Jeff Makes Software
The software musings of Jeff Putz
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The ugly evolution of running a background operation in the context of an ASP.NET app
If you’re one of the two people who has followed my blog for many years, you know that I’ve been going at POP Forums now for over almost 15 years. Publishing it as an open source app has been a big help because it helps me understand how people want to use it, and having it translated to six languages is pretty sweet. Despite this warm and fuzzy group hug, there has been an ugly hack hiding in there for years.
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The indie publisher moving to Azure, part 1: migration
I've been a big fan of cloud-based infrastructure for a long time. I was fortunate enough to be on a small team of developers who built the reputation system for MSDN back in 2010, on Microsoft's Azure platform. Back then, there was a serious learning curve because Azure was barely a product. At the end of the day, we built something that easily could handle millions of transactions per month without sweating, and that was a sweet opportunity. Most people never get to build stuff to that scale.
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POP Forums v12.1.0 released, includes Taiwanese Mandarin translation and bug fixes
This is a point release with bug fixes and a language update. v12.0 was a significant upgrade that includes updates to various packages and use of .NET 4.5.1, as well as MVC 5.
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Reading from a queue in an Azure WebJob
A few months ago, Microsoft introduced something called a WebJob in Azure. It's essentially a "thing" that can run as a background task to do "stuff." The reason this is cool has a lot to do with the way you would do this sort of thing in the pre-cloud days.
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5 Ways to surround yourself with awesome
[Repost from my personal blog.]
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The problem and opportunity with accountants' view on software people
[Note: This is a repost from my personal blog.]
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POP Forums v12 posted, for MVC 5
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Performant: Stop making up words
People need to stop saying "performant." If it's a word at all, it's a noun synonymous with "performer," like an actor. Even if the construct was a real word, it wouldn't indicate whether it's a negative or positive thing. Something can perform well or poorly... this word would only describe that it performs.
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Decoupling OWIN external authentication from ASP.NET Identity
One of the nicest features of the forthcoming release for the ASP.NET Web stack is the inclusion of bits around external authentication. It makes it stupid easy to add login capability through Google, Facebook and such. Coupled to this in the default project templates is a tie to the new ASP.NET Identity, which is a replacement for the old (and frankly crappy) Membership API. This new thing uses Entity Framework and is extensible and neat-o.
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Five things to remember when trying to change a company
One of the recurring things I've seen at companies large and small is that they often have really great people who don't necessarily have the breadth of experience to push processes in the "right" direction. It's happening a lot less in software circles than it used to, in part because people move around so much, and they build big boxes of best (or better) practices. Still, some people will only have experience moving between suboptimal environments, some will have long-term engagements that simply don't expose them to new things, and others will be the kind of stakeholders that by default won't expose them to alternatives (specifically, small company owners).