Azure

We are eager to try out our beer cooling solution and we want to see it in action. We want to visualize our data and keep eye on temperature of cooling beer. Before doing anything more complex like building web or mobile app we make a quick shortcut and bring our data to web, desktop and mobile. This post is about Power BI in action.

When cooling beer we want to store history of temperatures for two reasons. First, it gives us valuable history data for next cooling sessions. As a second thing we can ask measurements when we temporarily lost connection with IoT Hub. In this posting we make some analyzis and then build up database for our beer cooling solution.

As we have now fully functioning thermal solution running on Windows 10 IoT Core it’s time to focus to other components of our beer freezing solution. Our solution measures and calculates metrics of cooling beer but it doesn’t report this data anywhere. In this blog post we will set up Azure IoT Hub for our solution so it starts reporting measurements to Microsoft Azure.

Azure Search is new cloud service by Microsoft. I played with this service a little bit and now it is my favorite toy. In this post I give a quick overview of Azure Search and tell you what it is and what it is not. Also I provide some advice about what tools you need and how to get rid of some problems I faced when using service on CoreCLR.

Something cool to try out – you can run your ASP.NET vNext applications on Windows Azure Websites already today. Yes, you can take Visual Studio 14 CTP, create ASP.NET vNext application and deploy it to cloud. In this posting we will sniff around in Azure Websites to see how ASP.NET vNext applications run there.

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.

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.

Lately I had one weird experience on with running NHibernate on Windows Azure and I think it’s worth to share with you. NHibernate is matured industry-level ORM that is proven itself over years. Although it is not so easy to use as Entity Framework it is still my favorite due to flexibility and wide databases support it provides. In this posting I will show you one important trick with enum mappings. When ignored you may put huge unnecessary load to your database. (more…)

In one of current projects we needed to deploy one Windows Azure site that supports SSL and requires client certificates. Until it’s just about deploying SSL site wo Windows Azure there’s nothing complex but when modifying IIS settings is required then some coding is needed. Here is the example.

When preparing my Sinergija12 code examples I ran into interesting problem. Windows Azure local development storage hangs for about minute and gives StorageServerException stating that there was problem in web server. A little surf in search engines gave me solution.