binoot!

Running Azure Web Role locally

binu — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:54:28 +0000

There are a lot of good blogs explaining how to setup your Azure projects and how to convert your MVC web project (or create a new) to use Windows Azure. As part of this setup (Azure SDK installation), you will install Azure Emulators (Storage, Compute). These emulators are important part of your local development since it gives you an idea of how your application will behave once hosted in Azure Cloud platform.

You have a choice of running your MVC application and debugging in local (Click on MVC project, hit F5) or you could run and debug your Web Role project associated with your MVC project (Click on Azure Deployment Project that has the Web Role and hit F5)

If you have a setup like me, i.e., I am running a VM on my Mac Book Pro to host Windows 7 to do my Visual Studio work, and I have a named SQL Server instance, you might run into following error when you run your Web Role locally

Windows Azure Tools: Failed to initialize Windows Azure storage emulator. Unable to start Development Storage. Failed to start Storage Emulator: the SQL Server instance ‘localhost\SQLExpress’ could not be found. Please configure the SQL Server instance for Storage Emulator using the ‘DSInit’ utility in the Windows Azure SDK.

Ok, this was a descriptive enough error message, and I promptly ran my Azure Command line and ran DSInit. That ended up giving me following error message.

If you had a default instance of SQL Server running, then I think running DSInit without any command line options would have worked, a quick web search gave me all the options that DSInit supported (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg433005.aspx).

With this new found information, I changed my command to:

DSInit /server:WIN-F3VL38TDD1B\MACSQL

Voila, it ran successfully and created the local database it required to run the emulator.

Now that I had my local storage emulator running successfully, I was able to hit F5 to debug and run the web role locally.

More Azure exploration ahead…tune in soon.

Cheers!

Binu

2011 in review

binu — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:20:16 +0000

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 34,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 13 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

What is new in vNext? ASP.Net 4.5 / MVC 4.0

binu — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 20:39:52 +0000

Learn what is new in ASP.Net 4.5, see this link: http://www.asp.net/vnext/whats-new#_Toc303354480

For ASP.Net MVC 4.0 check out http://www.asp.net/learn/whitepapers/mvc4-release-notes

I am excited about several of these new features, hopeful to start trying out these soon…

binu — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 19:59:47 +0000

With MVC 3, is a useful way to mix your Razor and JavaScript syntax.


@{
 if (ViewBag.Blog != null)
 {

 
 var blogPost = '@ViewBag.Blog.Post';
 $('#wysiwyg').wysiwyg("setContent", blogPost);
 
 }
 }

Very Clever 404 Page ;-)

binu — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:03:33 +0000

I am not political – But I found this Http 404 page to very clever and witty!

http://www.hermancain.com/404

Cheers!

jQuery Info Resource

binu — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:16:56 +0000

I ran into this page, where you can test your jQuery selectors, thought of sharing with y’all.
http://codylindley.com/jqueryselectors/

And while we are talking about jQuery selectors, remember that not all selectors are made equal, some perform real good and some really slow!

Here is some links to good articles on selector performance,

Cheers!
Binu

Usability Presentation

binu — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:49:18 +0000

Few months back I presented “Usability & Agile Development”.

Cheers!

Binoot!

binu — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:42:49 +0000

It’s been a while since I have blogged something here. In fact this year until now, i haven’t blogged anything! Things are going to change and I have decided to combine my personal and programming blog into one…this is like re-branding myself. So here it is..binoot! This will be my all things blog from now on. At work, I have been dealing with lot more than programming for last couple of years, less of programming and more of Agile Team Management. I am planning to write something on that soon…always been interested in Usability aspects of web, that will be another area that I think I will cover here, and of course some .net programming tidbits.

So watch this space, while I make this site a little more interesting!

And I promise I will add some cartoons and caricatures too!

Cheers!

Web.Config changes in Visual Studio 2010

binu — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:43:28 +0000

In Visual Studio 2010, when you add a new project, it hard not to notice couple of things about the web.config files.

1) Web.config file is clean and lean (Read about this in Scott Gu’s blog here)
2) Web.config has 2 files attached to it, Web.Debug.config and Web.Release.config (see image).

Visual Studio 2010 - Solution Explorer

These are new features that I think that are very valuable for the deployment process, In the past I have used manual swaps a lot to manage environment specfic information in the web.config files. This new feature will let you create deployment environment specific (Dev, QA, UAT, Stage, Prod, etc.) Web.config files using simple to write transformations. You can find detailed information on how to do this in this article. (Link)

Happy Programming!

Cheers!

ReSharper 5.0 and Visual Studio 2010

binu — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 19:33:23 +0000

If you were a ReSharper user with Visual Studio 2008 (or 2005 in that case) and you installed Visual Studio 2010 now and want to continue use ReSharper, following is what you do. Naturally since you installed Visual Studio 2010 after your ReSharper install, ReSharper integration will not be there in Visual Studio 2010, and you will need to associate Visual Studio 2010 with ReSharper.

Step1: Run ReSharper installer again.

Step2: At welcome screen of the installer, click on “Change”, this will allow you to change the Visual Studio integration

Step3: Select Visual Studio 2010 from the list and click on install

Step4: Install will run for couple of minutes or more…

and installation is done…

Now open your Visual Studio 2010, ReSharper will ask for license information, enter your user id and license key, and you will notice that ReSharper appears on your menu bar.

Happy Programming!