DotNetKicks.com : Stories kicked by tiernano

Dynamic CSS with Razor (part 2)

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:21:32 GMT

In PART ONE we saw how to create a gradient programmatically in order automate a CSS stylesheet using the Razor engine. We started from a base color in the RGB space and converted it to the HSL space. Given its Lightness we could easily build shades and highlights of the starting color.

Basic Raven DB Indexing and Querying with Lucene

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:39:59 GMT

We've got up and running with Raven DB for our new project, which has been a delight to use from a code perspective, but one of the big gaps for me is figuring out how to do SQL like queries. I'm not too bad at putting a SQL query together as something I do semi-regularly as part of my job, so I thought it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to start pulling some statistics. I was wrong.

Why is RAID So Important for Databases?

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:32:36 GMT

A good server design has no, or very few, single points of failure. One of the most common server component that fails, are disks. So data redundancy becomes essential to recoverability. Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks (RAID) is a disk system that provides better fault-tolerance by making use of redundancy of disk(s).

Running your TeamCity builds from PowerShell for any Git branch

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:46:55 GMT

I love TeamCity and use it since a while to automate my build/release processes. As human we should never do the work a machine can do, we have certainly better and more interesting things to do. The habit I saw in the different projects I worked for is to create new TeamCity builds for the branches you work on. It take quite some work to do, even with templates. So I came with another way of doing it. It is leverage Git, PowerShell and the possibility to run TeamCity builds by "Accessing Server by HTTP"

Debugging Windows Service

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:24:04 GMT

In this post we can see the process of debugging windows services

Lucene.net - Ultra-fast search for MVC or Webforms

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:44:03 GMT

Mikhail T. has put together an article showing how you can integrate the Java-based Apache Lucene project with your .Net based MVC or WebForms sites, giving you ultra-fast and slick search capabilities.

Improve WCF services testability with simple Dependency Injection

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:05:04 GMT

Dependency injection is a great technique to reduce coupling between components and improve testability. Manually injected dependencies are dependencies which are passed manually to an object's constructor. When using WCF we depend on the WCF run time to create new instances of our service class. This solution provides a way to easily control service class instantiation for any type of WCF service

Thread Safe High Performance Capped Queue

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:49:10 GMT

Lately I was busy creating a new infrastructure for our logging system. I work on OpenBook - a website that gets a lot of traffic and involves with many different business processes. I started logging errors, info data and more with the excellent log4net to files, but has the logs got bigger and longer it became almost impossible to track it. We also use several IIS servers behind a load - balancer, and the result is a lot of logs on many different servers.

SQL Server Virtualization Notes

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:22:54 GMT

Virtualization of SQL Server these days are becoming more a reality and common practice. Usually if you mention SQL Server and Virtualization in one sentence people will look at you as if you are a mad man. With this post I would like to talk about a couple of notes you need to consider when you virtualize SQL Server. When using a hypervisor to consolidate your SQL Servers into a virtualization environment you need to think about the impact on CPU, Memory, Storage and Network performance and management.

Going Faster: Sexy numbers and full post-mortem

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:49:20 GMT

In a followup to my article on how not to suck at serving web content, I go over what we did to improve page performance at DotNetKicks and why it worked. Read the first post if you haven't already: http://blogs.dotnetkicks.com/dnk-jump-in/2011/12/21/going-faster-how-not-to-suck-at-serving-web-content/

A few principles for writing blazing fast code in .NET

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:45:33 GMT

Just a few tips to write code that requires higher performance demands

Arachnophobia - Spider, Spider go away, come again another day

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:47:59 GMT

While working on soon-to-be-released projects there has often been a need to make a staging/testing website publicly accessible for client testing. This is a slippery slope if search engine spiders get in and index your site before the rest of the world is meant to see it (it happens more than you'd like to think) - If it happens to be a website you are building for something that the rest of the world shouldn't see yet such as a product/service launch, having it leak too early can often make or break you. They have a word that describes this very fear of spiders - it's called Arachnophobia.

