Posts

First of all we have to say a big thank you to Kerry Street for suggesting the name Seriously Open. It was the best name by far, and I think it nicely condenses what we are trying to portray with our podcast. This is part 1 of a two part interview that we had with the founders of the Glimpse Project, Nik Molnar and Anthony van der Horn. The reason for two podcast releases is that we had such a great conversation with them, it was very tough to find any bad parts of the interview, plus there were essentially two podcasts. One about Glimpse and how it came about, and the other about the industry of open source. In the first podcast, Nik and Anthony talk to us about what it was like to start Glimpse and what it takes to create a successful open source project. ...

A few weeks ago Justin Rusbatch and I produced a first in hopefully a long line of podcasts. The mission statement of our podcast is: To talk about and promote Open Source .NET software development to encourage more participation. It occurred to us while we were talking about the setup of the podcast, such as name, logo, topics, etc, that we should just record it. And make this podcast process as open as possible, just like a real open source project. We decided on the podcast that we had the following outstanding issues for the podcast that we needed pull requests from the community for: ...

It is almost 1 year to the date of when I first posted JSON.NET Strong Naming And NuGet Woes and the NuGet compatibility issues have stabilized This stabilization hasn’t happened through a change from Microsoft, but a change in how publishers of NuGet packages version their libraries. I am writing this post, because even after one year I am getting very passionate comments on one side of the issue or not, people don’t seem to take a middle road on the strong naming issue. If you don’t believe me take a look at the comments. ...

Executify is offering 5 hours of complimentary compute time in honor of the MVP 2013 Summit for running CRON jobs in the cloud. In honor of the Microsoft MVP Summit going on in Seattle right now, we are offering every person who signs up this week, 5 hours of complimentary compute time for running all your CRON jobs. Signup here: http://executify.com/signup After you sign up for your account be sure to checkout our documentation on creating your first CRON job in Executify. ...

When you put open source software out there in the wild there is a mutual understanding that, you are going to see my source code, and probably take some influence from it into your own source code. Maybe sometimes you even take a little more than influence, and copy some lines of code. As an open source developer, we all know this is happening and we all know this is alright, encouraged, and to be expected. ...

One of the questions that comes up often related to Azure Websites is: How are Web Sites priced? To understand how they are priced you have to understand what a Web Site is to Azure. To Azure a Web Site, in its most simple definition, is: A single app pool tied to a single site running in IIS on a virtual machine. Now that we understand this let’s look at the pricing models. Their are three tiers: ...

Yesterday @writeameer posted on twitter a search query, using the new GitHub Code Search, showing that there are a whole lot of users on GitHub that have exposed their management certificates to the public. If you are not aware a management certificate gives you access to administer your Azure account using the Windows Azure SDK tools. Which among other things allows you to publish, change, delete, or basically cause total havoc if it fell in to the wrong hands in your Azure account. ...

As I explained about a month ago when I introduced Executify, I have launched a new website that works a lot like Azure Mobile Service Jobs except that you have more control over the jobs and you can create them in the .NET 4.5 Framework. Since then I have wanted to explain the vision behind it. Executify’s vision is to make cloud code easier and more affordable to develop and execute. Traditionally if you want to execute code in the cloud as a background task, you are left with very few affordable options and you have to pay a monthly fee even if you only use the code a few times a month. ...

As I was getting ready to roll out Executify, I like many of you read Scott Gu’s announcement of Azure Mobile Services providing scheduled jobs, and I was very excited by this announcement. Because it was validation of the service I have been working on since May, and we didn’t seem to step on each others toes. Because we differ in one major way. Azure Mobile Service Jobs are Node.js based Executify Jobs are .NET 4.5 based. So with Executify you don’t have to worry about rewriting all your .NET code to get it running in the cloud. The only thing you need to do is follow the instructions on creating your first app, sit back, and let us do all the scheduling work so that you can focus on what matters to you.

I have a common problem that many developers have. I have small programs or processes that I want executed on a semi-regular basis, but having a whole server set aside for just running these processes seems like overkill. Back in May of this year I was thinking about this problem, because I had a small program that I needed run every day in the morning, but paying the exorbitant prices of a worker role from Azure or AppHarbor seemed like overkill for what I needed. ...