I had Windows Azure training this week and I tried out how easy or hard it is to get Access Control Service to work with my ASP.NET MVC 3 application. It is easy now but it was not very easy to get there. In this posting I will describe you what I did to get ASP.NET MVC 3 web application to work with Access Control Service (ACS). I will show you also some code you may find useful.

During development it is possible that database schema changes and usually it changes are same sure to come as tax office and death. Later we need to reflect these changes also to live databases and it is not very easy task to do manually. In this posting I will show you how Visual Studio 2010 database tools can help you to update database schema. Visual Studio database projects Suppose you have database project in Visual Studio 2010. Screenshot on right shows you fragment of my example database with couple of tables. Of course, there are also other objects defined like…

One new feature that comes with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta is support for deployment references. Deployment reference means that you can include all necessary DLL-s to deployment package so your application has all assemblies it needs to run with it in deployment package. In this posting I will show you how to use deployment dependencies.

In one of my BI projects I needed to find count of objects in income range. Usual solution with range dimension was useless because range where object belongs changes in time. These ranges depend on calculation that is done over incomes measure so I had really no option to use some classic solution. Thanks to SSAS forums I got my problem solved and here is the solution.

In this posting I will show you how one stupid decision may turn developers life to hell. There is a project where bunch of complex applications exchange data frequently and it is very hard to change something without additional expenses. Well, one analyst thought that string is silver bullet of web services. Read what happened. (more…)

I created web.config transform that changes NHibernate configuration for Windows Azure projects. When building publishing package I get the following warning: "No element in the source document matches '/configuration/hibernate-configuration'" and transformed configuration doesn’t contain expected changes. In this posting I will show you how to solve this problem. (more…)

My previous posting about Windows Azure introduced how to access web role instances using Remote Desktop. In this posting I will show you how your web applications are stored in virtual server where instance is running and how to debug and redeploy your applications quickly. (more…)

My last posting about cloud covered new features of Windows Azure. One of the new features available is Remote Desktop access to Windows Azure role instances. In this posting I will show you how to get connected to Windows Azure web role using Remote Desktop.

Pex and Moles is new testing and code analysis technology that is created by Microsoft Research. Pex is powerful tool that helps you analyze your code, detect error situations and generate parameterized unit tests. In this posting I will give you quick and illustrated overview of Pex. (more…)

I ported views of my ASP.NET MVC application from ASP.NET to Razor. Although Razor is very new it is very promising view engine because of shorter and cleaner syntax. In this posting I will show you same view on ASP.NET and Razor view engine. I like Razor one more but what do you think?