Book Review: Soft Skills - The software developer's life manual

John Somnez is one of these people that as soon as you get in contact with, you instantly get inspired. I consider myself very fortunate to have come across John. He's a very energetic, enthusiastic and inspiring developer who, at the age of 33, managed to retire from the daily rat-race and turn his energy into something more constructive by contributing back to the community. I first heard of John during a .NetRocks podcast. It was during that same podcast that I also won a competition run by John to promote his excellent marketing course "How to market yourself …[read more]

Server-Side Data in jQuery DataTables with ASP.NET

The jQuery DataTables plugin is my default option whenever I need to display tabular data on a webpage. This is a great jQuery - not to be confused with this jQuery - tool that can be applied to a standard, well-formed HTML table and takes care of all the paging, sorting etc that you may need to apply to any tabular data. It is a very versatile and easy-to-use plugin that can be easily extended with a number of readily available add-ons. It also supports theming, as you would expect from any established jQuery tool. With all of these bells …[read more]

Why you should blog

Today marks almost 2 years since I started blogging. Most of my posts are about my adventures with programming. Sometimes I write about conferences I attend in person and online and oftentimes I blog about new products and tools I come across. It has been an exciting 2 years and my blog has grown from 0 to about 75 posts. This is almost a post every 2 weeks, which is not too bad. Admittedly, it could be better. Before I go on to explain why you should have a blog and why it is important to write regularly please note …[read more]

Learn how to harness the power of Azure Virtual Machine Extensions

Do you use Microsoft Azure? Do you have an Azure account? Did you know that you can get one for free here? If you are already an Azure account and you are using the Virtual Machine (VM) services, then I you are at the right place, because in this post I will show you how to take your VMs to the next level with help of VM Extensions. VM Extensions are relatively new to Azure. They were announce at the //Build2014 conference and since then there has been a steady growth. Extensions rely on Puppet and Chef. Puppet is a …[read more]

Getting Started With Microsoft Azure - Run your first website for free!

A friend recencly asked me whether he should use Azure for hosting his site and whether it was easy to get started with it. Although I was quick in saying yes, also realised that Azure is still a bit confusing, especially if you're new to the whole "cloud" idea or never used hosting services before. In this post, I will try to debunk some of these fears and show you how easy it is to get started with Azure. We will treat it as an "Azure for Dummies" post and take it really slow in order …[read more]

Introduction to ConfigR, the solution to your application configuration problems.

Are you still using XML files to store your application settings? Are you still placing your website properties in the web.config? Have you developed a nifty, cool, special library to manage XML files full of configuration properties? Do you, like me, find XML extremelly annoying even with all the new APIs such as LINQToXml? Sureley there must be something better out there? Well look no more, because I have the solution! Let me introduce you to ConfigR, the excellent little tool written by Adam Ralph. What is ConfigR you may ask? As Adam elegantly pitches it: ConfigR allows you …[read more]

A brief introduction to MiniBlog

Ah, the joys of blogging. Blogging in our industry is vital and, thankfully, these days there are many tools and frameworks that can help us with this task: Wordpress Ghost Github Pages Blogger The above are some of the most known ones. Most of them can host your blog for you ("on the cloud") and some allow you to deploy the blog engine to your own servers. My preference is to own both the engine and content. The important thing, however, is that blogging is easy! On the other hand, as easy as it is to get started, …[read more]

TechEd 2014 Europe Keynote Recap - What is new?

Are you following the announcements at TechEd 2014? Unfortunately I have been unable to attend in person this year due to a new family member, but I'm still following and watching the sessions at TechEd live thanks to Channel9. Tuesday (Oct 28 2014) was the first day of the conference, so things kicked off with the Keynote. The keynote recording is already available over on Channel9. However, if you don't want to sit through 3 hours of talking, here is a quick recap of the major announcements: Windows 10 New features in Windows 10 were announced for standard users, power-users …[read more]