Tag: Tips and Tricks

Custom Domains the Easy Way in Azure Web Apps

One of the best things about cloud development today is the low cost of entry. With cloud vendors competing to bring customers to their offerings, there are strong incentives to keep prices low, particularly at the entry level. Microsoft’s Azure offerings are no exception. You can get started with Azure Web Apps, whether for hosting a blog or a more full-featured application, for free, if you’re willing to accept the limitations of the free plan.

One of those limitations is that the free offering for Azure App Service does not support the use of custom domains. So any site or app you host using the free plan must use a subdomain of the azurewebsites.net domain, such as myreallycoolsite.azurewebsites.net. For development and testing, or for hosting an API that will only be called programmatically, this is no big deal. But for public facing sites, you’re going to want a custom domain. Read on to learn how easy Microsoft has made that with Azure Web Apps.

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Save Time and Keystrokes with Emmet in Visual Studio Code

It’s been more than 8 years since Jon Udell posted an encouragement of blogging over email entitled “Too busy to Blog? Count your keystrokes” and over 5 years since Scott Hanselman followed up with “Do they deserve the gift of your keystrokes?” Both posts explore the idea of our keystrokes being a limited resource that is better used to contribute to knowledge sources like blogs or wikis that are available to large numbers of people, rather than replying to a much more limited audience via email. In this post, I’ll introduce you to one of my favorite new helpers, Emmet in Visual Studio Code, and show you how it helps me save keystrokes when working with HTML markup. Continue reading Save Time and Keystrokes with Emmet in Visual Studio Code

Top 5 Reasons to Speak at NoVA Code Camp!

…or your local user group, meetup, or code camp.

Becoming a Speaker

As someone who’s been speaking on technical topics since the late 1990s, I can say with great confidence that there are huge benefits to sharing your knowledge at local code camps and user groups. And if you’re in the greater Washington, DC metro area, I want to encourage you to submit a talk for the Northern Virginia Code Camp, which is coming up on April 30th, 2016. Here are 5 reasons to speak you should consider: Continue reading Top 5 Reasons to Speak at NoVA Code Camp!

Multiple Monitors in Remote Desktop with Windows 7 Pro

The Best Laid Plans…

I’ve recently transitioned from working at home to working on-site at a client. The client did a great job of provisioning a nice desktop PC and large dual monitors. But one of the things I missed from my home office was my standing desk. To remedy this, I planned to bring in my laptop, set it up on a stand, and re-purpose one of the two monitors they provided so I could use Remote Desktop to connect to the desktop PC and still enjoy dual monitors…but there was a small wrinkle in my plan.

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Learn You Node with VS Code

Node.js may not be the “new” hotness, but it’s still pretty hot, and getting hotter all the time. Whether you’re a .NET developer who’s still on the fence about JavaScript, or just haven’t gotten around to taking a look at Node, now is a pretty good time to do so, and in this post, I’ll show you a nice combination of tools that make learning Node easy and fun, namely nodeschool.io and the new Visual Studio Code editor.

What is Node.js?

On the off chance that you’ve found your way here, but don’t know what Node.js is, Node.js (sometimes referred to simply as Node) is an execution environment for JavaScript code, based on the V8 JavaScript runtime from Chrome. It’s designed to be fast, lightweight, and efficient. You can use node to write server applications in JavaScript, from real-time chat apps, to web APIs, to full web applications. While Node itself is pretty simple, with a [limited, but want another word] API set, it ships with NPM, the node package manager, which provides a fast and easy way to install packages, which are collections of functionality wrapped up in such a way as to make them easy to add to your Node projects. Node packages are available to facilitate all kinds of applications, including MVC-style routing engines, template engines, unit testing and more.

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Migrating from Orchard CMS to WordPress using Windows Live Writer

OrchardLogo_200x200For the last 4 years or so, I’ve been hosting my blog/site using Orchard CMS. Orchard has been a pretty good platform. It offers a great deal of customization and extensibility points, and for .NET developers it can be a nice place to start for building an application. Unfortunately, whether because of my own customizations or some other reason, I ended up stuck on an older version of Orchard, and despite many hours of trying, could not get the site updated to a newer version. So I decided to move the site to the WordPress platform. Continue reading Migrating from Orchard CMS to WordPress using Windows Live Writer

Sometimes it’s the Simple Things

Hi, my name is Andrew, and I have a problem. I sometimes overthink things…just a bit. If you share that tendency you may, like me, instinctively greet any issue you run into as an opportunity for deep analysis and troubleshooting, which may not always be the place to start.

Overthinking in Action

A case in point. I’ve been working on a project that uses Crystal Reports (yes, plenty of people still use that) in an ASP.NET Web Forms app to generate reports for a non-profit. I was tasked with creating several new reports, which was a pretty straightforward task, and seemed to be going smoothly, when I went to test the PDF version of a given report and the report viewer simply returned a bunch of gobbledygook text in the browser.

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