MSDN Flash Podcast 011 – Steve Marx on Windows Azure

Also known as “that’s where I left my shoe” (you will need to listen to understand that)

This is a bonus edition of the podcast recorded on the 6th of October in London with Steve Marx, Technical Strategist working on Windows Azure.

It starts slow and a little quiet, it needed a few edits (deletes!) as we battled with “what is still not public” but picks up to be a pretty useful look at the improvements we have made to Windows Azure over the last few months with a specific focus on storage.

Topics covered include:

• Entity Group Transactions
• StorageClient library
• Queues
• Blobs and Shared Access Signatures/Blob Container Access Policies
• Communication between nodes without queues
• Logging

Show Links:

• Container Access Policies
• Shared Access Signatures
• Copy Blob and get committed block list methods
• Entity Group Transactions
• Azure Logging
• http://www.cerebrata.com/ 

Follow me or my team on twitter.

MSDN Flash Podcast 010 – Paul Jackson on Memory Mapped Files in .NET 4, Oslo and more

This podcast accompanies the October 8th edition of the MSDN Flash newsletter.

It is an interview with Paul Jackson which is meant to be about the article he wrote on Memory Mapped Files in .NET Framework 4.0 but tends to go off in different directions – but we both certainly enjoyed doing it :-) I was interested to hear how he was getting on with Oslo and why he was revisiting ASP.NET after many years of focus on XAML.

Show Notes:

• WebsiteSpark Program
• Microsoft Ajax CDN
• Web Platform Installer Version 2
• Web Toolkits series of screencasts
• Casestudy on F#
• Poll How many lines of code did you write yesterday?
• Memory Mapped File .NET 4.0 preliminary MSDN documentation
• Microsoft Oslo
• Book Pro ASP.NET MVC by Steven Sanderson
• Book Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 (with nerddinner sample) and the free chapter (pdf) from Scott Guthrie

Follow me or my team on twitter.

MSDN Flash Podcast 009 – Tom Quinn discusses Test Doubles, Mocking and Coding Dojos

This podcast is an interview with Tom Quinn in which we start off discussing his article on Test Doubles before moving on to Coding Dojos and finishing with a spot of “has software development really improved in the last 20 years”. The interview starts 7 minutes in after I complete a brief summary of the newsletter.

Show Notes:

• “Boot to VHD” – very cool stuff.
• New Doloto tool for AJAX optimisation
• 32 Silverlight 3 and Expression 3 Videos
• Last newsletter Poll on “How did your software team score in the Joel Test?”.  45% of you scored 6 or below ... hmmm, disappointing :-)
• This editions Poll looks at how we approach unit testing code
• UK South Scrum User Group
• Rhino Mocks, Typemock, NMock and Moq
• Tom summarises the first Coding Dojo he run
• http://southamptoncodingdojo.ning.com/ sign up details. Next is on Sep 24th in Southampton.
• Summary of Test Doubles, Fakes, Stubs, Dummies and Mocks from the work of the folks at ThoughtWorks

Follow me or my team on twitter.

MSDN Flash Podcast 008 – Gary Short on using XAF to build WebForm and WinForm apps

This podcast is an interview with Gary Short in which we discuss the DevExpress eXpressApp Framework™ (XAF) for quickly building WebForm and WinForm applications. Along the way we manage to mention testing frameworks, home-grown source control, rabbits feet, British Rail and Microsoft Access (Apologies in advance to the Access User Group) but most of it is about understanding what XAF is and when you would use it.

Show Notes:

• XAF
• Posts on the Project Management application being built in XAF
• eXpress Persistent Objects (XPO) – the ORM beneath XAF
• UK Access User Group

Follow me or my team on twitter.