Channel 9 Microsoft http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/Dev/App_Themes/C9/images/feedimage.png Channel 9 http://channel9.msdn.com/Niners/benriga/Posts Channel 9 keeps you up to date with the latest news and behind the scenes info from Microsoft that developers love to keep up with. From LINQ to SilverLight – Watch videos and hear about all the cool technologies coming and the people behind them. http://channel9.msdn.com/Niners/benriga/Posts en Mon, 20 May 2013 14:55:28 GMT Mon, 20 May 2013 14:55:28 GMT Rev9 52 3 25 Building Apps for Both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8: (04) Sharing Code Between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 Ben creates live demos to show examples of how to maximize code reuse. This final segment will include an overview of reuse techniques such as portable library, shared source code, inheritance, conditional compilation, partial classes and methods.

Full course outline:

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-04-Sharing-Code-Between-Windows-8-and-Windows-P Ben creates live demos to show examples of how to maximize code reuse. This final segment will include an overview of reuse techniques such as portable library, shared source code, inheritance, conditional compilation, partial classes and methods. [01:54] - Portable Library [10:17] - Shared source code [18:50] - Inheritance [22:36] - Partial classes Full course outline: Mod 01a: Comparing Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Part 1 Mod 01b: Comparing Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Part 2 Mod 02: Basics of View Models Mod 03: Model-View-ViewModel Mod 04: Sharing Code Between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 1688 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-04-Sharing-Code-Between-Windows-8-and-Windows-P Tue, 26 Feb 2013 22:45:56 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-04-Sharing-Code-Between-Windows-8-and-Windows-P Ben Riga, JeffKoch Ben Riga, JeffKoch 3 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-04-Sharing-Code-Between-Windows-8-and-Windows-P/RSS Application Development Windows 8 Windows Phone 8 Building Apps for Both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8: (03) Model-View-ViewModel This module introduces the user to MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel), the architecture and the Pros and cons. It will provide and overview for how to share code using MVVM, .NET portable class library as well as going over best practices and providing a wealth of resource information.

Full course outline:

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-03-Model-View-ViewModel This module introduces the user to MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel), the architecture and the Pros and cons. It will provide and overview for how to share code using MVVM, .NET portable class library as well as going over best practices and providing a wealth of resource information. [03:29] - Architecture overview of MVVM [08:06] - MVVM and code sharing [22:48] - Messages [28:14] - Best practices Full course outline: Mod 01a: Comparing Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Part 1 Mod 01b: Comparing Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Part 2 Mod 02: Basics of View Models Mod 03: Model-View-ViewModel Mod 04: Sharing Code Between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 2116 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-03-Model-View-ViewModel Tue, 26 Feb 2013 22:45:35 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-03-Model-View-ViewModel Ben Riga, JeffKoch Ben Riga, JeffKoch 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-03-Model-View-ViewModel/RSS Application Development MVVM Windows 8 Windows Phone 8 Building Apps for Both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8: (02) Basics of View Models This session will go over Data binding basics and look further into Dependency object and  property. It will review properties for binding specifically INotifyPropertyChanged and INotifyCollectionChanged, and include business logic to respond to user actions in the view.

Full course outline:

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-02-Basics-of-View-Models This session will go over Data binding basics and look further into Dependency object and  property. It will review properties for binding specifically INotifyPropertyChanged and INotifyCollectionChanged, and include business logic to respond to user actions in the view. [01:53] - Data binding basics [11:02] - Demo - data binding [18:31] - View models [22:07] - Commands Full course outline: Mod 01a: Comparing Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Part 1 Mod 01b: Comparing Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Part 2 Mod 02: Basics of View Models Mod 03: Model-View-ViewModel Mod 04: Sharing Code Between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 1706 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-02-Basics-of-View-Models Tue, 26 Feb 2013 22:45:18 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-02-Basics-of-View-Models Ben Riga, JeffKoch Ben Riga, JeffKoch 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-02-Basics-of-View-Models/RSS Application Development view models Windows 8 Windows Phone 8 Building Apps for Both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8: (01b) Comparing Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Part 2 Windows 8 and Windows are not the same platform. This module will cover how they are different by going over the UI and XAML, Platform specific features and reviewing the data model and supporting code.

Full course outline:

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-01b-Comparing-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Par Windows 8 and Windows are not the same platform. This module will cover how they are different by going over the UI and XAML, Platform specific features and reviewing the data model and supporting code. [12:05] - Demo - reminders [20:00] - App settings [31:03] - Media capture [39:31] - App bar Full course outline: Mod 01a: Comparing Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Part 1 Mod 01b: Comparing Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Part 2 Mod 02: Basics of View Models Mod 03: Model-View-ViewModel Mod 04: Sharing Code Between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 2984 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-01b-Comparing-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Par Tue, 26 Feb 2013 22:44:56 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-01b-Comparing-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Par Ben Riga, JeffKoch Ben Riga, JeffKoch 3 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-01b-Comparing-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Par/RSS Application Development Windows 8 Windows Phone 8 Building Apps for Both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8: (01a) Comparing Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Part 1 Windows 8 and Windows are not the same platform. This module will cover how they are different by going over the UI and XAML, Platform specific features and reviewing the data model and supporting code.

  • [06:15] - Windows and Windows Phone convergence
  • [13:25] - UI and XAML
  • [23:13] - Data model and supporting code
  • [27:50] - Demo - Local Storage
  • [36:08] - Platofrm-specific features

Full course outline:

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-01a-Comparing-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Par Windows 8 and Windows are not the same platform. This module will cover how they are different by going over the UI and XAML, Platform specific features and reviewing the data model and supporting code. [06:15] - Windows and Windows Phone convergence [13:25] - UI and XAML [23:13] - Data model and supporting code [27:50] - Demo - Local Storage [36:08] - Platofrm-specific features Full course outline: Mod 01a: Comparing Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Part 1 Mod 01b: Comparing Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Part 2 Mod 02: Basics of View Models Mod 03: Model-View-ViewModel Mod 04: Sharing Code Between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 3042 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-01a-Comparing-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Par Tue, 26 Feb 2013 22:44:37 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-01a-Comparing-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Par Ben Riga, JeffKoch Ben Riga, JeffKoch 7 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Jump-Start/Building-Apps-for-Both-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-01a-Comparing-Windows-8-and-Windows-Phone-8-Par/RSS Application Development Windows 8 Windows Phone 8 Top Ranked - Crash King Bad stuff happens!  There is no way around that.  It’s a fact; your apps, out there in the wild on consumers devices, will crash.  This in itself is ok but only if you can get the information about those crashes and use that information to fix the bugs that cause them.  The Windows Phone platform actually captures stack traces and provides those to you, the publisher of the app.  You can get a view of the number of crashes that are happening as well as download an Excel file with all the appropriate information and stack traces.  This is a good thing and you should take advantage of that information as it may give you some good clues as to what to fix to make your app a higher quality product.

There are a few things that App Hub does not give you though.  The first thing is that it may not give you enough information about the bugs that you are hitting.  One example of that is that the version number of the app is not provided so if you have published a few different versions of your app it is possible that a user is hitting a bug that you may have already fixed in a later version. 

The other issue is that stats on App Hub are delayed.  As a result you don’t see the issues that your end-users are hitting for a few days.  If something is happening out there that is causing a lot of crashes then you may not see it until after users start posting lots of low ratings and negative reviews. 

Another thing to keep in mind is that App Hub does not provide any sort of notification of issues.  It’s up to you to visit App Hub regularly and pull down those stack traces to see what’s going on. 

Finally (and I realize this is more a perception thing than an issue) end-users have no idea that the platform is gathering up those stack traces and making them available to you.  And, of course, they have no idea if you are looking at those traces and working on bug fixes.  As a result, when they see a bug most will assume the worst and give bad ratings and reviews.  As I’ve mentioned on a previous post you really want to make sure that, whenever you can, you provide the ability for the end-user to provide you feedback as that helps build a relationship which ultimately will result in higher ratings and ranking.

Fortunately there is a way to get around all of these issues.  Andy Pennell, a colleague on the Windows Phone dev team has posted some sample code which he dubbed Little Watson that I think every developer should include in all their apps.  Just like “Big” Watson does on Windows, that code does exactly what you would expect in that it captures all that stack trace info (including additional info you may need) and allows the end user to email it you so you can get to work fixing whatever bug caused the error.

Little Watson is pretty easy to use.  There are a few steps that you need to do:

  1. The first is to include the LittleWatson.cs in your project
  2. Then you need to let Little Watson know every time an exception happens.  When you do that Little Watson captures the trace info to isolated storage.  This is done by calling LittleWatson.ReportException.  You’ll need to do that in both RootFrame_NavigationFailed and Application_UnhandledException.  Both of those are in App.xaml.cs
  3. Finally to allow the end user to send you the stack trace you’ll need to add a call to LittleWatson.CheckForPreviousException() in the constructor for your main page (i.e. whatever page it is that your app launches into, usually that is MainPage.xaml.cs).  When you make that call Little Watson checks for an exception report file in isolated storage and if one exists prompts the end user to send it to you via email. 

