Perry Stathopoulos

Cloud Storage Studio: Essential tool for developing with Windows Azure

pstatho — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:40:46 +0000

If you are doing any serious development on Windows Azure at some point you will want to look at the data that is stored in the cloud (either dev fabric or azure fabric). I‘ve tried several tools and so far by far Cloud Storage Studio by Cerebrata.

You can manage multiple accounts which is very handy. All three storage types (Blobs, Table, and Queues) can be managed very intuitively through the interface.

Go ahead and give it a try you’ll be happy you did.

How to fix Silverlight 3 with Azure May SDK

pstatho — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:00:40 +0000

After upgrading my project from Silverlight 2 to Silverlight 3, my Azure project would not load . Looks like the upgrade for Azure assumes you have VS 2010.

Fortunately the fix is simple in 2 easy steps (click images to see them better):

1) Renumber the tools version from 4.0 to 3.5

2) Remove the text “ for VS2010”

Hope this helps

Accessing Drive Shares in Vista

pstatho — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 14:37:10 +0000

With Vista you can no longer access the default drive shares ex: C$ (or any other administrattive shares for that matter) by default anymore.

Fine, I can accept that, but it should have been clearer on how to re-enable it for those that want/need it, but I digress.

Anyway, I finally decided to look into some more and found the following KB article that explains how to re-enable it.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951016

Hope this helps

Perfmon for WCF Services on IIS7

pstatho — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:12:35 +0000

If you are running benchmarks with perfmon in Windows 2008 64-bit you can no longer user the ASP.NET and ASP.NET Application of perfmon is your application is in 32-bit mode.

As a better alternative anyway, is to use the new ServiceModel perfmon. You need to add the diagnostics section in the web.config like this:

<system.serviceModel>
    <diagnostics performanceCounters="All" />
system.serviceModel>

Then you will have access to metrics for each operation(method) in each endpoint in the ServiceModel* categories of perfmon. Really nice!

For more details:

http://blogs.msdn.com/wenlong/archive/2007/09/07/how-to-use-performance-counters-to-diagnose-performance-of-wcf-applications.aspx

Update Detached Entities

pstatho — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:00:15 +0000

Probably one of the most asked questions with LINQ to SQL, is how do you update detached entities. Often people will simply resort to doing a SELECT to get the entity into the datacontext and then update the data.

Steve Michelotti describes how to do it here:

http://geekswithblogs.net/michelotti/archive/2007/12/17/117791.aspx

and if your entity has child objects check this post out:

http://geekswithblogs.net/michelotti/archive/2007/12/30/118076.aspx

Entity Framework Tutorial/Overview

pstatho — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:06:57 +0000

For an excellent write up on Entity Framework that is both an overview and tutorial in one, see Stefan Cruysberghs 3 part series.

It covers enough that it’s not too much information, but detailed enough to get you going rapidly.

Optimistic Concurrency Updates with Entity Framework

pstatho — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:01:10 +0000

Cesar de la Torre has an excellent write up for managing concurrency with the Entity Framework.

Dynamic LINQ

pstatho — Sat, 10 May 2008 10:36:50 +0000

Good blog post the describes using dynamic LINQ to create lambda expressions to use in LINQ.

Silverlight Resources

pstatho — Sat, 10 May 2008 10:34:30 +0000

Mike Snow has a list of Silverlight resources here. Check out the comments for other links as well.

Improve LINQ to SQL performance

pstatho — Mon, 05 May 2008 12:21:25 +0000

While it is easy to get carried away with using LINQ to SQL, developers have the responsibility to understand what is going on under the hood and to ensure that things are running as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

The following blog post describes 10 tips from improving LINQ to SQL performance, highly recommended for anyone using LINQ to SQL.