Alan Dean › Comments

Use Pingtest.net to determine the quality of your broadband Internet connection. Streaming media, voice, video communications, and online gaming require more than just raw speed. Test your connection now to get your Pingtest.net rating and share the result with others! - Alan Dean

I’ve just kicked off a new MVC Framework application today. I’ve been considering moving to more behaviour based testing for a while now and I’ve been intrigued by Aaron Jensen’s descriptions of his MSpec (Machine Specifications) framework. So this afternoon I downloaded the build from here and got coding (just click ‘login as guest’ at the bottom). - Alan Dean

The slides from the day-long tutorial, REST in Practice, that Jim Webber and I gave at QCon San Francisco can be found here. - Alan Dean

If you want to use the ASP.NET Providers (membership, role, personalization, profile, web event provider) with SQL Azure, you'll need to use the the following scripts or aspnet-regAzure.exe tool to setup the database - Alan Dean

I have been working with ASP .NET MVC and I use the Moq mocking library to help test the code I write. Often in ASP MVC anonymous objects are passed around as function arguments. This is especially common in calls to RouteUrl. Since I want to be able to test this and verify that it is called correctly I wrote a handy extension method to make it easier called AsMatch. - Alan Dean

With all the visualization options out there, it can be hard to figure out what graph or chart suits your data best. This is a guide to make your decision easier for one particular type of data: proportions. Maybe you want to show poll results or the types of crime over time, or maybe you're interested in a single percentage. Here's how you can show it. - Alan Dean

One of the frustrating aspects of working with CSS (one of many, actually) is the amount of duplication in a .css file. .less help to keep your CSS files DRY using 4 constructs - Alan Dean

With Windows Azure Diagnostics, applications can perform logging using the familiar .Net Trace() APIs. In this post we will create a new Cloud Service project using and look at the wiring that is done automatically to make Windows Azure Diagnostics, and specifically simple logging, work. - Alan Dean

And finally, one last PDC keynote announcement from the first day was the beta release of ASP.NET MVC 2. MVC is a model-view-controller framework on top of the existing ASP.NET runtime that separates display and application logic as well as makes test-driven development of ASP.NET applications easier. MVC could be used with a variety of types of web applications but is frequently associated with REST applications. - Alan Dean

Unit Testing of Dates is often talked about problem – consider that one can’t depend on an absolute date in the test case. If the test passes, then the test will be considered successful only for the respective date. Instead, the standard advice is to use dependency injection (Adam Sroka, BigVisible): - Alan Dean

Before I get old and forget this little trick I thought I’d blog it. I’m sure someone else out here on the Internets can use it as well. Especially if you are hosting your database on a hosting company that charges you by the MB and you want to know how much space you are taking up. EXEC sp_MSforeachtable @command1="EXEC sp_spaceused '?'" - Alan Dean

Let your users bring LinkedIn profiles and networks with them to your site or application. You gain better awareness of your users, increase productive engagement, and gain reach through the 52 million professionals on LinkedIn. - Alan Dean

Last week at PDC 2009, we announced several new features for Windows Azure Storage. Windows Azure Storage enables applications to store and manipulate large objects and files in the cloud via Blobs, store and manipulate service state via Tables, and provide reliable delivery of messages using Queues. In addition, we also announced two new features coming soon to storage - Alan Dean

Mozilla's User Interface chief Aza Raskin just put forward some interesting thoughts on what Identity in the Browser could look like for Firefox. As one of the Knights in search of the Golden Holy Grail of distributed Social Networking, he believes to have found it in giving the browser more control of the user's identity. - Alan Dean

Brian Aker gave this 10 minute lightning talk on NoSQL at the Nov 2009 OpenSQLCamp in Portland, Oregon. It's incredibly funny, probably because there's a lot of truth to what he's saying. - Alan Dean

Most people who read this blog will not find the title of this post a revelation. I know firsthand, however, that this is not the case for many. - Alan Dean

What if we revisit the applicability of the Web, and its abstraction into REST, to the architecture of machine-to-machine distributed systems - to something like our order processing integration? I think we'd quickly arrive at something that looks more like FOREST than, say, AtomPub... - Alan Dean

This is one of my favourite slides from the PDC last week – it comes from the session titled Windows Azure Platform Business Model - Alan Dean

I’m sure this is documented somewhere but as I’ve just run into it I thought I would share. As I’m sure you know, Windows 7 (and IIRC Windows Vista) will generate a backup for you in a VHD format. When I was rebuilding my machine earlier this week, I decided to do a full machine backup and simply mount the resulting VHD afterwards to copy across any files I needed. Simples. - Alan Dean

Microsoft Windows Azure Platform AppFabric is a set of technologies helpful to connect on-premises applications with Azure cloud services and resources and eases interoperability between users belonging to different domains. The main components are the Service Bus and the Access Control Service. - Alan Dean

Getting your SQL Azure Account and creating your first database on the cloud. - Alan Dean

This time we will look at creating a simple jquery pager plugin to use with asp.net mvc project. Please note the intent is to learn the basics of jquery plugin development. The control as such is not recommended for use in production environment. - Alan Dean

Many thought leaders in the agile community have started talking more about software katas - a way of practicing specific exercises until one has them memorized. Over the past several weeks, there has been an increase in blog posts and sites devoted to katas. Robert Martin has gone as far as calling them "performance art". Should you add katas to your software toolkit? - Alan Dean

.less help to keep your CSS files DRY using 4 constructs - Alan Dean

The excellent Matthew Stibbe has published an excellent FREE eBook titled 30 Days to Better Business Writing. A number of years back I attended a course by Matthew on business writing and it was great – very practical and easy to consume stuff – his eBook is much the same. - Alan Dean

Certainly not what I had expected! I turned on tracing to try and understand what was happening… and just as it says in the message, it appears that the UrlRoutingModule has taken the requested URL and re-pointed to UrlRouting.axd. Then the WebDAVModule decides that PUT is not allowed for this URL. - Alan Dean

One of the real problems that pervades all routes to Linked Data value prop. incomprehension stems from the layering of its value pyramid; especially when communicating with -initially detached- end-users. - Alan Dean

Since the markets began to tumble in 2008, governments around the world have spent almost $11 trillion bailing out failing banks and trying to repair the financial system. - Alan Dean

In CSS, pattern matching rules determine which style rules apply to elements in the document tree. These patterns, called selectors, may range from simple element names to rich contextual patterns. If all conditions in the pattern are true for a certain element, the selector matches the element. - Alan Dean

It was CSS Specificity calculations that really opened my eyes. [http://ff.im/73wuu] - MikeAmundsen

The second time you write a piece of complicated code it will work much better than the first time. Especially if there are a few years inbetween and the original code was in production and you had to live with its flaws. Sometimes you have to write it a third or fourth time to really get it right. - Alan Dean