Since Andy blogged about Little Watson, other devs have grabbed that great idea and taken it further.  One example of that is the Northern Lights open source project.  Northern Lights has many different capabilities that are useful to Windows Phone developers.  One of those is an implementation of Little Watson based on the work I mentioned above from Andy Pennell.  One thing that Northern Lights does beyond Andy’s code is that they provide you the capability to automatically send the trace info to a web service behind the scenes so that the end user does not have to see it.  You should probably be careful in doing something like that.  As I mentioned above, it might actually be a good thing for end-users to know that you care about bugs.  You may also want to be careful about sending stuff to a web service behind the users back.  Some users will get freaked out about that if they notice.  This would be especially bad if you were including any sort of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) along with those traces.  In general, you’ll probably want to let users know somehow that you are doing that and definitely stay away from capturing any PII.

On my blog I’ve included the source code for the project I used in the video.  It’s a ridiculously dumb app but I often get asked for source so I’m including it for completeness. 

 

Let me know what you think about this episode of Top Ranked.

If you have questions about any of the videos, about problems or issues you’re hitting or if you have topics that you think would be of interest to other devs on the Windows Phone platform then drop me a note. I’d be particularly interested in hearing about some of the best practices you’ve adopted that you think have raised your quality or your ratings/ranking in the Marketplace. I’ll be sure to give full credit and link love whenever I can.

The Top Ranked series is hosted on Channel 9. You can view all the past videos there. You can also subscribe to the entire series via Zune or iTunes. All of that is available here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked

Let me know what you think by dropping me a note with the contact form on my blog here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/benriga/contact.aspx

Or better yet follow me on twitter and drop me a note there:
https://twitter.com/benriga

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Crash-King Bad stuff happens!  There is no way around that.  It’s a fact; your apps, out there in the wild on consumers devices, will crash.  This in itself is ok but only if you can get the information about those crashes and use that information to fix the bugs that cause them.  The Windows Phone platform actually captures stack traces and provides those to you, the publisher of the app.  You can get a view of the number of crashes that are happening as well as download an Excel file with all the appropriate information and stack traces.  This is a good thing and you should take advantage of that information as it may give you some good clues as to what to fix to make your app a higher quality product. There are a few things that App Hub does not give you though.  The first thing is that it may not give you enough information about the bugs that you are hitting.  One example of that is that the version number of the app is not provided so if you have published a few different versions of your app it is possible that a user is hitting a bug that you may have already fixed in a later version.  The other issue is that stats on App Hub are delayed.  As a result you don’t see the issues that your end-users are hitting for a few days.  If something is happening out there that is causing a lot of crashes then you may not see it until after users start posting lots of low ratings and negative reviews.  Another thing to keep in mind is that App Hub does not provide any sort of notification of issues.  It’s up to you to visit App Hub regularly and pull down those stack traces to see what’s going on.  Finally (and I realize this is more a perception thing than an issue) end-users have no idea that the platform is gathering up those stack traces and making them available to you.  And, of course, they have no idea if you are looking at those traces and working on bug fixes.  As a result, when they see a bug m 786 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Crash-King Tue, 08 May 2012 18:52:08 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Crash-King Ben Riga Ben Riga 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Crash-King/RSS Windows Phone Windows Phone Marketplace Top Ranked - Is your app aligned? Misaligned elements is probably one of the most common issues I see with apps in the marketplace.  In this episode of Top Ranked, I delve into why this is an issue and how easy it is to check for that and fix it.  Alignment is a part of the overall Metro design language.  I’ve even seen some designers in our UK COE group actually put post-it notes on their screens or on a device to verify that elements align properly.  This acts as a sort of forcing mechanism for them to check alignment.  The reason they do that is that you may not explicitly notice that stuff is out of alignment but when it is, you intuitively feel like something is off.  In general your app will feel a little sloppy when the element alignment is out of kilter.

The Metro design language does take alignment into account and as a result there are some things that you can keep in mind when designing and building pages.  The magic number 12 seems to resonate throughout the experience. Most elements in the native apps align up in a grid of one form or another.

The ingenious Jeff Wilcox built a development utility that makes getting the alignment right super simple.  This utility is called MetroGridHelper is also simple to find since you can grab it with NuGet.  Once included in your project you turn it on in App.xaml.cs in the same place where you turn on and off the frame rate counters and redraw regions etc.  You simply add MetroGridHelper.IsVisible = true; in the if block where the profiling info is included.  By doing it there you are assured that you will only ever see that grid when the debugger is actually attached (i.e. only in development).  When you run your project with the MetroGridHelper turned on, you’ll see a series of red squares layered over every screen in the app.  Those squares are strategically placed to make it really easy for you to see when elements are out of alignment.

Another thing to keep in mind while we’re talking about element alignment is the amount of space you leave to allow users to tap on an element (like an item in a list for instance).  Again here the magic number 12 is the number that you need.  Make sure that you have at least 12 pixels between tappable items so that the user can easily tap the item they want as opposed to mistakenly tapping nearby items.

You can read up on Jeff Wilcox’s MetroGridHelper on the original blog post but really all you need to do to use it is to grab it using NuGet.

Let me know what you think about this episode of Top Ranked.

If you have questions about any of the videos, about problems or issues you’re hitting or if you have topics that you think would be of interest to other devs on the Windows Phone platform then drop me a note. I’d be particularly interested in hearing about some of the best practices you’ve adopted that you think have raised your quality or your ratings/ranking in the Marketplace. I’ll be sure to give full credit and link love whenever I can.

The Top Ranked series is hosted on Channel 9. You can view all the past videos there. You can also subscribe to the entire series via Zune or iTunes. All that is available here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked

Let me know what you think by dropping me a note the contact form on my blog here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/benriga/contact.aspx

Or better yet follow me on twitter and drop me a note there:
https://twitter.com/benriga

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Is-your-app-aligned Misaligned elements is probably one of the most common issues I see with apps in the marketplace.  In this episode of Top Ranked, I delve into why this is an issue and how easy it is to check for that and fix it.  Alignment is a part of the overall Metro design language.  I’ve even seen some designers in our UK COE group actually put post-it notes on their screens or on a device to verify that elements align properly.  This acts as a sort of forcing mechanism for them to check alignment.  The reason they do that is that you may not explicitly notice that stuff is out of alignment but when it is, you intuitively feel like something is off.  In general your app will feel a little sloppy when the element alignment is out of kilter. The Metro design language does take alignment into account and as a result there are some things that you can keep in mind when designing and building pages.  The magic number 12 seems to resonate throughout the experience. Most elements in the native apps align up in a grid of one form or another. The ingenious Jeff Wilcox built a development utility that makes getting the alignment right super simple.  This utility is called MetroGridHelper is also simple to find since you can grab it with NuGet.  Once included in your project you turn it on in App.xaml.cs in the same place where you turn on and off the frame rate counters and redraw regions etc.  You simply add MetroGridHelper.IsVisible = true; in the if block where the profiling info is included.  By doing it there you are assured that you will only ever see that grid when the debugger is actually attached (i.e. only in development).  When you run your project with the MetroGridHelper turned on, you’ll see a series of red squares layered over every screen in the app.  Those squares are strategically placed to make it really easy for you to see when elements are out of alignment. Another thing to keep in mind while we’re tal 729 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Is-your-app-aligned Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:17:45 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Is-your-app-aligned Ben Riga Ben Riga 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Is-your-app-aligned/RSS Windows Phone Windows Phone Marketplace Top Ranked - All "About" You The About page is usually one of the last things you think about when building an app.  It’s just not core to the whatever it is you’re trying to build.  And yet you’ll soon find out that it’s pretty much a necessity for most apps.  Not only is it something you can use to help build a better relationship with your users; it’s also something that can help you to fulfill some of the marketplace certification requirements. 

Having a place in your app that encourages the user to reach out to you and connect somehow is a very good thing.  It could be used by them to send you an email to report a bug or a wish list item (before they use the app rating to express their frustrations) or it could be another place where you encourage end users to rate and review or actually buy your app.  By communicating with users you will become more connected to them and your app’s ratings and reviews will tend to be more positive. 

The other area where the About page can be useful is in fulfilling some of the Marketplace Application Certification Requirements.  One requirement in particular (5.6) states that your app must “include the application name, version information, and technical support contact information that are easily discoverable.”

In the video, I show a very simple app that surfaces an about page as a manually created page providing information about the app and myself.  Once you start thinking about what else you might include in the About page, manually maintaining that in code is probably not ideal.  You can add all sorts of things e.g. rate and review the app, a buy link for users using a Trial app, legal terms of use, credit to others who may have helped you (like open source projects) or a development change log.  As you can imagine this can start to get quite complicated and become a project in and of itself.  Fortunately someone has already done some of the heavy lifting for you.  Peter Kuhn aka Mister Goodcat has open sourced a project called Your Last About Dialog (YLAD) that goes a long way to making the About page a dead simple thing to add to your projects.

"Your Last About Dialog" is a robust and generic, highly configurable implementation you can easily pull into your own app and set up for your needs. It is able to pull most data from your application automatically, supports fetching both text and Xaml content from remote sources (with fallback local content), and allows easy localization of the complete dialog content to all of the languages supported by your app.

