Archives

Archives / 2015
  • EF7 RC, navigation properties and lazy loading

    Jumping into the brave new world of .NET as open source has been an experience, to say the least. The feedback loop is tight, things change quickly, and it's definitely a different world than the days of big bang releases. I think it's a great thing, but admittedly, it makes the early adoption thing a lot harder. Sometimes I find myself disappointed (as with the deferred release of SignalR 3, for example). Still, the scope of the frameworks and the number of people working on them is impressive, and I look forward to this new world.

  • Beating localization into submission on ASP.NET 5

    While I'm still enthusiastic about ASP.NET 5, there are things that I run into that seem way harder than they should be. Beta software, no docs, I know... I need to keep my expectations in check. Localization is just such a thing. The samples currently in GitHub along side the code lack context, especially relative to what we're all used to.

  • My last big Azure problem: The unexplained CPU spike

    Over the last year and change, I've written a number of posts about the challenges around moving my sites (primarily CoasterBuzz and PointBuzz) to Azure. These are moderately busy sites that can for the most part live in a small websites, er, app service, instance, with SQL Azure S0 for the data, some storage here and there, queues, and some experimental use of search, Redis and what not. I know I've done some complaining, but only because I really want one of the core premises of the cloud, namely for all of the maintenance and backend stuff to be abstracted away, to deliver without me thinking about it. Mostly, it has.

  • One year with sites in Azure

    My sites (CoasterBuzz and PointBuzz) have now been in Azure for about a year. It has been interesting, for sure. From a high altitude perspective, I can tell you that I've saved money when compared to renting a dedicated server, but there have been challenges in terms of reliability.

  • Repositories gone wild

    One of the very beneficial side effects of the rise of MVC in the ASP.NET world is that people started to think a lot more about separating concerns. By association, it brought along more awareness around unit testing, and that was good too. This was also the time that ORM's started to become a little more popular. The .Net world was getting more sophisticated at various levels of skill. That was a good thing.