Getting to Know Azure Mobile App Cont.

Microsoft Azure Mobile App has recently gone GA (General Availability) and has definitely captured my attention. Mobile App is a tremendous accelerator that enables us to go from an idea to a functional prototype quickly. Then, we can continue to build on that initial investment to create a robust production ready app. Finally, this post is all about using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to build and publish apps to HockeyApp, so that we can test and assess quality before our apps make it to our favorite app Stores.

So far, we’re using Template10 to build a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) Mobile App and we’re using Microsoft Account as an Identity Provider (IDP). This all got built using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and distributed to testers using HockeyApp.

Now that we’ve got the basics out of the way, let’s build something.

Working with Data

As previously mentioned, Azure Mobile App is an accelerator and the goal of this post is to walk through the pieces that allow us to Create, Read, Update and soft Delete (a.k.a. CRUD) data from an Azure SQL Database.

Book – Building Interactive Queries with LINQPad

A few months ago Sébastien Finot was approached to write a book about working with LINQ using LINQPad and I had the honor of being one of the technical reviewers.

If you need to interact with databases, XML, in-memory collections, or remote services, LINQ can make your life simpler. The best way to discover LINQ is with the help of LINQPad, a free IDE whose first goal is to make sure that writing and interacting with your LINQ query is fun and easy. More generally, LINQPad is a C#/VB/F# scratchpad that instantly executes any expression, statement block, or program with rich output formatting and a wealth of features.

With Building Interactive Queries with LINQPad, you will quickly learn everything you need to know to start using LINQ. To accelerate your learning curve, you will discover how to use LINQPad and its features to test your queries interactively and experiment with all the options offered by LINQ.

In all probability, you already know C#, but have you had a chance to try out LINQ? Building Interactive Queries with LINQPad will introduce you to everything LINQ can offer and will let you interact with every example in LINQPad, LINQ’s best companion.

You will learn how to build and experiment with interactive queries with this practical guide illustrated with short and detailed code samples. You will also get acquainted with other cool applications of LINQpad such as testing, code snippet generation, and so on, along with a broad approach to LINQ (to object, to SQL, to XML, and so on).

ADO.Net DataTable why did I ever stop using you?

Recently, I started working on a Windows Azure project which involves working with large datasets. The original design used a normalized database and the application would pull a few megabytes worth of data every time it had to accomplish a task. Needles to say that this wasn’t the most efficient way to go about working with all this data

Build Reusable Testable Commands Part 1

Commands can be complicated to test and reuse. In a previous post, I demonstrated how to build reusable testable Queries, in this series of posts I will show you how to build commands which can be tested and reused.

This small yet powerful interface can help you build commands which respect SOLID principles like the Single Responsibility Principal (SRP), the Open/Closed Principle (OCP) and the Dependency inversion principle (DIP).

public interface IModelCommand<in TModel>
{
    void Apply(TModel model);
}

Build Reusable, Testable Queries Part 2

Query encapsulation can become quite empowering. For instance, query objects can be decorated, extended and reused. They allow us to implement concepts like targeted caching or user defined queries. They even allow us to execute the same query on two different data sources.

In part 2 of this series, we will be looking at how we can leverage the IModelQuery interface to enable us to reuse queries.

Build Reusable, Testable Queries Part 1

Queries are complicated to test and nearly impossible to reuse. In systems of all sizes they get duplicated,  modified and augmented to the point where we are afraid to modify them. They are essentially questions about data that generate information upon which we can act. They should be reusable. They should be predictable and above all, they should be testable.