In the video I show off a few of the YLAD features but there are many more in the app itself.  I encourage you to have a look by pulling it in to your app using NuGet.  You have installed NuGet, right? If you haven’t go do it now, I’ll wait here.

Let me know what you think about this episode of Top Ranked.

SOURCE CODE: I’ve provided the source code for the very simple app I showed in the video as an attachment to the blog post.

As an aside, I say the word “aboot” enough times that I’m sure many will spot my Canadian accent.  Don’t hate me.  :\ 

If you have questions aboot any of the videos, aboot problems or issues you’re hitting or if you have topics that you think would be of interest to other devs on the Windows Phone platform then drop me a note. I’d be particularly interested in hearing aboot some of the best practices you’ve adopted that you think have raised your quality or your ratings/ranking in the Marketplace. I’ll be sure to give full credit and link love whenever I can.

The Top Ranked series is hosted on Channel 9. You can view all the past videos there. You can also subscribe to the entire series via Zune or iTunes. All that is available here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked

Let me know what you think by dropping me a note the contact form on my blog here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/benriga/contact.aspx

Or better yet follow me on twitter and drop me a note there:
https://twitter.com/benriga

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-All-About-You The About page is usually one of the last things you think about when building an app.  It’s just not core to the whatever it is you’re trying to build.  And yet you’ll soon find out that it’s pretty much a necessity for most apps.  Not only is it something you can use to help build a better relationship with your users; it’s also something that can help you to fulfill some of the marketplace certification requirements.  Having a place in your app that encourages the user to reach out to you and connect somehow is a very good thing.  It could be used by them to send you an email to report a bug or a wish list item (before they use the app rating to express their frustrations) or it could be another place where you encourage end users to rate and review or actually buy your app.  By communicating with users you will become more connected to them and your app’s ratings and reviews will tend to be more positive.  The other area where the About page can be useful is in fulfilling some of the Marketplace Application Certification Requirements.  One requirement in particular (5.6) states that your app must “include the application name, version information, and technical support contact information that are easily discoverable.” In the video, I show a very simple app that surfaces an about page as a manually created page providing information about the app and myself.  Once you start thinking about what else you might include in the About page, manually maintaining that in code is probably not ideal.  You can add all sorts of things e.g. rate and review the app, a buy link for users using a Trial app, legal terms of use, credit to others who may have helped you (like open source projects) or a development change log.  As you can imagine this can start to get quite complicated and become a project in and of itself.  Fortunately someone has already done some of the heavy lifting for you.  Peter Kuhn aka Mister 818 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-All-About-You Tue, 13 Mar 2012 17:05:06 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-All-About-You Ben Riga Ben Riga 2 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-All-About-You/RSS Windows Phone Windows Phone Marketplace Top Ranked - Control Feedback on Tap In this episode, I focus on another small tweak that developers can add to their apps that will help make those apps look a lot more like native apps.  I’m referring to the addition of the Tilt Effect to controls.  By default, when you add controls to the canvas in Visual Studio or Expression Blend they do not get the tilt effect.  This may seem like a small thing but as I’ve mentioned before the experience is something that users will notice and their ratings and as a result your rankings will be affected by that. 

The thing is, that there is, in fact, a really easy way to add the tilt effect to your apps using the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit .  You can grab the source code for that from Codeplex or, even easier, you can just pull it in to your project and reference it using Nuget.

Adding the Tilt Effect is as simple as adding the namespace for the toolkit and then adding the effect to either the individual controls or to the entire page.  In most cases it shouldn’t take you more than a few seconds on each of the pages in your project so there’s really no reason for you not to take advantage of this.

Let me know what you think about this episode of Top Ranked.

If you have questions about any of the videos, about problems or issues you’re hitting or if you have topics that you think would be of interest to other devs on the Windows Phone platform then drop me a note. I’d be particularly interested in hearing about some of the best practices you’ve adopted that you think have raised your quality or your ratings/ranking in the Marketplace. I’ll be sure to give full credit and link love whenever I can.

The Top Ranked series is hosted on Channel 9. You can view all the past videos there. You can also subscribe to the entire series via Zune or iTunes. All that is available here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked

Let me know what you think by dropping me a note via the comment form below.

Or better yet follow me on twitter and drop me a note there:
https://twitter.com/benriga

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Control-Feedback-on-Tap In this episode, I focus on another small tweak that developers can add to their apps that will help make those apps look a lot more like native apps.  I’m referring to the addition of the Tilt Effect to controls.  By default, when you add controls to the canvas in Visual Studio or Expression Blend they do not get the tilt effect.  This may seem like a small thing but as I’ve mentioned before the experience is something that users will notice and their ratings and as a result your rankings will be affected by that.  The thing is, that there is, in fact, a really easy way to add the tilt effect to your apps using the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit .  You can grab the source code for that from Codeplex or, even easier, you can just pull it in to your project and reference it using Nuget. Adding the Tilt Effect is as simple as adding the namespace for the toolkit and then adding the effect to either the individual controls or to the entire page.  In most cases it shouldn’t take you more than a few seconds on each of the pages in your project so there’s really no reason for you not to take advantage of this. Let me know what you think about this episode of Top Ranked. If you have questions about any of the videos, about problems or issues you’re hitting or if you have topics that you think would be of interest to other devs on the Windows Phone platform then drop me a note. I’d be particularly interested in hearing about some of the best practices you’ve adopted that you think have raised your quality or your ratings/ranking in the Marketplace. I’ll be sure to give full credit and link love whenever I can. The Top Ranked series is hosted on Channel 9. You can view all the past videos there. You can also subscribe to the entire series via Zune or iTunes. All that is available here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked Let me know what you think by dropping me a note via the comment form below. Or better yet follow me on twitter 468 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Control-Feedback-on-Tap Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:46:34 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Control-Feedback-on-Tap Ben Riga Ben Riga 1 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Control-Feedback-on-Tap/RSS Silverlight Toolkit Windows Phone Windows Phone Marketplace Top Ranked - Market Testing In this episode we talk about pricing and more generically about market testing.  I know, I know, marketing is probably not every coders favorite subject.   Smiley   I bring it up as I’ve noticed many apps in the marketplace that are underpriced.  Apps that are cool, differentiated or do something of great value to the consumer can clearly support higher price points.  No user is ever going to ask you to charge them more for your app so the task of picking the right price point falls on you.  The easiest way to do that is to do market testing aka A/B testing (or split testing, bucket testing etc).  In this episode I refer specifically to price testing for paid apps but this technique could easily be used to test for other things that might increase revenue in paid apps or downloads in free apps.  All sorts of things like categories,  descriptions, keywords, or artwork can be affect the performance of your app and so could be optimized.

As I mentioned above, from what I’ve seen in the marketplace many developers will underprice their apps.  They seem to be optimizing for number of downloads.  That is indeed what you want for free or ad-supported apps but for paid apps you probably want to optimize for revenue and that formula is a simple one everyone knows: revenue = paid downloads x price.  If you optimize for downloads then likely you are in a race to the bottom; i.e. how fast you can get to the $0.99 price point.

Since you have 2 variables to optimize and only one which you have any control over, the easiest way to optimize for revenue is to test different price points and watch the number of paid downloads at each point.  Obviously if you want to maximize revenue then you want to get the highest price possible for your app.  To do that start at a high price.  Over time you may need to drop the price (e.g. for competitive reasons or for sales or promotional events).

So the obvious question is: how do I do market testing on the Windows Phone marketplace?  Since you cannot vary pricing by market in the marketplace the way I recommend is to submit the same app with the same metadata twice.  You would do that to two different markets that have very similar buying behavior.  Examples of markets that have similar buying behavior are US/Canada, France/Belgium, Germany/Austria, or Australia/New Zealand.  By doing this you can do your A/B testing; i.e. by maintaining all things equal except for pricing then you can figure out what price the market will bear for your app. 

Let me know what you think about this episode of Top Ranked.

If you have questions about any of the videos, about problems or issues you’re hitting or if you have topics that you think would be of interest to other devs on the Windows Phone platform then drop me a note. I’d be particularly interested in hearing about some of the best practices you’ve adopted that you think have raised your quality or your ratings/ranking in the Marketplace. I’ll be sure to give full credit and link love whenever I can.

