wintellect-blogs|May 11, 2010

Paraffin 3.12: A Bug Fix and Three New Features

After a bit of rest and relaxation, Paraffin, my tool to make managing your Windows Installer XML (WiX) fragments easier makes a surprise appearance back on my blog. If you’re not familiar with Paraffin search this blog for numerous entries. Grab the latest version here. The relevant changes are as follows. I moved everything over…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|May 10, 2010

Updated FAQ for SQL Azure

Microsoft published an updated FAQ (May 3, 2010) for SQL Azure, available here The FAQ is very thorough and is a “must read” for any organization planning a relational database migration or new cloud application “This paper provides an architectural overview of SQL Azure Database, and describes how you can use SQL Azure to augment…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|May 10, 2010

Understanding Page Orientation in Silverlight for Windows Phone

At MIX this year, Silverlight developers were handed a real treat: their first look at Silverlight for Windows Phone. Silverlight is the primary platform that developers will use to write applications for the new Windows phone, which will debut later this year. I can’t remember being this excited about a platform since…well, since Silverlight 1.0.…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|May 9, 2010

Different Ways to Start Processes under a Debugger

The other day I got a question about how to start a process under the debugger and there are quite a few different ways to do that. I thought I’d discuss them all because the information about how to do each of these is scattered around various spots in the Visual Studio documentation. As the…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|May 4, 2010

Improving Windows Azure Storage Throughput Using the Content Delivery Network

Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) caches your Windows Azure Data Storage blobs at strategically placed locations around the world (18 at the time of this blog post). The purpose of the CDN is to provide maximum bandwidth for delivery of content to our applications and users. Building massively scalable applications requires squeezing every ounce…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|May 2, 2010

Silverlight Out of Browser (OOB) Versions, Images, and Isolated Storage

This is a quick and simple post to address three very common questions I receive about Silverlight Out-of-Browser (OOB) applications. In case you haven’t heard, applications made with Silverlight version 3 and later can be installed locally to your machine (whether it is a Windows machine or a Mac) and run “out of the browser”…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|May 1, 2010

MEF: DLL Versions and Multiple Exports for a Class

During my talk about the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) at Devscovery this past week, I had two very good questions asked by the audience and promised I’d get an answer. The first one was about exporting in MEF. I was under the impression that a MEF part could have one export, but I was mistaken.…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|Apr 28, 2010

Want to Know How to Debug Better for Free?

Recently, I did a session on Advanced .NET Debugging at the Atlanta Microsoft office and it was recorded for posterity. You can catch the three part video up on Channel 9, here, here and here. Unfortunately, the sound isn’t the best in the world, but it’s still understandable. Fortunately, all the people in the audience…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|Apr 26, 2010

MVVM with Transaction and View Locator Example

I had a lot of requests after both of my posts about transaction with the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern and Yet Another View Locator Pattern to provide a sample project. You asked, I listened, and here it is. I’ll walk through how I built the example. Most of the code is taken verbatim from my two…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|Apr 23, 2010

Yet Another MVVM Locator Pattern

Been working with a lot of customers using the MVVM pattern with MEF and the issue always comes up regarding how to marry views to view models. There have a been a few musings on this, from my own ViewModel locator pattern to the even more advanced (and elegant) locator proposed by John Papa et…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|Apr 22, 2010

Transactions with MVVM

One objection to MVVM I often hear is that it doesn’t manage transactions well. I’m not talking about database transactions or “true atomic” transactions, but those short-lived transactions that happen in the UI. With data-binding, updates happen immediately. If I pass a validation, the field is updated. Many applications, however, don’t work this way. While…
Read More→
wintellect-blogs|Apr 20, 2010

Learning Windows Azure platform Resources

I’ve assembled a short list of training materials and utilities that are helpful in learning the Windows Azure platform Windows Azure SDK v1.1 samples http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dba6a576-468d-4ef6-877e-b14e3c865d3a&displaylang=en Windows Azure Samples: C:Program FilesWindows Azure SDKv1.1Samples.zip Windows Azure platform AppFabric v1.0 Code Samples http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=39856A03-1490-4283-908F-C8BF0BFAD8A5&displaylang=en C:Program Files (x86)Windows Azure platform AppFabric SDKV1.0Samples Windows Azure Platform Training Kit http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=413e88f8-5966-4a83-b309-53b7b77edf78&displaylang=en Windows Azure…
Read More→