accepted one, apparently...

Windows Cloud Platform - Azure Thing? →

Graffiti CMS doesn't ship with an archive/history widget to display the number of posts published by month, as is common in many other blog engines. I've been looking for such a widget for several months and Keyvan pointed me to one a few days ago that I got up and running in just a few moments today...

Graffiti History Widget →

A common area to test in software are ranges of values and off-by-one errors. But this problem certainly isn't limited to programmer code. I just wrapped up a survey by TNS for customer satisfaction that ended with this question. Note that I have 10 employees in my company (trying to pick the invisible...

Range Errors Not Just In Software →

I'm giving an overview of ASP.NET MVC at the "Dog Food" conference in Columbus, Ohio, next month. The details and schedule are as follows: Date: November 20, 2008 Location: · Floor 4: Suite 400 · Floor 5: Classroom 501 and 502 8800 Lyra Dr Columbus, OH 43240 Dogfood Developer’s Conference: A commonly...

Speaking at Dog Food Conference in Columbus Ohio November 2008 →

Ayende recently commented on Spolsky's latest Inc. column about how commission schemes typically backfire for companies due to local optimization by those seeking to maximize their commissions. Both make good points; read them, I'll wait. As it happens, I was just getting to my notes on this from Lean...

Incenting Behavior →

In the last year or so I've really seen the light on how to really write loosely-coupled code. I thought I knew something about this concept before - I mean, I knew loose coupling was good, generally speaking, and I knew data abstraction was one of the key ways to limit dependencies between classes....

Insidious Dependencies →

In my tools talk at DevReach earlier this week I mentioned that I use Fiddler with IE and FireBug with Firefox to see HTTP traffic involved in loading and working with a given web page/site. I said in the talk that Fiddler only works with IE, but that's not entirely true as Ivo Evtimov was kind enough...

Fiddler for Firefox →

I spent most of the last week speaking at DevReach in Sofia, Bulgaria. This was DevReach's third year, but was my first time speaking there, as well as my first time visiting Bulgaria. The conference is sponsored primarily by Telerik and Martin Kulov of Kulov.net . The organizers did a great job, I thought...

DevReach 2008 →

PDC is fast approaching and Cloud Computing is the theme - and all the rage for everyone else in the Industry media. Amazon recently announced they'll be extending their compute cloud to support Windows and real databases. Here's a look at some recent trends in the tech industry, using Google Trends...

Search Trends October 2008 →

One of the points made in Jeffrey's agile development boot camp last week that struck a chord with me was that many database-centric designs have lookup tables that aren't really just data. That is, tables that hold values such as statuses that, if modified, can easily break existing code or won't function...

Reducing SQL Lookup Tables and Function Properties in NHibernate →

Wrapping up HeadSpring's Agile Boot Camp class this week, we're installing VisualSVN Server locally. Running the setup is just a matter of hitting Next three times - it's very simple. Running the visual server window yields this opening screen: Next, right click on VisualSVN Server and select Properties...

Installing VisualSVN Subversion →