The Top Ranked series is hosted on Channel 9. You can view all the past videos there. You can also subscribe to the entire series via Zune or iTunes. All that is available here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked

Let me know what you think by dropping me a note via the contact form on my blog here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/benriga/contact.aspx

Or better yet follow me on twitter and drop me a note there:
https://twitter.com/benriga

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Market-Testing In this episode we talk about pricing and more generically about market testing.  I know, I know, marketing is probably not every coders favorite subject.     I bring it up as I’ve noticed many apps in the marketplace that are underpriced.  Apps that are cool, differentiated or do something of great value to the consumer can clearly support higher price points.  No user is ever going to ask you to charge them more for your app so the task of picking the right price point falls on you.  The easiest way to do that is to do market testing aka A/B testing (or split testing, bucket testing etc).  In this episode I refer specifically to price testing for paid apps but this technique could easily be used to test for other things that might increase revenue in paid apps or downloads in free apps.  All sorts of things like categories,  descriptions, keywords, or artwork can be affect the performance of your app and so could be optimized. As I mentioned above, from what I’ve seen in the marketplace many developers will underprice their apps.  They seem to be optimizing for number of downloads.  That is indeed what you want for free or ad-supported apps but for paid apps you probably want to optimize for revenue and that formula is a simple one everyone knows: revenue = paid downloads x price.  If you optimize for downloads then likely you are in a race to the bottom; i.e. how fast you can get to the $0.99 price point. Since you have 2 variables to optimize and only one which you have any control over, the easiest way to optimize for revenue is to test different price points and watch the number of paid downloads at each point.  Obviously if you want to maximize revenue then you want to get the highest price possible for your app.  To do that start at a high price.  Over time you may need to drop the price (e.g. for competitive reasons or for sales or promotional events). So the obvious question i 451 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Market-Testing Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:22:21 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Market-Testing Ben Riga Ben Riga 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Market-Testing/RSS Windows Phone Windows Phone Marketplace Top Ranked - Benefiting from Trial Mode In this episode of Top Ranked I talk about Trial mode.  Trial mode is one of the most important features available to you as a developer if you’re building a paid app.  By implementing Trial mode in your app you give consumers the opportunity to take your app for a spin while ensuring that you’ll get paid for your hard work if a consumer sees value in it.

We know from what we see on the back end that apps which include trial mode get 70x more downloads on average.  Of those 70x more downloads about 10% will get converted into purchases so doing the math you can expect on average about 7x more sales just by doing the small amount of work required to include a trial capability into your app.

We make it very easy for your app to know whether it is running in trial mode or if the consumer has purchased a license.  What we cannot do is decide what trial mode means for your app.  In fact, I would say probably the most important part of including trial mode is deciding how trial mode should work in your app.  There are various scenarios that you could use.  You might make the trial time-based (e.g. full functionality for 10 days), launch based (e.g. full functionality the first 10 times the app is launched on a device) or partial functionality (e.g. only the first 2 levels of a 30 level game are available in trial mode).  You should be careful when allowing full functionality in a trial as a consumer could easily uninstall and re-install the app to completely reset the trial.  When you provide full functionality you may want to consider storing the info about a user or a device in the cloud so that it persists across reinstalls.

There is a performance cost related to checking for trial mode so you should be careful about how often you actually do the check.  It’s a synchronous (blocking) operation that can take 60ms or more to complete.  Note that you will not see this when in development as that 60ms penalty is not there then but you will see it when the app is published.  An easy way to avoid this issue is to perform the license check when the app is started or resumed from a dormant/tombstoned state.

Another best practice is to be absolutely sure that you close the deal.  That is, that you make it very easy for the consumer to buy your app.  You should absolutely include links to the marketplace buy page right in the app itself.  If you don’t do that then you’re relying on the end-user to make the effort of launching the marketplace app, searching for your app and buying it.  Most just won’t do that.

Although it’s strictly not related to trial mode, another important best practice is to encourage consumers to rate your app.  The best way to raise your standing in the rankings is by getting lots and lots of high ratings.  That will help you get more visibility and encourage more downloads.  If you don’t explicitly encourage consumers to rate from within the app then you are relying on them to search for the app again or find it in the app list and tap-and-hold to find the rate and review page.  Again, most consumers just won’t do that. 

And the final thing you should be sure to do within your app is to include the capability to test both the full version and the trial version of your app while you are in development.

In the video I’ll walk you through all of these topics.  I’ve also included the source code for the project I used (on my blog here).  The code is not that complicated but I’m sure having it will make it that much easier for you to get started. 

Let me know what you think about this episode of Top Ranked.

If you have questions about any of the videos, or about problems or issues you’re hitting or if you have topics that you think would be of interest to other devs on the Windows Phone platform then drop me a note. I’d be particularly interested in hearing about some of the best practices you’ve adopted that you think have raised your quality or your ratings/ranking in the Marketplace. I’ll be sure to give full credit and link love whenever I can.

The Top Ranked series is hosted on Channel 9. You can view all the past videos there.  You can also subscribe to the entire series via Zune or iTunes. All that is available here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked

Let me know what you think by dropping me a note via the contact form on my blog here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/benriga/contact.aspx

Or better yet follow me on twitter and drop me a note there:
https://twitter.com/benriga

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Benefiting-from-Trial-Mode In this episode of Top Ranked I talk about Trial mode.  Trial mode is one of the most important features available to you as a developer if you’re building a paid app.  By implementing Trial mode in your app you give consumers the opportunity to take your app for a spin while ensuring that you’ll get paid for your hard work if a consumer sees value in it. We know from what we see on the back end that apps which include trial mode get 70x more downloads on average.  Of those 70x more downloads about 10% will get converted into purchases so doing the math you can expect on average about 7x more sales just by doing the small amount of work required to include a trial capability into your app. We make it very easy for your app to know whether it is running in trial mode or if the consumer has purchased a license.  What we cannot do is decide what trial mode means for your app.  In fact, I would say probably the most important part of including trial mode is deciding how trial mode should work in your app.  There are various scenarios that you could use.  You might make the trial time-based (e.g. full functionality for 10 days), launch based (e.g. full functionality the first 10 times the app is launched on a device) or partial functionality (e.g. only the first 2 levels of a 30 level game are available in trial mode).  You should be careful when allowing full functionality in a trial as a consumer could easily uninstall and re-install the app to completely reset the trial.  When you provide full functionality you may want to consider storing the info about a user or a device in the cloud so that it persists across reinstalls. There is a performance cost related to checking for trial mode so you should be careful about how often you actually do the check.  It’s a synchronous (blocking) operation that can take 60ms or more to complete.  Note that you will not see this when in development as that 60ms penalty is not th 912 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Benefiting-from-Trial-Mode Mon, 16 Jan 2012 23:49:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Benefiting-from-Trial-Mode Ben Riga Ben Riga 3 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Benefiting-from-Trial-Mode/RSS Windows Phone Windows Phone Marketplace Top Ranked - Supporting All Markets

Note: This video is the first in the series so I spend some time at the beginning introducing myself and the goals for the series.  To get directly to the content in this episode skip to about the 4:00 mark. 

When we launched the Windows Phone platform we released initially for the EFIGS (English, French, Italian, German and Spanish) markets.  In all that was about 16 markets.  With Mango we added a bunch more and just a few days ago we added another few.  We’re now up to 41 markets where we as a developer can choose to make an app available. 

Since we cannot know what the rights are related to your app we cannot just publish to new markets as they come on-stream.  In order for an app to made available in these new countries you will have to go into your App Hub account and cross-submit every time new markets come online.  I was surprised at how many apps don’t do this.  I suspect many developers don’t know that they have to do this.  It’s such an easy thing to do that I thought I would do this as part of the first episode.

It may be easy but if you stay on top of it you may find that you get a nice boost in downloads as new markets come online since you’ll be there first.  Rather than try to describe what needs to be done go ahead and watch the video (topic starts at about the 4:00 mark).

Let me know what you think about this episode of Top Ranked.

If you have questions about the videos, or about problems or issues you’re hitting or if you have topics that you think would be of interest to other devs on the Windows Phone platform then drop me a note. I’d be particularly interested in hearing about some of the best practices you’ve adopted that you think have raised your quality or your ratings/ranking in the Marketplace. I’ll be sure to give full credit and link love whenever I can.

You can drop me a note via the contact form on my blog here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/benriga/contact.aspx

Or better yet follow me on twitter and drop me a note there:
https://twitter.com/benriga

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Supporting-All-Markets Note: This video is the first in the series so I spend some time at the beginning introducing myself and the goals for the series.  To get directly to the content in this episode skip to about the 4:00 mark.  When we launched the Windows Phone platform we released initially for the EFIGS (English, French, Italian, German and Spanish) markets.  In all that was about 16 markets.  With Mango we added a bunch more and just a few days ago we added another few.  We’re now up to 41 markets where we as a developer can choose to make an app available.  Since we cannot know what the rights are related to your app we cannot just publish to new markets as they come on-stream.  In order for an app to made available in these new countries you will have to go into your App Hub account and cross-submit every time new markets come online.  I was surprised at how many apps don’t do this.  I suspect many developers don’t know that they have to do this.  It’s such an easy thing to do that I thought I would do this as part of the first episode. It may be easy but if you stay on top of it you may find that you get a nice boost in downloads as new markets come online since you’ll be there first.  Rather than try to describe what needs to be done go ahead and watch the video (topic starts at about the 4:00 mark). Let me know what you think about this episode of Top Ranked. If you have questions about the videos, or about problems or issues you’re hitting or if you have topics that you think would be of interest to other devs on the Windows Phone platform then drop me a note. I’d be particularly interested in hearing about some of the best practices you’ve adopted that you think have raised your quality or your ratings/ranking in the Marketplace. I’ll be sure to give full credit and link love whenever I can. You can drop me a note via the contact form on my blog here:http://blogs.msdn.com/b/benriga/contact.aspx Or better yet follow me 586 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Supporting-All-Markets Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:26:27 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Supporting-All-Markets Ben Riga Ben Riga 2 http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Top-Ranked/Top-Ranked-Supporting-All-Markets/RSS Windows Phone Windows Phone Marketplace Self-Service Dynamics CRM solutions fly on Windows Azure As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been working with Shan McArthur from ADXSTUDIO to develop a demo that would illustrate how self-service web sites can connect directly to Dynamics CRM over the web to provide solutions that are both proactive and effective.  The information gathered or transactions entered in the self-service applications are immediately available in the Dynamics CRM system; the obvious place to track actions and outcomes.  The solution that we put together (OK so Shan and his team did most of the heavy lifting here Smiley) turned out fantastic. 

