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Automated Build and Deployment with Windows Azure SDK 1.6

A few months ago I posted on how to automate deployment of Windows Azure projects using MSBuild. While the approach documented in that post continues to work, Windows Azure SDK 1.6 has introduced some...

Updates to Windows Azure MSBuild post for SDK 1.5

Just a quick note that I’ve edited my previous post Using MSBuild to deploy to multiple Windows Azure environments based on some changes to the platform that have come with the Windows Azure SDK...

Using Service Bus Topics and Subscriptions with WCF

Introduction In my last post, I showed how to use Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus Queues with WCF. Service Bus Queues provide a great mechanism for asynchronous communication between between two ...

Using Service Bus Queues with WCF

In 2008 I posted a series of blog articles about how to use MSMQ, WCF and IIS together. I chose to use this architecture as it combined the scalability and resiliency benefits of durable asynchronous ...

Environments for Windows Azure development

What is an Environment? Anyone who has worked on a software development project will be familiar with the concept of an environment. Simply put, an environment is a set of infrastructure that you can...

Hosting Services with WAS and IIS on Windows Azure

Many developers choose to use service oriented techniques to break large systems into smaller, loosely coupled services. Frequently, each service will be hosted on a different machine and use WS-* pro...

Creating multi-series Bubble Charts in Excel

Bubble Charts are a great way to visualise data that has three numerical values for each point. Two of the values are plotted on the X and Y axis, while the other is represented via the diameter of th...

Using MSBuild to deploy to multiple Windows Azure environments

Introduction If youve used the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio, youll know how easy it is to publish your applications to Windows Azure straight from Visual Studio with just a couple of clicks....

Adding a Windows Firewall rule using PowerShell

PowerShell is an amazing technology which Id love to learn to use properly some day. Unfortunately Im still at the stage where I dont really know much about it, but from time to time I need to use it ...

The role of an architect in an agile team

I’ve just come back from Microsoft’s Tech.Ed conferences in Australia and New Zealand, where I presented a session called The role of an architect in an agile team. Thanks to everybody who...

Get logging in Windows Azure with Enterprise Library

Hi again – yes I know it’s been a while. Recently I’ve started a new role in Microsoft which involves helping customers deploy applications on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud ...

Suggested Resources Visual Studio Plug-In

Todays post is a quick plug for a new tool developed by my friend Olaf Conijn, who (amongst other things) has been a developer on several versions of Enterprise Library. His new tool is called Suggest...

What do you think of the EntLib 5.0 configuration tool?

Hello again! Its been a while, I know. Ive been busy over the last few months with several projects, some of them software related, and one of them human my son Jesse was born on 26 February 2010. Fu...

See you at TechEd Australia and New Zealand

Just a quick post for anyone attending TechEd Australia and/or New Zealand, in the first couple of weeks of September 2009. Ill be doing two presentations, so please stop by and say hello (and maybe e...

Beware the perils of local time

Where were you at 2:15am (Sydney time) on 5 April 2009? Other than the fact that your memory is pretty hazy now that a few weeks have passed, youd expect there to be an unambiguous answer to that ques...

Protecting against XML Entity Expansion attacks

One of the critical responsibilities of every developer and architect is to understand, and know how to prevent, as many kinds of security attacks as possible. While there are many types of attacks an...

Your guided tour of the Microsoft Solutions Development Centre

When I decided to leave the patterns & practices team to move back to Australia, one of my big concerns was whether I would be able to work on teams with the quality and dedication I experienced o...

What do you want to see in EntLib 5.0?

As youve probably noticed, Ive been on a bit of a blogging vacation of late. Rest assured that Im still here and Ill try to get some good posts happening soon. But for now I just wanted to draw your a...

Enterprise Library 5.0 kick-off! Spend your $100 wisely!

Its that time again the kick-off for the next major release of Enterprise Library. I cant believe were already up to version 5.0 it doesnt seem like that long ago when we were planning version 1.0. ...

Just Released: Validation Application Block Hands-On Lab

Reposting Grigoris announcement in case you missed it: Heres a gift for the New Years. We have produced a new hands-on lab on validation with Enterprise Library. It contains 13 exercises that walk...

The Joy of Code Reviews

As I mentioned in my recent post about how my team does agile, one of the core ingredients of our process is that nobody is allowed to check in without having gone through a code review and a test rev...

StickyNotes for Visual Studio

Pablo Galiano, one of my friends and colleagues from my patterns & practices days, has just released a very cool extension for Visual Studio 2008 called StickyNotes. As the name suggests, it allow...

How my team does agile

As you know, Im a big fan of agile software development. But what exactly does agile mean? If you ask a room full of software engineers that question, youre sure to get as many different answers as th...

Windows Live finally makes sense

Those who have followed my blog for a while should know that Im not in the habit of using this space to blindly promote Microsoft products although if I find something genuinely cool or useful Ive be...

Constructors and Inheritance Why is this still so painful?

Recently my team discovered a limitation in the RelativeDateTimeValidator that ships with the Enterprise Library Validation Application Block. This validator is used to check if a DateTime object occu...

