Weekly East Region Roundup: Vol. 4

Here are some resources and blog posts from my fellow Technical Evangelists here in East Region:

Developer

Lots of activity from my developer-focused peers…read the whole list…you won’t regret it.

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Weekly East Region Roundup: Vol. 3

Here are some resources and blog posts from my fellow Technical Evangelists here in East Region:

Developer

Continue reading Weekly East Region Roundup: Vol. 3

My Site’s Fallen, and it Can’t Get Up!

TL:DR

Short version…some extra traffic crashed my blog last week, thanks to my decision to use cheap shared hosting. In response, I moved my blog to Windows Azure Web Sites, where I can easily scale to meet any traffic spikes. Read on for the background, or skip to “Making the Move” for the technical details.

The Background

Cheap hosting. It lures you in with the siren song of saving lots of money. And for a while, perhaps even a long while, it may give you everything you need. But sooner or later, you find out that you get what you pay for.

Continue reading My Site’s Fallen, and it Can’t Get Up!

East Region Roundup

Wanted to share a few posts from my fellow Microsoft Technical evangelists here in East Region, hopefully you’ll find them as interesting and useful as I did:

That’s all I’ve got for today…I’ll post more links from my peers in future roundups. Let me know if you find these valuable!

Pardon my Dust

The Other Shoe…

OK, so I mentioned a few days ago that I updated my blog theme, and as a part of the process of revamping the blog, I also thought it might be a good time to add some better analytics, since the analytics suite used by default at my web host (who shall remain nameless, despite my temptation to call them out publicly) had started throwing 502 errors pretty much all the time.

I decided on the Piwik analytics platform, which was suggested by one of my peers. The good news is that Piwik is pretty straightforward to install, and despite my lack of familiarity with PHP and MySQL (ASP.NET is more my speed, given that I’ve written a few books about it), I was able to get it up and running reasonably quickly.

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Microsoft DevRadio: (Part 7) Using Windows Azure to Build Back-End Services for Windows 8 Apps – Authentication Tips and Tricks

Wrapping up their “Using Windows Azure to Build Back-End Services for Windows 8 apps” series Brian Hitney , Andrew Duthie  and Peter Laudati, as they showoff some useful tips and tricks around authentication for your Windows Azure Mobile Server based apps.

Continue reading Microsoft DevRadio: (Part 7) Using Windows Azure to Build Back-End Services for Windows 8 Apps – Authentication Tips and Tricks

Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: Authentication Tips and Tricks

In previous installments of this series, I’ve shown how you can quickly create REST-based services accessible via HTTP that allow you to easily store and retrieve data in a Windows Store app, using several different approaches including WCF Data Services, ASP.NET Web API, and the new Windows Azure Mobile Services. You can read all of the previous parts of the series here. I recommend reading the intro post and the post on Windows Azure Mobile Services, as well as the most recent installment covering the basics of authentication with mobile services at a minimum, so you’re familiar with the games I’m using to demonstrate the concepts in the series, and with the basics of mobile services.

Continue reading Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: Authentication Tips and Tricks