Kirill Tatatinov kindly asked me to showcase the solution back in November.  I showed it off during his keynote session at Convergence EMEA in Copenhagen.  The solution can be deployed on-premises, hosted by a partner or, as in our case, hosted by Microsoft (i.e. Windows Azure).  Naturally, Dynamics CRM can also be hosted in any of those modes as well.  In North America you might use CRM Online.  In Copenhagen we opted to use the great service of AlfaPeople.  They provided us a rock solid Dynamics CRM hosted platform. 

I just got the video for that from MS Studios so have a look.  I’m using the Silverlight Streaming service so you should be able to view this full screen:

The solution really shows off the power that ISVs get when using Dynamics CRM as a line-of-business application platform.  Not only do you get the platform that’ll get your app to market faster, you get to use the same skills to enhance that application and differentiate from competitors.  That could mean building compelling user experiences with Silverlight or it could mean hosting on the Azure Services Platform.  In this case, ADXSTUDIO is taking full advantage of the platform.  Hosting the app in Windows Azure.  Storing the content in SQL Data Services.  Using Live ID for authentication.  Performance, scalability, security and privacy with no capital expenditures.  Scale up or down when you need to.  Nice!

Update:  Looks like the transcript for the entire keynote was posted here.

Update #2: Moving this video to Channel 9 as the Silverlight Streaming Service has been decommissioned.

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Self-Service-Dynamics-CRM-solutions-fly-on-Windows-Azure As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been working with Shan McArthur from ADXSTUDIO to develop a demo that would illustrate how self-service web sites can connect directly to Dynamics CRM over the web to provide solutions that are both proactive and effective.  The information gathered or transactions entered in the self-service applications are immediately available in the Dynamics CRM system; the obvious place to track actions and outcomes.  The solution that we put together (OK so Shan and his team did most of the heavy lifting here ) turned out fantastic.  Kirill Tatatinov kindly asked me to showcase the solution back in November.  I showed it off during his keynote session at Convergence EMEA in Copenhagen.  The solution can be deployed on-premises, hosted by a partner or, as in our case, hosted by Microsoft (i.e. Windows Azure).  Naturally, Dynamics CRM can also be hosted in any of those modes as well.  In North America you might use CRM Online.  In Copenhagen we opted to use the great service of AlfaPeople.  They provided us a rock solid Dynamics CRM hosted platform.  I just got the video for that from MS Studios so have a look.  I’m using the Silverlight Streaming service so you should be able to view this full screen: The solution really shows off the power that ISVs get when using Dynamics CRM as a line-of-business application platform.  Not only do you get the platform that’ll get your app to market faster, you get to use the same skills to enhance that application and differentiate from competitors.  That could mean building compelling user experiences with Silverlight or it could mean hosting on the Azure Services Platform.  In this case, ADXSTUDIO is taking full advantage of the platform.  Hosting the app in Windows Azure.  Storing the content in SQL Data Services.  Using Live ID for authentication.  Performance, scal 477 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Self-Service-Dynamics-CRM-solutions-fly-on-Windows-Azure Thu, 13 May 2010 17:10:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Self-Service-Dynamics-CRM-solutions-fly-on-Windows-Azure Ben Riga Ben Riga 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Self-Service-Dynamics-CRM-solutions-fly-on-Windows-Azure/RSS Cloud Computing Dynamics CRM Dynamics CRM Online Microsoft Convergence Self-Service Silverlight SQL Azure Windows Live ID Windows Azure Lessons Learned: Domino's Pizza In this final "Azure Lessons Learned" post I chat with Jim Vitek, Director of Ecommerce for Domino’s Pizza. Domino’s is one of the largest ecommerce site out there. In 2009, Domino’s hit over 20 Million online transactions. That is one heck of a lot of pizza! As you can imagine Domino’s uses a ton of interesting technology in order to be able to scale to those kinds of levels.

Availability is a critical requirement here as they only have a small window to take a order. When a Domino’s customer is hungry and ready to place the order you had better be ready to take that order. If the site is not available they’ll go elsewhere and that order is lost.

As Jim states, Domino’s is a business of peaks. They have rushes every day (dinner). they have peak days of the week (Fridays) and they have peak days of the year (e.g. Super Bowl). Within about an hour on that one day of the year (i.e. Super Bowl Sunday) Domino’s has a peak that’s about 50% higher than any other day of the year.

If you think that through, you’ll realize that, although Domino’s has to provision capacity to be able to handle the very highest peak in traffic, a huge percentage of the time much of Domino’s computing infrastructure is running idle.

Clearly there is a huge benefit to optimizing computing capacity while being able handle peak demand and innovate on new products and capabilities. Domino’s is looking to Windows Azure to help them with that as they port their ecommerce solution.

Jim walked me through the Domino’s Build your Own Pizza app. It’s interesting to note it was running on Tomcat and written in Java all hosted in Windows Azure. That’s a clear testament that Windows Azure is as interoperable as Windows Server.

Jim’s main concern when building out this solution was that they remain portable. They expect to be able to run the same code in their own data centers or Windows Azure. Windows Azure allowed them to use the Java skills, tooling and infrastructure they were using in their own data center.

Domino’s menus, product availability and pricing of their pizzas is done locally based on the neighborhood of the store you’re ordering from. As a result when you build a pizza online it has to query the local store to provide you with the correct price you’ll pay before you order. They use Service Bus (now known as AppFabric) to get the orders to the stores and pricing back from the store. Eventually that will also provide the information required for their Pizza Tracker app.

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Dominos-Pizza In this final "Azure Lessons Learned" post I chat with Jim Vitek, Director of Ecommerce for Domino’s Pizza. Domino’s is one of the largest ecommerce site out there. In 2009, Domino’s hit over 20 Million online transactions. That is one heck of a lot of pizza! As you can imagine Domino’s uses a ton of interesting technology in order to be able to scale to those kinds of levels. Availability is a critical requirement here as they only have a small window to take a order. When a Domino’s customer is hungry and ready to place the order you had better be ready to take that order. If the site is not available they’ll go elsewhere and that order is lost. As Jim states, Domino’s is a business of peaks. They have rushes every day (dinner). they have peak days of the week (Fridays) and they have peak days of the year (e.g. Super Bowl). Within about an hour on that one day of the year (i.e. Super Bowl Sunday) Domino’s has a peak that’s about 50% higher than any other day of the year. If you think that through, you’ll realize that, although Domino’s has to provision capacity to be able to handle the very highest peak in traffic, a huge percentage of the time much of Domino’s computing infrastructure is running idle. Clearly there is a huge benefit to optimizing computing capacity while being able handle peak demand and innovate on new products and capabilities. Domino’s is looking to Windows Azure to help them with that as they port their ecommerce solution. Jim walked me through the Domino’s Build your Own Pizza app. It’s interesting to note it was running on Tomcat and written in Java all hosted in Windows Azure. That’s a clear testament that Windows Azure is as interoperable as Windows Server. Jim’s main concern when building out this solution was that they remain portable. They expect to be able to run the same code in their own data centers or Windows Azure. Windows Azure allowed them to use the Java skills, tooling and infrastructur 1061 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Dominos-Pizza Thu, 22 Apr 2010 18:29:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Dominos-Pizza Ben Riga Ben Riga 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Dominos-Pizza/RSS AppFabric Azure Lessons Learned ecommerce Java Super Bowl Windows Azure Windows Azure AppFabric Windows Azure Lessons Learned: Archetype In this episode I talk to Danny Riddell and Luigi Rosso, CEO and CTO of Archetype.  Archetype is a rich internet application (RIA) development and design shop.  They provide both products and development/design services using Silverlight and Flash with .NET and SQL Server back-ends. 

Archetype saw the trend around video and media related solutions moving to the cloud and took the initiative to build out their end-to-end solution.  They had a couple of projects where they had to be able to handle large scale very quickly.  In general they had trouble scaling up quickly and then back down once the project was over. Windows Azure gave them that capability in both their services and product businesses.

One of their products is a media content management system called Archetype Media Platform (AMP) that allows enterprises to control all their media assets.  Danny and Luigi spent some time here showing off some of the video content management and editing capabilities of the AMP solution running on Windows Azure.

Towards the end of the video Luigi shares some of his experiences porting to Windows Azure (first cut working in less than a week).  The solution architecture use web roles for the front end and web services as well as worker roles for various activities in the background (e.g. encoding or analyzing media).  SQL Azure is used for content metadata and Windows Azure blob storage for the video files.