Application Architecture for .NET v2 - This time for real!

Those of you who have been paying attention may have remembered a post I did over a year ago announcing the p&p team's plans to update the excellent but now very dated Application Architecture for...

My Clean Image Installation List

Today I rebuilt my work laptop for the first time in about 15 months. It was actually running fairly well in most regards, but I'm currently in a gap between projects so I thought it was a good time t...

MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice (Part 3)

Previously, in MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice: In Part 1, we built a client and IIS-hosted service application and got them communicating over MSMQ using WCF's NetMsmqBinding. In Part 2...

MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice (Part 2)

Welcome back! In Part 1 of this tale, we'd successfully configured a WCF client and an IIS-hosted service to communicate via MSMQ on the same machine. But we're only half done. As you may recall, our ...

MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice (Part 1)

A few weeks ago I posted an article describing how my current team built a publish/subscribe message bus using WCF and MSMQ. At that time we had only deployed the application in a single-server test e...

Building a Pub/Sub Message Bus with WCF and MSMQ

In recent years there has been a lot of talk about event-driven architecture as a technique to build more scalable and maintainable systems. I've found this to be a very interesting pattern that makes...

Enterprise Library 4.0 - Get it while it's hot!

It's almost exactly a year since I handed in the keys to the Enterprise Library bus, but I'm still as excited as ever about the release of a new version. The team has just released Enterprise Library ...

Thoughts on being a Solution Architect

About a year ago I put together a post called Thoughts On Product Management, containing some random musings about my role at the time. The big reason I put together this post was because so few peopl...

Enterprise Library 4.0 Community Technology Preview

From Grigori: We are pleased to announce the release of the EntLib 4.0 March 2008 CTP and invite your feedback. This release has been adapted to work with WMI version 2.0 and version 3.5 of the .NET ...

Cool New Stuff on CodePlex

In the last few weeks there have been a number of interesting new projects added to CodePlex that you may want to check out. Resource Application Block Stephen Phillips has just checked in a complete ...

Polymorphism and the Validation Application Block

The Validation Application Block is a useful piece of technology, but unfortunately it doesn't get along too well with that slippery character called Polymorphism. This is because you need to tell the...

Why your customers will love agile (even if they think they hate it)

Project management methodology has never been a particularly sexy topic. While it's always been necessary to employ some kind of process to guide any non-trivial software development project, in my ex...

Gosh! GAT/GAX is Golden!

Hot off the presses: the February 2008 release of the Guidance Automation Toolkit and Guidance Automation Extensions is now available. In addition to a number of new features, it's great to see that G...

Unity + EntLib = ?

If you've been following Grigori Melnik's blog, you'll know a bit about Unity, the new Dependency Injection container that's coming in Enterprise Library 4.0. Unfortunately I won't be able to make it ...

Unity Workshop in Redmond

In case you missed it, the "Dependency Injection Application Block" promised for Enterprise Library 4.0 is now called "Unity". (As an aside, I find it quite interesting how Microsoft's product nam...

A Follow-up on PIAB+WCF Integration

Last month I posted an entry describing how to invoke the Policy Injection Application Block at WCF service boundaries by using custom WCF behaviours. Since then I've discovered a couple of new thing...

Enterprise Library 4.0 Plan Published!

Happy New Year to you all! The Enterprise Library team has started the new year with a bang by publishing their v4.0 product backlog onto CodePlex. As announced previously, the big ticket item is a ne...

Prioritising Validation Results using VAB ASP.NET Integration

One of the many cool features of the Validation Application Block is the simple integration into ASP.NET web applications. By using the PropertyProxyValidator (PPV), you can associate input controls w...

Dependency Injection coming in EntLib v4

Just a quick note in case you missed Grigori's announcement on the patterns & practices team's plan to focus on Dependency Injection in the upcoming release of Enterprise Library, now apparently k...

Invoking the Policy Injection Application Block at WCF Service Boundaries

Back when we originally designed the Policy Injection Application Block for Enterprise Library 3.0, we made a conscious decision not to target the block at WCF service boundaries. This wasn't because ...

Code Generators: Can't live with them, can't live without them

I'm still not sure what I think about code generators. This may sound strange, coming from someone who has spent much of the last few years working on and talking up software factories, of which code ...

Coming this Spring: Writing for a global audience

A lot (but probably still not nearly enough) time is often spent discussing and testing for internationalisation of software. This is of course a very important consideration for anyone building softw...

What do you want to see in EntLib vNext?

Grigori has finally broken the silence on the patterns & practices team's plans for Enterprise Library with this short post on the Codeplex community: Yes, we are planning a release of EntLib for...

The Repository Factory - Try It, Use It, Contribute!

This news isn't exactly hot of the presses, but it probably flew under the radar for many of you so I thought it was worth a blog post. The first official release of the Repository Factory is now avai...

EntLib Contrib September 2007 Release

In keeping with the p&p team's tradition of naming a release after the month that's just finished, the September 2007 release of EntLib Contrib is now available! EntLib Contrib is the community-dr...

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