Copying here those comments of mine at a discussion on the GraphX project: https://github.com/panthernet/GraphX/issues/21 describing the source code (physical) folder structure and the Visual Studio solution (virtual) folder structure I’ve been using at ClipFlair and other multi-platform projects. —— looking at the ...

Copying here my comment at a discussion on the GraphX project: https://github.com/panthernet/GraphX/pull/15 in case it helps somebody in using MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) in their software’s architecture ——– Using static classes instead of interfaces can mean though that you need to use reflection to call them (e.g. if ...

Continuing on where I left it on my previous post, I’m going to explain how the Announcement service works and why we choose that approach. The way JBoss and mod_proxy work now is that every time something changes in the topology, either a new proxy is added or removed or a JBoss node, then the proxy [...]

Recently, I’ve been looking a way to persist the status of an idling Workflow on WF4. There is a way to use SQL Azure to achieve this, after modifying the scripts because they contain unsupported T-SQL commands, but it’s totally an overkill to use it just to persist WF information, if you’re not using the RDBMS for another reason. I decided ...

Paspartu is French for “one size fits all”. Recently I’ve been coming across posts explaining and “promoting” the idea of spawning threads inside a worker role each one of them with a unique work to be done. All are sharing the same idea and all of them are describing the same thing. The idea You have some work to do, but you want to do it ...

Watching Vittorio Bertocci's Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) introductory talk at PDC as well as the recording of the excellent talk Microsoft Architect Hervey Wilson gave on this subject at PDC09 brought back wonderful memories of long discussions (and arguments ;-)) I had with Stelios, Manolis, Dimos and Stavros back when I was working at DOL, ...

I’m going to be speaking at the next DotNetZone event on a very interesting topic namely IoC (Inversion of Control) and on how using ''Prism'' and it's friend Unity (an implementation of IoC) from the Patterns and Practices team that can help in building Silverlight applications in a way that lends itself to testability and modularity. In talking ...

When you have your service running on Windows Azure, the least thing you want is monitoring every now and then and decide if there is a necessity for specific actions based on your monitoring data. You want the service to be, in some degree, self-manageable and decide on its own what the necessary actions should take place to satisfy a ...

In general, there are two kind of updates you’ll mainly perform on Windows Azure. One of them is changing your application’s logic (or so called business logic) e.g. the way you handle/read queues, or how you process data or even protocol updates etc and the other is schema updates/changes. I’m not referring to SQL Azure schema changes, which ...

In a previous post I’ve described what a VIP Swap is and how you can use it as an updating method to avoid service disruption. This particular method doesn’t apply to all possible scenarios and if not always, most of the times, during protocol updates or schema changes you’ll need to upgrade your service when its still running, chunk-by-chunk ...

Windows Azure automatically divides your role instances into some “logical” domains called upgrade domains. During upgrade, Azure is updating these domains one by one. This is a by design behavior to avoid nasty situations. Some of the last feature additions and enhancements on the platform was the ability to notify your role instances in case of ...

Today, during my presentation at Microsoft DevDays “Make Web not War” I had a pretty nice question about concurrency and I left the question somehow blurry and without a straight answer. Sorry, but we were changing subjects so fast that I missed it and I only realized it on my way back. The answer is yes, there is concurrency. If you examine ...

Performing an in-place upgrade on Windows Azure to change your service definition file it’s not possible unless you stop the service, upgrade and then start it again. Otherwise you can do a VIP Swap. VIP stands for Virtual IP and VIP swaps can be either done by the Developer portal or using the Service Management API by calling “Swap ...

Its been a while since Windows Azure caught the attention of a broader audience rising all kinds of questions from the most simple “How do I access my table storage” to the most complex and generic “How do I optimize my code to pay less”. Although there is a straight answer on the first one, that’s not the case on the second. Designing an ...