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Archetype In this episode I talk to Danny Riddell and Luigi Rosso, CEO and CTO of Archetype.  Archetype is a rich internet application (RIA) development and design shop.  They provide both products and development/design services using Silverlight and Flash with .NET and SQL Server back-ends.  Archetype saw the trend around video and media related solutions moving to the cloud and took the initiative to build out their end-to-end solution.  They had a couple of projects where they had to be able to handle large scale very quickly.  In general they had trouble scaling up quickly and then back down once the project was over. Windows Azure gave them that capability in both their services and product businesses. One of their products is a media content management system called Archetype Media Platform (AMP) that allows enterprises to control all their media assets.  Danny and Luigi spent some time here showing off some of the video content management and editing capabilities of the AMP solution running on Windows Azure. Towards the end of the video Luigi shares some of his experiences porting to Windows Azure (first cut working in less than a week).  The solution architecture use web roles for the front end and web services as well as worker roles for various activities in the background (e.g. encoding or analyzing media).  SQL Azure is used for content metadata and Windows Azure blob storage for the video files. 1371 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Archetype Sat, 27 Mar 2010 00:30:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Archetype Ben Riga Ben Riga 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Archetype/RSS Azure Lessons Learned Media SQL Azure Windows Azure Windows Azure Lessons Learned: Sitemasher In this episode of Azure Lessons Learned I chat with Phil Calvin, CTO of Sitemasher.  Sitemasher is a web site platform for service providers.  They have an interactive environment for web designers, user experience designers, and web content owners to build on.  Their target is more user experience html and css designers, service providers and agencies building highly scalable web sites.

For Sitemasher, Azure provides uptime and availability over their previous hosting in dual colo spaces in L.A. and Vancouver.  They’ve now moved to Azure so they don’t have to worry about the infrastructure.

Phil showed a few sites that clearly illustrate the target for their product: a professional design tool for web professionals.  He also shows how their design tools allow web designers and javascript jockeys to visually design pages, forms, databases and manage the related sites and data.

From an architectural point of view the solution is built with shared-everything multi-tenancy in mind whether on-prem, hosted or in the cloud.  Related to that, Phil helped out in a session on multi-tenancy at PDC (have a look at it here).

The Sitemasher architecture before the move to Azure included multiple instances of SQL Server 2008 as well as multiple instances of Windows Server 2008 running IIS 7.   The solution is a C# ASP.NET application running across that infrastructure.  Naturally there were load balancers in front of all that to help with scale.  As a small startup they had to manage all of that infrastructure.

With Azure they don’t have to worry about any of that.  They also no longer have to worry about uptime, backups or any of the individual hardware systems.  Instead they focus on their core intellectual property and core value which is innovation around the software itself.  They’ve built a C# web role for the front end as well a worker role for caching using memcached.  Naturally they are now using SQL Azure for database scale out.

The video is a little dated (sorry got busy with MIX :[  ) so where Phil talks about getting ready to move they are now actually on the Windows Azure platform.

Phil has some very good tips and best practices toward the end of the video where he talks about how he ported over to Windows Azure and some of the lessons he learned.

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Sitemasher In this episode of Azure Lessons Learned I chat with Phil Calvin, CTO of Sitemasher.  Sitemasher is a web site platform for service providers.  They have an interactive environment for web designers, user experience designers, and web content owners to build on.  Their target is more user experience html and css designers, service providers and agencies building highly scalable web sites. For Sitemasher, Azure provides uptime and availability over their previous hosting in dual colo spaces in L.A. and Vancouver.  They’ve now moved to Azure so they don’t have to worry about the infrastructure. Phil showed a few sites that clearly illustrate the target for their product: a professional design tool for web professionals.  He also shows how their design tools allow web designers and javascript jockeys to visually design pages, forms, databases and manage the related sites and data. From an architectural point of view the solution is built with shared-everything multi-tenancy in mind whether on-prem, hosted or in the cloud.  Related to that, Phil helped out in a session on multi-tenancy at PDC (have a look at it here). The Sitemasher architecture before the move to Azure included multiple instances of SQL Server 2008 as well as multiple instances of Windows Server 2008 running IIS 7.   The solution is a C# ASP.NET application running across that infrastructure.  Naturally there were load balancers in front of all that to help with scale.  As a small startup they had to manage all of that infrastructure. With Azure they don’t have to worry about any of that.  They also no longer have to worry about uptime, backups or any of the individual hardware systems.  Instead they focus on their core intellectual property and core value which is innovation around the software itself.  They’ve built a C# web role for the front end as well a worker role for caching using memcached.  Naturally 1594 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Sitemasher Fri, 26 Mar 2010 22:50:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Sitemasher Ben Riga Ben Riga 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Sitemasher/RSS Azure Lessons Learned Multi-tenancy SQL Azure Windows Azure Windows Azure Lessons Learned: RiskMetrics In this episode of “Azure Lessons Learned” Rob Fraser from RiskMetrics talks about the work they’ve done with Windows Azure to scale some of their heavy computational workloads out to thousands of nodes on Windows Azure.

RiskMetrics specializes in helping to manage risk for financial institutions and government services.  The solution they built on Windows Azure is primarily for calculating financial risk for their clients.  Calculating the risk on portfolios of financial assets is an incredibly compute-intensive problem to solve (Monte Carlo simulations on top of Monte Carlo simulations).  There is an ongoing and increasing demand for this type of computation.  RiskMetrics calculations require enormous computational power but the need for that power tends to come in peaks.  That means the required hardware is idle for much of the time.  Windows Azure solves this problem by allowing RiskMetrics to quickly acquire the very large number of required processors, use them for a short time and then release them.

To give you a sense of the scale RiskMetrics is talking about, the initial target is to use 10,000 worker roles on Windows Azure.  And that’s just a beginning as Rob thinks they could eventually be using as many as 30,000.

While using Windows Azure may help control costs, the real motivation is having the kind of compute power they need to build analytic services for their clients that they just wouldn’t otherwise be able to do easily.

Rob goes in to some depth on the architectural pattern they devised to ensure the efficient flow of work packets from their data center into the cloud for processing and then back again with the results.  The architecture is an interesting hybrid of on-premises and cloud computing.

Rob (along with his colleague Phil Jacob) also presented some of this in a PDC session.

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-RiskMetrics In this episode of “Azure Lessons Learned” Rob Fraser from RiskMetrics talks about the work they’ve done with Windows Azure to scale some of their heavy computational workloads out to thousands of nodes on Windows Azure. RiskMetrics specializes in helping to manage risk for financial institutions and government services.  The solution they built on Windows Azure is primarily for calculating financial risk for their clients.  Calculating the risk on portfolios of financial assets is an incredibly compute-intensive problem to solve (Monte Carlo simulations on top of Monte Carlo simulations).  There is an ongoing and increasing demand for this type of computation.  RiskMetrics calculations require enormous computational power but the need for that power tends to come in peaks.  That means the required hardware is idle for much of the time.  Windows Azure solves this problem by allowing RiskMetrics to quickly acquire the very large number of required processors, use them for a short time and then release them. To give you a sense of the scale RiskMetrics is talking about, the initial target is to use 10,000 worker roles on Windows Azure.  And that’s just a beginning as Rob thinks they could eventually be using as many as 30,000. While using Windows Azure may help control costs, the real motivation is having the kind of compute power they need to build analytic services for their clients that they just wouldn’t otherwise be able to do easily. Rob goes in to some depth on the architectural pattern they devised to ensure the efficient flow of work packets from their data center into the cloud for processing and then back again with the results.  The architecture is an interesting hybrid of on-premises and cloud computing. Rob (along with his colleague Phil Jacob) also presented some of this in a PDC session. 1008 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-RiskMetrics Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:32:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-RiskMetrics Ben Riga Ben Riga 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-RiskMetrics/RSS Azure Lessons Learned High Performance Computing HPC Windows Azure SQL Azure Lessons Learned: ESRI In this episode of Lessons Learned I chat with Rex Hansen of ESRI.  Rex works on MapIt; a product for visualizing enterprise data on maps.  This was recently released as a on-premises product that enables developers to work with the tabular and spatial data in SQL Server 2008 and integrate that data with maps on ArcGIS online and Bing Maps. 

ESRI has been working to extend that functionality to Windows Azure and SQL Azure.  MapIt takes advantage of SQL Azure to consume location-based data.  The MapIt spatial data service can be deployed as a role on Windows Azure and provides spatial data capabilities to applications using SQL Azure.  This provides a valuable service to folks that miss the spatial data types they were used to using in SQL Server.

Rex walked me through building a Silverlight application with their Silverlight Control Toolkit in Expression Blend.  As Rex mentions in the video ESRI has released the source code for their Silverlight toolkit controls.  You can find those on CodePlex here: http://ESRISilverlight.codeplex.com/

It sounds like ESRI has some big plans for where they want to take the MapIt product to provide even better integration with SQL Azure.

You can find out more about the ESRI MapIt product here.

