Create a WCF Data Service (OData) to share an Azure Table

The Open Data (OData) is a new protocol for querying and updating data. Find in this site a list of sites that are already supporting OData. Windows Azure Table Storage is one of them but to use this endpoint, the storage key is needed. Sharing an Azure Table is easy using WCF Data Service and Azure [...]

Rough Cut Editor (RCE) and IIS Transform Manager: Best Friends

A month ago, Microsoft published the alpha version of the IIS Transform Manager. The Transform Manager provides simple integrated video encoding and batch conversion of video files to the IIS Smooth Streaming format.  It does this quite nicely, as it provides an extensible platform for scheduling and running multiple tasks in sequence on an IIS [...]

Windows Azure Storage: TDD and mocks

During the last months, we have been working on a sample application for the Windows Azure Architecture Guide. One of the challenges we want to face in the development side is to develop the majority of the sample application following TDD practices. This post shows how we mocked-up Azure Storage Tables by using a IAzureTable interface. Similar [...]

Quick Tip: Accurate Seeks on the Smooth Streaming Media Element (SSME)

Yesterday, I exchanged some emails with my friend Chandler from iStreamPlanet. He was having some trouble with the Smooth Streaming Media Element (SSME). He described the issue as: When I set the position on the Smooth Streaming Media Element, the displayed frame is not updated. I can only get the frame displayed to update when playback is [...]

Consumer Identities for Business transactions

A year ago I wrote a blog post about how to use the Windows Identity Foundation with OpenID. Essentially the idea was writing an STS that can speak both protocol WS-Federation and OpenID, so your apps can keep using WIF as the claims framework, no matter what your Identity Provider is. WS-Fed == enterprise, OpenID [...]

Software Architecture Course for Students - Index

Here is the first chapter of this course, intended to explain the core concepts of Software Architecture to high-school/first years students.

Prism Training Kit: Beta Version Available

Over the last week, Matias and I took some time to work on something a Prism Training Kit. We figured out that was one of the things that would be useful to learn Prism. Therefore, we decided to create a set of Hands on Labs that cover the basic topics addressed by Prism (if you [...]

Prism 4.0 Drop 3 released

The third drop of Prism 4.0 (formally known as the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight) has been released and can be found in Codeplex. We are early in the process of creating Prism 4.0 so we really need your feedback on the drop and on what you want for this version of prism. The assets [...]

Software Architecture for Students (Spanish)

In the next weeks, I’ll be publishing  an small (introductory) course in the new Microsoft Student Cells website about Software Architecture. The course will cover the basics of Software Architecture, and it can may be complemented with live meeting sessions (always in spanish language). Microsoft Cells Site (PuertaDeEnlace.Net) Arquitectos de Software de América Latina (ASLA)

“That solution doesn’t scale”

I posted yesterday about a poor man’s distributed caching solution using Windows Azure queues and ASP.NET cache. I’ve got an interesting comment in twitter: My short answer is that there aren’t solutions that scale or doesn’t scale. The scalability is a quality attribute of a system and it varies depending on the context. A [...]

Poor man’s memcached for Windows Azure

UPDATE: After reading this post you can read about the scalability of this solution, posted based on some comments. Part of working with the Windows Azure guidance team is not only about writing but it’s also about helping customers and understanding real life problems. This help us validate and enrich the content. One of the customers [...]

Associating a URL Protocol to your Application

This is something done by WebPI (wpi://) and many p2p apps that you can do with your own application also: associate a URL protocol to your application. Let’s say you want to use URLs beginning with myapp:// to launch your own application and perform a certain task (i.e. download a file and open it). This [...]

Windows Azure Performance Gotchas #1, raising the throughput reducing the headache

Lately, we’ve been working on a Windows Azure Project with huge load, really high peaks. During the project we got the following “gotcha moments” that I’ll be trying to summarize throughout the post and thru a series of post I expect to write. If you are using WCF, you must tweak it On iServiceOriented.com, there was this [...]