Intriguing article about EA policy :)

Πριν μερικές ώρες γύρισα από το πολυαναμενόμενο event του dotnetzone.gr, για αρχιτεκτονική λογισμικού [link]. Θα ήθελα να συγχαρώ τους διοργανωτές για την οργάνωση και τη θεματολογία. Δυστυχώς έπρεπε να αποχωρήσω στο τελευταίο μέρος λόγω υποχρεώσεων αλλά θα ήθελα να σας μεταφέρω την εμπειρία από τα τρία πρώτα μέρη. Locating and addressing ...

I briefly got the chance to talk about MetaCMS, the content management system and e-shop platform I’ve designed and built, a while back. Since then a lot of sites have been built using it. Some of which (the biggest ones) include: www.nooz.gr (former www.flash.gr) www.progreece.gr ...

The patterns & practices team plans to create some new Web guidance and we needs our help prioritizing the requirements through a survey that went live. They have split the effort into 2 projects. The first project will be to update the Web Client Software Factory (WCSF) to run on Visual Studio 2010. The second project will take a fresh ...

Πριν από περίπου δύο μήνες οργάνωσα στο Microsoft Innovation Center μία εκδήλωση για τους τεχνικούς διευθυντές και τους τεχνικούς ειδήμονες των Ελληνικών software houses, με την ονομασία ISV Innovation Days. Μία από τις ομιλίες ήταν δική μου με τίτλο “10+1 τρόποι για να κάνετε την εφαρμογή σας πιο ελκυστική”. Έκτοτε έλαβα πολλά αιτήματα για να ...

Την Τετάρτη 18 Φεβρουαρίου στις 19:20, διοργάνουμε το 26ο dotNETZone.gr Community Event, στις εγκαταστάσεις της Microsoft Hellas (Κηφισίας 221, Μαρούσι ). Η παρουσίαση θα γίνει από τον Μάνο Κελαϊδίτη (KelMan) και τον γράφοντα, Γιώργο Καπνιά (gcapnias) με θέμα «Presentation Layer Patterns». Πώς μπορούμε να ξεφορτωθούμε business κώδικα από τα ...

Την Τετάρτη 18 Φεβρουαρίου στις 19:20, διοργάνουμε το 26ο dotNETZone.gr Community Event, στις εγκαταστάσεις της Microsoft Hellas (Κηφισίας 221, Μαρούσι ). Η παρουσίαση θα γίνει από τον Μάνο Κελαϊδίτη (KelMan) και τον γράφοντα, Γιώργο Καπνιά (gcapnias) με θέμα «Presentation Layer Patterns». Πώς μπορούμε να ...

So it’s time for me to reveal what I’ve been up to for the past 6 months. As some of you may already know, I moved to a new start up company about six months ago, called Metadata (I know the site isn’t quite ready yet, but we focused on the product instead of the site), where I was assigned the task of designing and building a solution for Content ...

I had one of those rare AHA! moments while I was reading Dave Fetterman's chapter from the ''Beautiful Architecture'' book on Facebook's architecture.  Facebook presents a simplified view of its data to applications (Users, Friends, User Info) and allowes them to query it using its own SQL-like language, FQL. An application's output is ...

You can now buy the print edition of ''Beautiful Architecture'' from O'Reily's site. Amazon still has the book on pre-order. I've already finished Chapters 1,2,6 and 8 but had no time to blog about them. Up to this point the most interesting is #6, The Architecture of the Facebook Platform by Dave Fetterman. Fetterman describes how Facebook ...

Οι γιορτές τελείωσαν και εμείς ετοιμαζόμαστε για το πρώτο event του 2009: Θα πραγματοποιήσουμε το 24ο dotNETZone Community Event την Τετάρτη, 14 Ιανουαρίου στις 7.15μμ, στις εγκαταστάσεις της Microsoft Hellas (Κηφισίας 221, Μαρούσι ). Την παρουσίαση θα κάνει ο Παναγιώτης Καναβός (pkanavos), με την συμμετοχή του γράφοντα, Γιώργου Καπνιά ...