Archives
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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).
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Today's ideal developer
Scott Hanselman wrote a short blog post about developers vs. Googlers, but I really love where that inspired Rick Strahl to go. Having been in a lot of positions to hire people over the years, I think Rick really goes in depth with regard to skills, career development and the market reality of what we need out of people.
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When the Google beats on your SignalR
Around the end of April, I put v11 of POP Forums into production on CoasterBuzz. Probably the biggest feature of that release was all of the new real-time stuff in the forum, with new posts appearing before your eyes and in the topic lists and such. This was all enabled in part by SignalR, the framework that allows for bidirectional communication between the browser and the server over an open connection (or simulated open connection, depending on the browser).
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Everyone else is doing it (incorrectly)!
[This is actually a repost from my personal blog, but I think the technical audience might “dig” it as well.]
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Lessons from live blogging with Azure (nothing bad happened)
I wrote previously about how I built a "live blog" app in Azure, so we could use it for PointBuzz during last week's festivities at Cedar Point. Not surprisingly, it worked just fine. As I expected, the whole thing was kind of overkill. Sweet, over-provisioned overkill.
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Building for Web scale is a different skill
There are a lot of things that one can find satisfying about building stuff for the Web. For a lot of people, it's probably just the act of building something cool, pretty and useful. These are certainly things to strive for, but for me, the interesting thing has always been to build something that can scale.
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Building a live blog app in Windows Azure
If you're a technology nerd, then you've probably seen one technology news site or another do a "live blog" at some product announcement. This is basically a page on the Web where text and photo updates stream into the page as you sit there and soak it in. I don't remember which year these started to appear, but you may recall how frequently they failed. The traffic would overwhelm the site, and down it would go.
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One interface to rule them all
I'm not shy about telling people that I'm not much of a computer science kind of guy. It's not that I don't respect computer science or understand it, I'm just not one to get academic over it to the point of not building anything. And while I can't always remember what the hell SOLID stands for, I do remember that the "I" stands for the "interface segregation principle." It says, "Thou shalt not force everything to use one interface, because specific interfaces are better."
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POP Forums v11 for ASP.NET MVC posted, with SingalR goodness
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POP Forums v11 Beta for MVC posted on CodePlex
I won’t repost all of the changes here, but this is the version of the app that gets all real-time and stuff (thank you, SignalR!). I also spent some time refining the UI. You can get these naughty bits, and the overall change log, here:
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The burden of hiring software developers
(I wrote this for my personal blog, but it’s obviously an important topic here.)
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SignalR really changes everything
I think I started to mess with HTML in 1995, and the Internets became the focus of my profession in 1999. The fun thing about this is that I’ve watched the tools and development technology evolve most of the way, and it has been an awesome ride.