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/SQL-Azure-Lessons-Learned-ESRI In this episode of Lessons Learned I chat with Rex Hansen of ESRI.  Rex works on MapIt; a product for visualizing enterprise data on maps.  This was recently released as a on-premises product that enables developers to work with the tabular and spatial data in SQL Server 2008 and integrate that data with maps on ArcGIS online and Bing Maps.  ESRI has been working to extend that functionality to Windows Azure and SQL Azure.  MapIt takes advantage of SQL Azure to consume location-based data.  The MapIt spatial data service can be deployed as a role on Windows Azure and provides spatial data capabilities to applications using SQL Azure.  This provides a valuable service to folks that miss the spatial data types they were used to using in SQL Server. Rex walked me through building a Silverlight application with their Silverlight Control Toolkit in Expression Blend.  As Rex mentions in the video ESRI has released the source code for their Silverlight toolkit controls.  You can find those on CodePlex here: http://ESRISilverlight.codeplex.com/ It sounds like ESRI has some big plans for where they want to take the MapIt product to provide even better integration with SQL Azure. You can find out more about the ESRI MapIt product here. 1028 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/SQL-Azure-Lessons-Learned-ESRI Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:08:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/SQL-Azure-Lessons-Learned-ESRI Ben Riga Ben Riga 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/SQL-Azure-Lessons-Learned-ESRI/RSS Azure Lessons Learned Bing Maps Maps Spatial SQL Azure Windows Azure SQL Azure Lessons Learned: Telerik Telerik is one of the more popular component vendors building good stuff for ASP.NET, Silverlight, and WPF.  I was intrigued by the interest they have taken in the Windows Azure Platform.  Naturally all the UI components just work on the platform with no changes required.  Telerik has gone further in looking at how they can adapt their Object Relational Mapper (ORM) and Content Management System (CMS) technologies to take advantage of the benefits of Azure.

Stephen Forte is their Chief Strategy Officer (love that title Smiley) responsible for thinking about their new technology directions.  In this episode of Lessons Learned, Stephen shows me how they’re now able to go from SQL Azure tables to persistent classes when developing applications using their OpenAccess ORM product.

The process of implementing a SQL Azure provider for OpenAccess was fairly straightforward.  Telerik ran unit tests of their existing SQL Server provider against SQL Azure to find the differences.  They found the few minor issues and were able to get a working version running in three weeks or so.

The biggest difference they found between SQL Server and SQL Azure was the data types.  SQL Azure supports most of the SQL Server data types but some (like spatial, text, etc) are not supported.  Another difference was multiple active result sets (MARS).  This one was a little trickier and with some work they were able to get the same end-result using different t-sql.

The OpenAccess ORM product is available now.  Telerik is also dogfooding it internally using another of their products: Sitefinity CMS.  The next release of Sitefinity will then support SQL Azure as a data store.

A few links mentioned in this episode:

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/SQL-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Telerik Telerik is one of the more popular component vendors building good stuff for ASP.NET, Silverlight, and WPF.  I was intrigued by the interest they have taken in the Windows Azure Platform.  Naturally all the UI components just work on the platform with no changes required.  Telerik has gone further in looking at how they can adapt their Object Relational Mapper (ORM) and Content Management System (CMS) technologies to take advantage of the benefits of Azure. Stephen Forte is their Chief Strategy Officer (love that title ) responsible for thinking about their new technology directions.  In this episode of Lessons Learned, Stephen shows me how they’re now able to go from SQL Azure tables to persistent classes when developing applications using their OpenAccess ORM product. The process of implementing a SQL Azure provider for OpenAccess was fairly straightforward.  Telerik ran unit tests of their existing SQL Server provider against SQL Azure to find the differences.  They found the few minor issues and were able to get a working version running in three weeks or so. The biggest difference they found between SQL Server and SQL Azure was the data types.  SQL Azure supports most of the SQL Server data types but some (like spatial, text, etc) are not supported.  Another difference was multiple active result sets (MARS).  This one was a little trickier and with some work they were able to get the same end-result using different t-sql. The OpenAccess ORM product is available now.  Telerik is also dogfooding it internally using another of their products: Sitefinity CMS.  The next release of Sitefinity will then support SQL Azure as a data store. A few links mentioned in this episode: Telerik team blogs are here Stephen’s blog is here OpenAccess ORM product page Sitefinity CMS product page 713 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/SQL-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Telerik Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:02:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/SQL-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Telerik Ben Riga Ben Riga 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/SQL-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Telerik/RSS Azure Lessons Learned CMS Object Relational Mapping SQL Azure Windows Azure Windows Azure Lessons Learned: Quest Software In this episode of Azure Lessons Learned I chat with Dmitry Sotnikov, new product research manager with Quest Software.  Quest, as you probably know, is a huge global ISV focused primarily on Systems Management software.

Quest is an early adopter of the Windows Azure platform.  They’ve been working on a new offering for their various management business.  They’ve built out an extensive services framework as well as a few service offerings on that framework. 

Quest has hundreds of solutions for the enterprise.  These are your typical on-premises that would normally require hardware and people to install and maintain those solutions.  The Quest OnDemand project Dmitry is working would extend those offerings to the small and medium business by making many of the solutions available as subscription services.  The first 3 offerings are Recovery Manager OnDemand for Active Directory, InTrust OnDemand event log management, and Site Administrator Reports OnDemand for SharePoint.  These are now available in beta.

Dmitry walks us through the experience of setting up Recovery Manager OnDemand to provide backup and recovery of AD.  The solution running in Windows Azure does most of the work in the cloud while sending requests to the local infrastructure via agents that are running locally.  There is no need to set up servers or install anything beyond that simple local agent service.

Dmitry was very open about the process they went through to adapt their existing solutions to this new subscription model.  He mentions that they were able to re-use about 50% of the code for one of their solutions (Recovery Manager).

Since Quest OnDemand is meant to be on solution with many different component offerings it was important that there be a consistent framework across all those offerings (including login authentication/access control, portal, subscription/payment/billing).  Even within Quest I think they were a little surprised as to how fast they could port applications over once that framework was in place and available to re-use.

Dmitry also goes into detail about the architecture they have built out for this set of services including the portal, Windows Identity Foundation (formerly Geneva) Security Token Service (STS), and the individual services.  He also is very open about what they learned along the way of this development.  It’s interesting to note that the bulk of the Quest products are on-premises so although they had many large installations there had never been a call for super-scalable super-secure multi-customer/multi-tenant deployments like the one required by Quest OnDemand.

I love that Windows Azure played such a big role in helping Quest to adapt the way that they do business.

Have a look at the Quest OnDemand Service here:

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Quest-Software In this episode of Azure Lessons Learned I chat with Dmitry Sotnikov, new product research manager with Quest Software.  Quest, as you probably know, is a huge global ISV focused primarily on Systems Management software. Quest is an early adopter of the Windows Azure platform.  They’ve been working on a new offering for their various management business.  They’ve built out an extensive services framework as well as a few service offerings on that framework.  Quest has hundreds of solutions for the enterprise.  These are your typical on-premises that would normally require hardware and people to install and maintain those solutions.  The Quest OnDemand project Dmitry is working would extend those offerings to the small and medium business by making many of the solutions available as subscription services.  The first 3 offerings are Recovery Manager OnDemand for Active Directory, InTrust OnDemand event log management, and Site Administrator Reports OnDemand for SharePoint.  These are now available in beta. Dmitry walks us through the experience of setting up Recovery Manager OnDemand to provide backup and recovery of AD.  The solution running in Windows Azure does most of the work in the cloud while sending requests to the local infrastructure via agents that are running locally.  There is no need to set up servers or install anything beyond that simple local agent service. Dmitry was very open about the process they went through to adapt their existing solutions to this new subscription model.  He mentions that they were able to re-use about 50% of the code for one of their solutions (Recovery Manager). Since Quest OnDemand is meant to be on solution with many different component offerings it was important that there be a consistent framework across all those offerings (including login authentication/access control, portal, subscription/payment/billing).  Even within Quest I think 1425 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Quest-Software Wed, 06 Jan 2010 01:24:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Quest-Software Ben Riga Ben Riga 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Quest-Software/RSS Azure Lessons Learned Windows Azure Windows Identity Foundation Windows Azure Lessons Learned: CCH In this episode of Lessons Learned we talk with Jones Pavan and Gurleen Randhawa of CCH about tax and accounting!  No wait stick around, that stuff can be exciting too.  Yes, really!  Smiley

The good folks at CCH (a Wolters Kluwer company) have built an interesting service on Windows Azure.  The solution we discuss here is a sales tax calculation service which they offer to other accounting firms.  This is an existing on-premises product that they are now moving to the cloud.

The existing product was a stateless web service that was designed to live behind the firewall.  The service is meant to be called directly via a plug-in in an accounting firms ERP system (for example, Dynamics AX).  To move that to the cloud CCH wrapped the web services in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

They had been using another third party RAD development tool called CA Plex.  The Plex runtime was added to the project and copied out to the cloud.  One of the things they quickly learned is that the nature of the cloud app is to be stateless and that required special consideration when moving on-premises apps (for example the Plex tool was caching db connections behind the scenes).

