I’ve got lots to say just not enough time

I haven’t really spent anytime blogging in the past few months.  I have a tons of things to say, unfortunately just don’t have enough time at the moment.

I’ve obviously been writing my book on Azure and have loads to blog about regarding.

I’ve also spent time messing around with

• design patterns
• Data Layers
• OR/M’s,
• Caching

I’ve also been looking outside of the Microsoft stack which reaffirms my position of why I’m glad I work with Microsoft.  However it has broadened my horizons and realize there is a lot of cool stuff other folks in other platforms are doing.  Some of it the same, some of it different.

Specifically I was looking at:

• Postgres
• Objective C
• IPhone development

I’m currently looking forward to .NET 4.0 (haven’t really played with it yet as I’ve been focused on the book).  The thing that excites me the most is ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.0.

I’ve also got a big list of things to play with once the first draft of the book is done.

I’m behind on loads of blogging and screencasts (especially with Silverlight).

Anyways I hope to be able to fit in some time soon and catch up with my blog posts.

It’s been a busy time.

If you’re interested in the book.

I’ve finished the first drafts of chapter 1 and chapter 5.  I’m nearly finished my first draft of chapter 4.  My co-author Brian Prince has finished his first draft of chapter 2 and has nearly finished his draft of chapter 3.

All in all we are nearly a third of the way through the book.

Silverlight: (and Azure) Range Http Request Header

So this one is for the Azure team.

Can we have in Windows Azure Blob Storage the ability to pass through as an http request header key x-ms-range as well as range.

Both Silverlight and Flash don't allow the ability to pass the range in the header. I suspect that the NSAPI plug-in is preventing this. This means we can't make us of range downloads (and other functionality such as authorization) unless the Azure teams adds some extra support.

Please make the classes in RestHelpers.cs public

There are a bunch of very cool set of helper classes (resthelpers.cs) in the Windows Azure storageclient library.

If these could be made public rather than internal my life would be so much happier

Blob Scenarios for the Azure in Action book

So I’m currently looking at the Blobs chapter of the “Azure in Action” book that myself and Brian Prince are writing.

In our call with the publisher the other night, our very cool publishing company (Manning) encouraged us to get as much input from folks in the community as possible.  I love this philosophy and I love working with such an enlightened company.

So if there any cool samples that you would love to see done, then please give me a shout.  We do have lots of cool scenarios and samples that I think will be particularly exciting, however I’m keen not to miss the mark on anything.

I hope to post a little bit more on some of the cool stuff in book, pretty soon.

My new Azure Book

So I've just agreed to write a book on Azure for Manning.  The timeline is very aggressive so I'm going to pretty focused on Azure for the next few months.

I'm incredibly pleased and honored to have had my proposal accepted and today is my first day of writing.  Actually, when I say first day of writing, it's more of my first day setting up my environment for writing the book.

Today has so far consisted of:

• Downloading lots of Software
• Clearing up my desk
• Uninstallaing and Installing Software

Anyways I will therefore pretty much exclusively focused on Azure rather than Silverlight for a few months, that's not to say that there is not some synergy in some areas.

I think the next few months will be a lot of fun but a lot of hard work.

The book should be available in all good bookstores (and some of the dodgy ones too) from January.

Anyways, enough waffling and back to some serious work.

Silverlight: Toronto Code Camp Slides + Samples

A big thanks to everyone who came to my session on Silverlight Communication at Toronto Code Camp.

Also a big mega thanks to everyone I met, and everyone involved in the organization.  What a great event.

My slides are available here and my samples are available here

Silverlight: Multiple Http Requests Screencast

It's important to remember that Silverlight is a browser technology and is therefore subject to the limits imposed by the browser.

This is especially true in the networking stack and Silverlight is limited to the number of connections it can make just as the browser is.

I show you this is the case in my latest screencast, Multiple Http Requests in Silverlight

The video is embedded below for you to view also: