This is one of the examples from my presentation about how to port existing ASP.NET applications to Windows Azure and how to build hybrid applications that work in multiple environments. One of important aspects is file storage that may have multiple implementations for different technical environments. In this posting I will introduce you my idea about generalized file access in web applications.

When building application that works both on WinRT and Window Phone you use Portable Class Libraries (PCL) for shared classes. As there are many application specific things that are not same on different platforms or that are not supported by PCL then you have to make some architectural decisions when creating shared functionalities. In this posting I will focus on persisting data for offline use.

Composite pattern is used in many applications. It helps to build hierarchies of similar objects and handle slices of hierarchy as one. Maybe one of the most popular implementation of this pattern in .NET world is Nodes collection of ASP.NET TreeView control. In this posting I will introduce you composite pattern and provide some implementation tips and samples about it.

Patterns of Enterprise Applications Architecture by Martin Fowler defines Transaction Script pattern that is one of domain logic patterns. In his book Martin Fowler also gives a hint how to use Command Pattern by Gang of Four with Transaction Script. In this posting I will show you some real-life code that makes use of both patterns.

Often developers ask how to add polling, scheduled tasks and so on to ASP.NET web applications. There are many ways how to do it and there are even more reasons why not to do it. Let’s see what are the problems and how to build services for your web applications wherever they run.

Working at home is modern way to work but it is often very challenging too. Over years I have heard different stories from different people about working at home. Some of there people have been successful on it while others went back to office quickly after couple of days of trying. Let’s see what makes working at home challenging and what you need to get your home office running.

In one of my projects I needed configuration transforms similar to web applications. But I needed transforms for command line and Windows service applications to make sure that with release builds some settings are different (by example, web service URL-s and some other settings). I found some materials from web and got everything work well. Here is how to enable web.config transforms for App.config files too.

With Visual Studio 2013 Microsoft also announced online version of Visual Studio for Windows Azure Web Sites. When I first saw SharePoint Napa tools and “powered by Vsiual Studio” slogan then I knew that soon Visual Studio is on cloud. Now Microsoft made their next step. Let’s see what Visual Studio Online with codename “Monaco” is and what you can do with it.

It’s business Tuesday again and this time I will share with you some of my experiences on getting started with successful outsourcing. Outsourcing may sound like something simple or something too troublesome but if you do your home work well then it is possible to succeed and have a cooperation that really makes your life more rich by many aspects you maybe don’t expect at first. Here are some of my experiences.

Time for business Tuesday post. Source code gets rotten, systems get slower, every fix takes a lot of time, estimates for implementing new functionalities get more and more utopic, customers are mad, users are mad, developers are exhausted – struggling with problem like this? Maybe it’s time to use some software rescue services?