MCS UK Solution Development Team
The blog of the UK Solutions Development Team of Microsoft Consulting Services.
Why building highly scalable applications is hard – Part 2
In the first part of this 2 part article I described what a Primary bottleneck is, defined what...
Date: 02/09/2015
Why building highly scalable applications is hard – Part 1
In this first part of a 2 part article (click here for part 2) I’m going to discuss what causes...
Date: 01/22/2015
Access to an ASP.NET website via multiple authentications – revisited (v4.0)
Hi all A couple of years ago I posted an article entitled 'Access to an ASP.NET website via multiple...
Date: 11/27/2014
LINQ, collections and null reference exceptions
This short post describes an idiosyncrasy of LINQ that, for someone with several years of C#...
Date: 10/27/2014
Adding Trace to Azure Web Sites and Web Jobs
Using standard .NET trace in Azure Web Sites and Web Jobs is an extremely simple affair, with trace...
Date: 09/04/2014
Video Streaming with a custom IRandomAccessStream on Windows and Windows Phone (Universal App)
Overview We encountered a challenge on our project where we wanted to play videos in MediaElement...
Date: 07/12/2014
Using Application Insights to track Unhandled Exceptions in Windows Phone and Windows Store Apps
Application Insights is a preview service offered as part of Visual Studio Online. If you...
Date: 03/14/2014
Creating a DNS Server in Azure IaaS
Scenario I have multiple Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) Virtual Machines (VMs) running...
Date: 03/04/2014
FloodHack
On Friday evening (14th Feb 2013), as I was walking out the building for the weekend, I was grabbed...
Date: 02/18/2014
Hosting a TFS Build Controller on Windows Azure and connecting to Visual Studio Online
The Visual Studio Online Hosted Build Controller will serve you well for 90% of scenarios, but there...
Date: 02/12/2014
Azure: Knowing the limitations with Point-to-Site VPN connections via Authenticated Proxies
There are two options currently available for secure cross-site VPN connectivity between a virtual...
Date: 12/16/2013
Implementing LOB Storage in Memory Optimized Tables
Introduction Memory optimized tables do not have off-row or large object (LOB) storage, and the row...
Date: 12/09/2013
Pulling data from SharePoint 2013 in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 apps
In a recent project a Windows Phone 8 Line of Business (LOB) App was required to pull data from...
Date: 10/14/2013
Managing Entity Relationships with MVC Scaffolding
Using MVC Scaffolding is a great way to rapidly develop a website that provides basic CRUD...
Date: 09/20/2013
Azure: Calling the Azure Management Rest API
The Azure Management REST API exposes a series of endpoints that allow you to perform various...
Date: 08/08/2013
Unit Testing Delay Signed Assemblies on the Hosted TFS Build Service
Using the hosted build service available in the Team Foundation Service is great because you don't...
Date: 05/23/2013
Building an SCCM Self Service Portal for Deploying Applications – Part 3 (Example Code)
This article is the third in a series of three. The first article looked at the context of the...
Date: 05/14/2013
Building an SCCM Self Service Portal for Deploying Applications – Part 2 (Design)
In the previous article (The Background) we looked at why a Self Service portal for developers...
Date: 05/14/2013
Azure PowerShell: Provisioning Multiple VMs
To create new VMs for use with the Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks preview feature for Azure,...
Date: 02/25/2013
Exploring Dynamic Access Control Part 4 – Central Access Rules
In this series I have looked how we secure and classify resources (such as Files and...
Date: 02/19/2013
Exploring Dynamic Access Control Part 3 – Properties and Claims
In the previous post I looked at Classifying resources. In this post I will be looking at setting up...
Date: 02/01/2013
Exploring Dynamic Access Control Part 2 - Classification
Dynamic Access Control is a way for you to secure your resources (such as files and folders) without...
Date: 01/25/2013
Execution Time Based Heuristic Custom Task Scheduler
If you follow the samples for Parallel Programming with the .Net Framework, you may have come across...
Date: 12/06/2012
Workflow Foundation (WF 4.5) - Designer Improvements
.NET 4.5 has introduced some great new features to improve the usability of the Workflow designer....
Date: 11/07/2012
Azure Access Control Services: Creating a Custom Identity Provider
Azure Access Control Services (ACS) allows you to secure an application (i.e. Relying Party, RP), by...
Date: 11/02/2012
SAML 2.0 tokens and WIF – bridging the divide
Background We all know the following limitations about Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) and passive...
Date: 11/02/2012
Dealing with an XSD Choice when XSD.exe doesn’t add XmlChoiceIdentifierAttribute
On my current project we are dealing with some quite complex xsd schemas. Whilst working with one of...
Date: 10/26/2012
Access to an ASP.NET website via multiple authentications
Background Is it possible to secure a website using Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) without...
Date: 10/18/2012
Co-occurrence Approach to an Item Based Recommender
For a while I thought I would tackle the problem of creating an item-based recommender. Firstly I...
Date: 07/01/2012
.Net Implementation of a Priority Queue (aka Heap)
I thought I would take a break for a while from Hadoop and put together an F# .Net implementation of...
Date: 05/10/2012
ADFS 2.0: Single sign-on when a website references remote images
I recently had an issue where a website, secured with Active Directory Federation Services 2.0...
Date: 05/02/2012
Generic based Framework for .Net Hadoop MapReduce Job Submission
Over the past month I have been working on a framework to allow composition and submission of...
Date: 05/02/2012
Framework for Composing and Submitting .Net Hadoop MapReduce Jobs
An updated version of this post can be found at:...
Date: 04/16/2012
Workflow Foundation (WF4) – Rehosting The Workflow Designer
Rehosting the WF designer in an application outside of Visual Studio is nothing new and since WF4,...
Date: 03/26/2012
Hadoop Binary Streaming and F# MapReduce
As mentioned in my previous post Hadoop Streaming not only supports text streaming, but it also...
Date: 01/08/2012
Hadoop Streaming and F# MapReduce
As you may know Microsoft has recently announced plans for a Hadoop adoption for both Windows Server...
Date: 12/22/2011
Mutual authentication with a IIS hosted WCF data service installed in a workgroup environment
This post covers the steps required to secure communication between a WCF client and a WCF data...
Date: 12/14/2011
Adventures in TSQL: SQL Server Query Performance Analysis using DMVs
From the development perspective I often have to perform an analysis of a database application. More...
Date: 11/27/2011
Creating a Partitioned View in the BAM Archiving Database
When you run the BAM data maintenance package (BAM_DM_<activity name>) BAM copies each...
Date: 11/15/2011
Adventures in TSQL: Comma separated string from column values
It seems that several times now I have had the requirement to create a comma separated string from...
Date: 11/04/2011
Preventing Build Hangs and File Locking on Build Servers When Running Unit Tests (revised)
Recently I was tasked with changing our daily and Continuous Integration builds so that they would...
Date: 11/02/2011
FSharpChart release supporting Stacked Charts and Markers (version 0.60)
FSharpChart now supports binding for Stacked Charts and for modifying the Marker associated with a...
Date: 11/01/2011
String extension methods rather than using RegEx
In a recent project I was using regular expressions a lot for validating string expressions such...
Date: 10/19/2011
Preventing Build Hangs and File Locking on Build Servers When Running Unit Tests
Note : An updated version of this post can be found here. Recently I was tasked with changing our...
Date: 10/12/2011
FSharpChart new release available (version 0.55)
If you have been using FSharpChart you will have seen some recent activities around documentation. I...
Date: 10/11/2011