Application Insights is a Business Tool

Applications Insights is an extensible analytics service that monitors live applications. It helps us detect and diagnose performance issues, and understand what users actually do with our applications. This is especially useful when we maintain applications, because it allows us to identify applications that have active users. And more specifically, we have a means to identify applications that have been abandoned.

The Greenfield to Brownfield Transition

There’s a special moment in every project where it transitions from a Greenfield (new) project to a Brownfield (legacy) project. This moment usually occurs close to the second release.

As developers, we love Greenfield projects. It’s a new adventure where creativity runs wild and free.

The transition of a project from Greenfield to a Brownfield is an event that we can all appreciate. It’s delicate and requires attention from everyone on the team.

How do you build features on #Azure?

For the past few months my team and I have been using git-flow to build a new REST API for an existing cloud native application. The challenge was impressive, but this is how we did it.

Our team is spread across many geographical locations. We use a mix & match of best practices to help us communicate. For example, we use Skype, it’s on all our devices (phones, tables, laptops and desktops…) and makes collaboration easy! Our code lives in Git and is continuously built and released to our integration environment for validation.

Our team isn’t unique. Many of my colleagues work in distributed teams. Surprisingly, we all share the same common challenges. Time zones, cultural differences and language barriers are now part of each decision we make. Fortunately we all speak a common language, C#.

With this added complexity, how did we go to production on time? We implemented a process that we continuously tweak and adjust to meet our goals.

Drive Productivity by Limiting Work in Progress

We were a team that finally worked as a team! Identifying and removing blocking issues from the work in progress (WIP) became everyone’s focus. Our communication improved and knowledge was shared. This resulted in more contributions from everyone on the team.

Continue Reading...

My Reading List for 2014

Every year I hunt for new books to read. 2013 was a wild year where I didn’t really have a plan in place and my reading was all over the place. Wanting to get organized in 2014 is all about not missing out.

Last year I read some great books about SQL Server, Windows Azure and methodology, this year I want to focus on catching up some more on those key books that greatly affected our industry. Are there any books that shouldn’t be on my list? What’s missing from the list?

• Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
• Executable Specifications with Scrum: A Practical Guide to Agile Requirements Discovery
• A CQRS Journey
• Exploring CQRS and Event Sourcing (Microsoft patterns & practices)
• Data Access for Highly-Scalable Solutions: Using SQL, NoSQL, and Polyglot Persistence (Microsoft patterns & practices)
• Dependency Injection with Unity (Microsoft patterns & practices)
• Developing Big Data Solutions in the Cloud
• How to Stop Sucking and Be Awesome Instead
• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
• Planning Extreme Programming
• Extreme Programming in Practice
• Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams
• Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
• Agile Estimating and Planning
• Managing Agile Projects
• Service Design Patterns: Fundamental Design Solutions for SOAP/WSDL and RESTful Web Services
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
• Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models
• User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development
• Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Enterprise Library, 2nd Edition (Microsoft patterns & practices)
• TypeScript for C# Programmers
• Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

I probably won’t get to read everything on my list, but with your help I can try to pick the best ones to read this year and continue working down the list next year.

2013 was a slow year for reading, because my focus was mostly geared towards sharing what I had learnt about Windows Azure through my blog. This year is going to be different, I will try to balance my efforts between writing and catching up on the past.

Take Control – Windows Azure SQL Database Application Life Cycle Management Made Easy!

Think back to projects where you had to maintain databases using update scripts. They’re usually applied using home grown solutions and can cause some major headaches. 

Microsoft has been developing the Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools for a while and I strongly recommend using them to develop and deploy your Windows Azure SQL Database.

As you may already know, Windows Azure SQL Database doesn’t support the full range of features available in SQL Server 2012. Using the Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools will help you identify issues early by validating your schema against the target platform. The tools will provide IntelliSense and make it possible to manage database versions by storing scripts in TFS. Furthermore, they simplify deployments by comparing the new schema against the destination database in order to generate an update script.