Yep, I said it. I may have just committed professional suicide and may never be offered a job again and just to make it worth it I’m going to say it again. Windows.8.Is.Not.That.Bad Why such gleaming praise? Have I lost my mind, or been bribed by Microsoft to say nice things about their crappy OS to my two readers (hi guys)? No, but unlike most of those who bash Windows 8 for it’s split perso...

Yep, I said it. I may have just committed professional suicide and may never be offered a job again and just to make it worth it I’m going to say it again. Windows.8.Is.Not.That.Bad Why such gleaming praise? Have I lost my mind, or been bribed by Microsoft to say nice things about their crappy ...

The Monitoring Project When using the traffic manager, it needs an endpoint on your service to hit in order to determine whether or not it is responding. This endpoint must be open (no authentication) and must be a path on your service. As you may have noticed, in the ServiceDefinition, I instructed my Site, Web Service and REST Services to only respond on port 80 or 443 to a specific host head...

The Monitoring Project When using the traffic manager, it needs an endpoint on your service to hit in order to determine whether or not it is responding. This endpoint must be open (no authentication) and must be a path on your service. As you may have noticed, in the ServiceDefinition, I instruc...

You don’t see many netbooks around these days, and for a very good reason. When they were new, their performance ranged from ok to rubbish and they were no good for any real computing. Looking back, they were more like the first stab at the sweet spot between a smart phone and a full-on laptop/desktop, a gap which has been much more successfully filled with tablets in recent years. I have 2 ne...

You don’t see many netbooks around these days, and for a very good reason. When they were new, their performance ranged from ok to rubbish and they were no good for any real computing. Looking back, they were more like the first stab at the sweet spot between a smart phone and a full-on laptop/de...

The time comes to every PC, when it’s reached the end of it’s life and it’s time to be turned off once and for all…Except, when that PC has old software on it with a non-transferable license. In an ideal world this wouldn’t happen, but sometimes it just can’t be helped - either the software is no longer available to buy and transferring to an equivalent would cost a bomb, or you’d have to buy a...

The time comes to every PC, when it’s reached the end of it’s life and it’s time to be turned off once and for all…Except, when that PC has old software on it with a non-transferable license. In an ideal world this wouldn’t happen, but sometimes it just can’t be helped - either the software is no...

As detailed previously, the application consists of three major components: The web site, which predictably is used by everyone. The asmx web service which is used by about 80% of users but performs fairly low-resource actions. The REST service is hit only by external systems importing/retrieving data on a schedule, so it doesn’t need a lot of resources either. Going with the default c...

As detailed previously, the application consists of three major components: The web site, which predictably is used by everyone. The asmx web service which is used by about 80% of users but performs fairly low-resource actions. The REST service is hit only by external systems importing/re...

Ever since my company moved our main management system to Azure, I’ve been slowly working on the ability to monitor the application better in order to find the bottle necks and improve the user experience. To date, I’ve added: Timing on every request so I can query for the slowest pages. Azure Diagnostics StackExchange MiniProfiler to give me some insight in to every request, this has p...

Ever since my company moved our main management system to Azure, I’ve been slowly working on the ability to monitor the application better in order to find the bottle necks and improve the user experience. To date, I’ve added: Timing on every request so I can query for the slowest pages. Az...

The FTP Server is a Windows Server 2012 Extra Small VM, running IIS for FTP and our in-house import/export agent. The FTP server is used to exchange data between the application and external services. The reason for FTP is that the main external service we deal with only has that capability. We hope that external service can eventually switch to using JMS which can then be bridged to Service B...

The FTP Server is a Windows Server 2012 Extra Small VM, running IIS for FTP and our in-house import/export agent. The FTP server is used to exchange data between the application and external services. The reason for FTP is that the main external service we deal with only has that capability. We ...

Azure’s storage system took a turn for the worse this weekend, reportedly because they forgot to renew the SSL certificate for the storage services. Just in the comments section of this article, there are many comments chastising Microsoft for making such an amateur mistake (and rightly so). But there are also many who use this incident as a reason to write off cloud computing as a whole. Let...

Azure’s storage system took a turn for the worse this weekend, reportedly because they forgot to renew the SSL certificate for the storage services. Just in the comments section of this article, there are many comments chastising Microsoft for making such an amateur mistake (and rightly so). But...

In my previous post, I outlined the new architecture. You may have noticed how we no longer have urls containing relative paths. This is because all of the components will be hosted on the same web role and I don’t want to have to deal with complicated startup scripts to configure IIS, therefore I want to try and use the Azure-provided methods as much as possible. When deploying multiple sites ...

In my previous post, I outlined the new architecture. You may have noticed how we no longer have urls containing relative paths. This is because all of the components will be hosted on the same web role and I don’t want to have to deal with complicated startup scripts to configure IIS, therefore ...

In my previous post, I briefly went over the current situation and the rationale for making the move to Microsoft’s Azure service. I also promised details on the current architecture and what I have determined to be the new architecture. I will also attempt to explain how I got from old to new and why I have made the decisions I have made. The old architecture Here’s a quick diagram: As sta...

In my previous post, I briefly went over the current situation and the rationale for making the move to Microsoft’s Azure service. I also promised details on the current architecture and what I have determined to be the new architecture. I will also attempt to explain how I got from old to new a...