Phone 8 & Azure Mobile Services - Toast Notifications

Plugging in notification services for Windows8, using azure was easy. So it should be the same for phone 8 right? Well we were wrong. A day later we got it waxed, but for the life of me i cant figure out why it has to be like this - perhaps i missed something.

Performance on large tables

Data volumes are exploding in every business where a Database or BI professional might find himself. Subsequently data warehouse and decision support systems to keep up with this growth,  and are expected to perform at the same levels while offering even deeper insights into what the data is actually saying.

ToExcel() Extension Method

I recently had a migraine inducing problem where I needed to save an object to an Excel file which, at first glance I thought would be something easy and simple to do... However Nu-Get's Excel libraries are not as abundant as one would think. After doing some research I finally found a library worth its salt, presenting ExtremeML.

ASP.NET Web API <#= Proxy to T4 #>

One of the coolest new features of ASP.NET is Web API, which allows you to build powerful RESTful services exposed over HTTP. HTTP is not just for serving up web pages, but it provides a platform for building APIs that expose services and data. It is simple, flexible, and ubiquitous.

ASP.NET Web API is all about REST HTTP Services. Unlike Web Services, it does not expose an end-point for meta-data exchange. When consuming a HTTP Service, you will have to create your own client-side code that must serve as a proxy for interfacing with the API.

Like any other WCF junkie out there, I've been working with Windows Communication Foundation for quite some time now implementing Web Services. Not only is it flexible and extensible, but it offers inter-operability, multiple message patterns, transactions and  meta-data exchange etc.

The nice thing about WCF is meta-data exchange, which allows you to generate the client-side proxy-code, contracts and classes used for talking to the service. On the other hand, ASP.NET Web API is more light-weight, operates only via HTTP and is used more for serving CRUD-based operations. The latter, however, does not have functionality (yet) for exposing service meta-data. Until now...

Some API "best suggestions"

In today’s modern world of computing it’s a no-brainer to expose some kind of service for the outside world to access your enterprise platform in a controlled fashion. Because of good old legacy systems, we all know that “the perfect world” never exists in any of our clients’ current environment. There are always compatibility issues regarding unified communication between these systems and we end up building all kinds of middle layers to facilitate this interaction. The latter makes it a nightmare to implement any kind of external service.

By building a platform with a collection of loosely coupled components and exposing specific functionality via an unified interface is much better than having all kinds of silo systems talking to each other. We can achieve this by implementing an API over REST (Representational state transfer).

Train yourself, yourself

Getting skilled up is the only way to stay alive in the IT services business, and the best way to do that is hands-on experience.  But it isn’t always easy to explore a new tech or skill if you are not working on a project that it is being used on, apart from time constraints the hardware and software you need may be lacking. So I decided to post a couple of things I`ve come across to help in this regard. And since I`m a SQL guy, I will focus on SQL type things.

I`m not saying formal, class based or course-type training is useless, it is great to introduce you to a new field and get you going quicker, but to become skilled, it will have to be some dirt under the nails stuff.
 

So let`s start at the beginning.

It Sounds Like...

Imagine a world where everyone had the spelling capability of a High School English teacher... Now snap out of it, because that's slightly delusional. Everybody makes the odd spelling mistake, especially when it comes to names, luckily there's a way in SQL to get around this...

Google Doodles Hacked... Well kind of...

When the Google Doodles were initially released during the Olympics I played every single game up to the point of absolute boredom. Then yesterday I was a bit bored and started going on a random Google spree and came across the games again and once again I decided to play them, then I thought... Why not try to automate this...