Visual Studio Achievements, now a reality!

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:13:24 GMT

Follow up to last year's comic story on Visual Studio having game-like achievements.

10 Things ASP.NET Developers Should Know About Web.config Inheritance

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 03:16:05 GMT

Ten things you should know about Web.config inheritance and overrides that will simplify some configuration challenges and help with debugging. Bet there are some you didn't know about!

What's new in WCF 4.5? Improved streaming in IIS hosting

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 16:00:53 GMT

What's new in WCF 4.5? Improved streaming in IIS hosting As promised in my previous post, I'm continuing my mission to inform you of new changes in WCF 4.5. If you've ever tried creating a WCF service that uses streamed requests (for example a file upload service) and host it in IIS, you may have noticed a strange behavior in your WCF service - it would seem that WCF is late in receiving the request, as if it was entirely loaded into the memory, and then passed to WCF. So is it streamed? or is it actually buffered? well, it's both. This is the ninth post in the WCF 4.5 series. This post continues the previous posts on web-hosting features, and this time it is about the improved streaming capabilities of WCF 4.5 when it is hosted in IIS.

MVC Asynchronous Controller : The Basics

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:43:37 GMT

When I first saw the Asynchronous Controllers introduced in MVC 2, I couldn't wait to start playing around. I thought that it would be a really easy to get up and running with a simple example, but after searching online for a few working examples - pretty much all of them used an event based pattern that wasn't easy to understand. In this blog post I am going to run through a really simple example that will show you the basics of Asynchronous Controllers, and show you how easy they really are.

Using Quartz.Net to Create Scheduled Tasks

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:22:27 GMT

Quartz.Net is a full-featured, open source job scheduling system. Basically this system allows an asp.net web application to schedule and run background jobs. This makes it much simpler for us developers by making it so that we do not have to have a windows service running on the server as well.

ASP.NET MVC 3 Real Time Collaborative Apps with SignalR

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:53:27 GMT

In this article, we'll create a simple blog app using ASP.NET MVC 3 and SignalR, that will allow multiple collaborators to review the same article in real-time

NoSQL MongoDb Enterprise Design with C# .NET, the Repository Pattern

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:12:26 GMT

Learn how to use a NoSQL MongoDb database to create a simple .NET application for displaying Dragons. Our architecture will utilize the repository pattern, combined with a global database context provider. We'll create a 3-tier system for accessing the Dragons, creating, updating, and deleting.

C# 5.0 Async explaned as simple as possible

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:32:26 GMT

In my own clear style, async programming explained

How To Build a Modern Website in 2011

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:10:43 GMT

Over the past 12 months I've been on a self-imposed quest for knowledge. We're at a changing - almost revolutionary - point with the web as I (start) writing this on November 1st, 2011. Here's why

ASP.NET session hijacking with Google and ELMAH

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:17:10 GMT

ELMAH is one those libraries which is both beautiful in its simplicity yet powerful in what it allows you to do. Combine the power of ELMAH with the convenience of NuGet and you can be up and running with absolutely invaluable error logging and handling in literally a couple of minutes. Yet, as the old adage goes, with great power comes great responsibility and if you're not responsible with how you implement ELMAH, you're also only a couple of minutes away from making session hijacking of your ASP.NET app - and many other exploits - very, very easy.

Having Fun with a Console Application

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:50:26 GMT

Messing around with basic console graphics.

Essential guide to ASP.NET MVC3 performance

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:16:43 GMT

The .NET CLR can give your web application a significant performance boost compared to other platforms such as PHP due to it's compiled nature. Not only does your .NET code perform better because it's more low-level, it also comes with good support for parallel programming. This guide will not explain the basics of a responsive and fast web application by talking about CSS minifying, sprites, content delivery networks, etc. Instead this guide will be an essential guide for making sure you don't miss any features that can enhance the performance of your ASP.NET MVC3 application.

Microsoft to enable Linux on its Windows Azure cloud in 2012

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:23:10 GMT

Microsoft to offer persistent VMs and Linux hosting on Azure this year.