Anther important consideration was security.  They were not ready to move to ACS so for the initial release they used X.509 certs, ADFS and message-based security to establish trust relationships with the server.

BTW, the Windows Azure marketing folks have already published a case study on the CCH solution (available here).

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-CCH In this episode of Lessons Learned we talk with Jones Pavan and Gurleen Randhawa of CCH about tax and accounting!  No wait stick around, that stuff can be exciting too.  Yes, really!  The good folks at CCH (a Wolters Kluwer company) have built an interesting service on Windows Azure.  The solution we discuss here is a sales tax calculation service which they offer to other accounting firms.  This is an existing on-premises product that they are now moving to the cloud. The existing product was a stateless web service that was designed to live behind the firewall.  The service is meant to be called directly via a plug-in in an accounting firms ERP system (for example, Dynamics AX).  To move that to the cloud CCH wrapped the web services in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). They had been using another third party RAD development tool called CA Plex.  The Plex runtime was added to the project and copied out to the cloud.  One of the things they quickly learned is that the nature of the cloud app is to be stateless and that required special consideration when moving on-premises apps (for example the Plex tool was caching db connections behind the scenes). Anther important consideration was security.  They were not ready to move to ACS so for the initial release they used X.509 certs, ADFS and message-based security to establish trust relationships with the server. BTW, the Windows Azure marketing folks have already published a case study on the CCH solution (available here). 896 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-CCH Wed, 30 Dec 2009 22:27:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-CCH Ben Riga Ben Riga 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-CCH/RSS ADFS ADFS 2.0 Azure Lessons Learned Dynamics AX SQL Azure WCF Windows Azure Windows Communication Foundation Windows Azure Lessons Learned: Active Web Solutions There are not many solutions that can claim to have saved lives.  In this episode of Lessons Learned I chat with Richard Prodger of Active Web Solutions about the Windows Azure project they’ve been working on that tracks fishermen in real time.  It monitors not only their location but also their status so as to immediately raise the alarm if help is needed (e.g. fallen off the side of a boat or pressed a panic button).  This solution is already credited with saving the lives of 9 fishermen.

Electronics on the fishing vessels communicate directly via satellite to the Windows Azure solution.  Those messages are processed via Windows Azure worker roles and routed using the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus to various on-premises systems for review and action.  The desktop client overlay marine charts onto Bing maps so that the coast guard gets a visual representation of the exact location of boats that have raised alarms.

The good folks at Active Web Solutions have published some of the source code that they developed to “automatically bridge arbitrary TCP endpoints, handling any intermediate firewall traversal.”  The code is available on CodePlex as the SocketShifter project:

http://socketshifter.codeplex.com/

If this is interesting, you should also have a look at Port Bridge published by Clemens Vasters on his blog.  Clemens describes it as “Socketshifter’s older brother”

http://blogs.msdn.com/clemensv/archive/2009/11/18/port-bridge.aspx

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Active-Web-Solutions There are not many solutions that can claim to have saved lives.  In this episode of Lessons Learned I chat with Richard Prodger of Active Web Solutions about the Windows Azure project they’ve been working on that tracks fishermen in real time.  It monitors not only their location but also their status so as to immediately raise the alarm if help is needed (e.g. fallen off the side of a boat or pressed a panic button).  This solution is already credited with saving the lives of 9 fishermen. Electronics on the fishing vessels communicate directly via satellite to the Windows Azure solution.  Those messages are processed via Windows Azure worker roles and routed using the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus to various on-premises systems for review and action.  The desktop client overlay marine charts onto Bing maps so that the coast guard gets a visual representation of the exact location of boats that have raised alarms. The good folks at Active Web Solutions have published some of the source code that they developed to “automatically bridge arbitrary TCP endpoints, handling any intermediate firewall traversal.”  The code is available on CodePlex as the SocketShifter project: http://socketshifter.codeplex.com/ If this is interesting, you should also have a look at Port Bridge published by Clemens Vasters on his blog.  Clemens describes it as “Socketshifter’s older brother” http://blogs.msdn.com/clemensv/archive/2009/11/18/port-bridge.aspx 742 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Active-Web-Solutions Tue, 29 Dec 2009 23:32:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Active-Web-Solutions Ben Riga Ben Riga 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Active-Web-Solutions/RSS .NET Service Bus AppFabric Azure Lessons Learned Location Service Bus Windows Azure Windows Azure Lessons Learned: GoGrid One question that is often asked is how hosters can benefit from the Windows Azure Platform.  While the platform can be used to deploy many types of web apps we expect many partners including hosters to develop on top of the Windows Azure platform infrastructure.  In this episode of Azure Lessons Learned I chat with Paul Lappas, VP Engineering at GoGrid and Mehul Shah and Madhavrao Pachupate from Blue Star Infotech.  GoGrid has been working on a hybrid solution that builds on the GoGrid infrastructure to assist in development and load testing of Windows Azure applications.

For more information on the GoGrid solution for Windows Azure have a look here: http://www.gogrid.com/azure/

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-GoGrid One question that is often asked is how hosters can benefit from the Windows Azure Platform.  While the platform can be used to deploy many types of web apps we expect many partners including hosters to develop on top of the Windows Azure platform infrastructure.  In this episode of Azure Lessons Learned I chat with Paul Lappas, VP Engineering at GoGrid and Mehul Shah and Madhavrao Pachupate from Blue Star Infotech.  GoGrid has been working on a hybrid solution that builds on the GoGrid infrastructure to assist in development and load testing of Windows Azure applications. For more information on the GoGrid solution for Windows Azure have a look here: http://www.gogrid.com/azure/ 1009 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-GoGrid Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:21:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-GoGrid Ben Riga Ben Riga 1 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-GoGrid/RSS Azure Lessons Learned Hosting Load Testing Windows Azure Windows Azure Lessons Learned: Invensys Invensys and Aleksey Savateyev, Senior Architect in Microsoft’s Global ISV group working with Invensys.  Invensys is well known for industrial automation and control systems.  They’ve been working to develop a system for the power industry to manage the large network of smart meters that will be used to build out smart grids delivering electricity from suppliers to consumers.  To do this Invensys is using Windows Azure AppFabric (formerly called “.NET Services”).  The AppFabric Service Bus is the magic that allows this type of application.  It allows those meters not only to connect across the cloud to on-premises systems but also does it a way that can scale to the millions of homes and businesses that will form the smart grids. ]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Invensys In this episode of Windows Azure Lessons Learned I chat with Paul Forney, System Architect for Invensys and Aleksey Savateyev, Senior Architect in Microsoft’s Global ISV group working with Invensys.  Invensys is well known for industrial automation and control systems.  They’ve been working to develop a system for the power industry to manage the large network of smart meters that will be used to build out smart grids delivering electricity from suppliers to consumers.  To do this Invensys is using Windows Azure AppFabric (formerly called “.NET Services”).  The AppFabric Service Bus is the magic that allows this type of application.  It allows those meters not only to connect across the cloud to on-premises systems but also does it a way that can scale to the millions of homes and businesses that will form the smart grids. 1327 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Invensys Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:34:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Invensys Ben Riga Ben Riga 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Windows-Azure-Lessons-Learned-Invensys/RSS .NET Service Bus .Net Services AppFabric Azure Lessons Learned Windows Azure Windows Azure AppFabric SQL Azure Lessons Learned: Embarcadero Database tooling is important for many developers and DBAs as they manage numerous databases across the enterprise and the cloud.  In this episode of Azure Lessons Learned I chat with Scott Walz, Sr. Director Product Management at Embarcadero Technologies responsible for the DBArtisan product.

Scott walks us through the DBArtisan product to show how SQL Azure integrates seamlessly into this cross-DBMS product.  It was interesting to hear how quickly the effort to add SQL Azure went.  I think that bodes well for other tooling in general for SQL Azure.  Since SQL Azure is so very close to SQL Server it should be relatively simple for ISVs to add SQL Azure support to products that support SQL Server today.

Scott mentions a trial of DBArtisan for SQL Azure.  You can grab that here.

As always let me know your comments below.

]]> http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Azure-Lessons-Learned-Embarcadero Database tooling is important for many developers and DBAs as they manage numerous databases across the enterprise and the cloud.  In this episode of Azure Lessons Learned I chat with Scott Walz, Sr. Director Product Management at Embarcadero Technologies responsible for the DBArtisan product. Scott walks us through the DBArtisan product to show how SQL Azure integrates seamlessly into this cross-DBMS product.  It was interesting to hear how quickly the effort to add SQL Azure went.  I think that bodes well for other tooling in general for SQL Azure.  Since SQL Azure is so very close to SQL Server it should be relatively simple for ISVs to add SQL Azure support to products that support SQL Server today. Scott mentions a trial of DBArtisan for SQL Azure.  You can grab that here. As always let me know your comments below. 845 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Azure-Lessons-Learned-Embarcadero Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:56:00 GMT http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Azure-Lessons-Learned-Embarcadero Ben Riga Ben Riga 0 http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/benriga/Azure-Lessons-Learned-Embarcadero/RSS Azure Lessons Learned SQL Azure Windows Azure