Posts

Previously I had written about how to setup Cassandra as a database on your Windows machine. As I was diving in deeper to learn more about the subject, I realized that .NET lacks a critical type to Cassandra, for column comparison and sorting, called TimeUUIDType. TimeUUIDType is a Version 1 UUID used in the CompareWith attribute of the storage config file. A Version 1 UUID is defined as the following: Conceptually, the original (version 1) generation scheme for UUIDs was to concatenate the UUID version with the MAC address of the computer that is generating the UUID, and with the number of 100-nanosecond intervals since the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in the West. In practice, the actual algorithm is more complicated. This scheme has been criticized in that it is not sufficiently “opaque”; it reveals both the identity of the computer that generated the UUID and the time at which it did so. ...

After beta testing a feature that I announced last year to a lot of fan fair. I have finally wrapped up the testing phase and I am ready to release my new super secret project on the world. Let me know your thoughts: Click Here To View New Feature

Recently I have been exploring the NoSQL options for .NET and specifically a database called Cassandra. In case you haven’t heard of Cassandra before, it is a decentralized, fault-tolerant, elastic database designed by Facebook for high availability. As Wikipedia describes it: Cassandra is an open source distributed database management system. It is an Apache Software Foundation top-level project, as of February 17, 2010, designed to handle very large amounts of data spread out across many commodity servers while providing a highly available service with no single point of failure. It is a NoSQL solution that was initially developed by Facebook and powers their Inbox Search feature. Jeff Hammerbacher, who led the Facebook Data team at the time, has described Cassandra as a BigTable data model running on an Amazon Dynamo-like infrastructure. ...

Since writing yesterday’s post about what annoys me regarding the limited insight most web developers have in regards to Routing vs Rewriting. It occurred to me that I might be able to make the difference and benefits between the two more clear, after remembering a post Phil Haack wrote about Editable MVC Routes. By taking my companies already production ready URL Rewriter that supports runtime-editing of rewriter rules and adding support for routes. I would essentially be merging together Routing and Rewriting in the same configuration, and making the routes just as editable as the rewriter rules. By doing this, my hope is that it should illustrate the benefits of having both a Rewriter as well as a Router in your web arsenal, because you can play with both in real time and start to connect in your mind when one is more useful than the other. ...

As most of you are probably aware, if you read my blog enough, I am the sole developer of a URL Rewriter that I have tried to keep extensible and relevant to the problems that modern web developers face when exposing their applications to the web, by allowing them to have more control over the only interface that matters on the web … THE URL. The benefits of a URL Rewriter have been explained many times, by many people, so I am not going to add just another rant to the web about keeping your URL’s clean for the search engines. I will just leave you with Jeff’s explanation of why you shouldn’t ignore the URL. ...

As I announced earlier in the month, Philly Code Camp was searching for qualified speakers for many different topics surrounding .NET specifically .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. Now, in this post, I have the pleasure to announce to you that we are going to be looking for sponsors for Philly Code Camp. If you have a product that you would like to present to over 500 targeted, attentive, and actively engaged .NET developers, please contact us today. ...

Philly.NET is looking for speakers to fill 60 sessions for Code Camp 2010.1. We have exciting news this year. 10 of the sessions will be broadcast live by the MSDN team in Redmond and posted to Channel 9. We need to set the agenda by March 12 so please get your submissions posted in the coming days. Enter your session details here… Details Our first 2010 Code Camp will be held at the DeVry University campus in Fort Washington, PA on Saturday, April 10 from 8:30-5:00. Please register at EventBrite. Detailed directions are on the DeVry web site. ...

With the recent release of Visual Studio 2010 RC, I decided to take Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 RC for a spin also. I was really interested in seeing what new and great features are being offered, because there has been a lot of buzz around this release of TFS. After installing Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate on my laptop and setting up TFS 2010 as a new install, which was way easier than I remember 2005 being, I connected up VS 2010 and TFS 2010 with out a problem. ...

If you know what these numbers mean, you known why I am typing them today. If you don’t then go here to find out.

Today I just noticed that my blog’s CDN (Google AppEngine) was failing to resolve. After a little research I realized that WebSense, a corporate web filtering software and scourge of intranet users that need to be productive, had decided that the IP Address range that Google AppEngine uses should be completely blocked. And because most corporate IT departments just blindly apply the WebSense rules that they are sent, with out first verifying that they make sense; my blog is completely without JavaScript and CSS on these corporate networks. ...