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by Tom Hollander via Tom Hollander's blog on 12/6/2011 12:36:37 AM
A few months ago I posted on how to automate deployment of Windows Azure projects using MSBuild. While the approach documented in that post continues to work, Windows Azure SDK 1.6 has introduced some new capabilities for managing Windows Azure credentials and publishing settings which I wanted to leverage and build upon. With this new approach, you’ll no longer need to manually manage details such as Subscription IDs, hosted service names and certificates. Because this approach relies on a few ...
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by Tom Hollander via Tom Hollander's blog on 10/6/2011 11:54:00 PM
In 2008 I posted a series of blog articles about how to use MSMQ, WCF and IIS together. I chose to use this architecture as it combined the scalability and resiliency benefits of durable asynchronous messaging, with the simplicity and power of the WCF programming model and IIS hosting model. Over the last year I’ve spent much of my time working with Windows Azure. While Windows Azure has long provided a durable queuing mechanism, there was no integration with WCF or IIS, meaning developers ...
by Tom Hollander via Tom Hollander's blog on 9/28/2011 1:22:00 AM
What is an Environment? Anyone who has worked on a software development project will be familiar with the concept of an “environment”. Simply put, an environment is a set of infrastructure that you can deploy your application to, supporting a specific activity in your software development lifecycle. Any significant project will have multiple environments, generally with names such as “Test”, “UAT”, “Staging” and “Production”. On a tradi ...
by Tom Hollander via Tom Hollander's blog on 9/6/2010 11:42:00 AM
Hi again – yes I know it’s been a while. Recently I’ve started a new role in Microsoft which involves helping customers deploy applications on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. I thought it may be fitting it I kick this off with a post that bridges my (now quite) old role with my new one and talk about using Enterprise Library with Windows Azure. One of the great things about Windows Azure is that it includes the .NET Framework in its entirety – s ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 6/21/2009 5:06:28 AM
Where were you at 2:15am (Sydney time) on 5 April 2009? Other than the fact that your memory is pretty hazy now that a few weeks have passed, you’d expect there to be an unambiguous answer to that question. However it turns out you could well have been in two completely different places at that time, as Sydney was coming out of daylight savings on that night, so the hour from 2am to 3am was repeated. If you’re like me, you’ve probably known that this happens forever, but never really worried ab ...
by Tom Hollander via Tom Hollander's blog on 6/21/2009 5:06:28 AM
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 5/21/2009 12:25:00 PM
One of the critical responsibilities of every developer and architect is to understand, and know how to prevent, as many kinds of security attacks as possible. While there are many types of attacks and many weapons at our disposal to thwart them, the most basic defence we have is input validation. The rule of thumb really needs to be to assume all input from uncontrolled sources is malicious, unless you can prove otherwise. This includes input from end users, as well as input from other systems. ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 12/23/2008 3:04:00 AM
Pablo Galiano, one of my friends and colleagues from my patterns & practices days, has just released a very cool extension for Visual Studio 2008 called StickyNotes. As the name suggests, it allows you to attach sticky notes to your code, with a lot more richness and less intrusiveness than regular code comments. You can also choose between personal notes (visible only to the person who created it) and team notes (visible to the entire team). Unfortunately my team is still using Visual Studi ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 11/18/2008 12:32:00 PM
Recently my team discovered a limitation in the RelativeDateTimeValidator that ships with the Enterprise Library Validation Application Block. This validator is used to check if a DateTime object occurs within a configured time before or after Now. It’s a useful validator for checking things like birth dates and expiry dates. However we discovered that it assumes the date being validated is in local time – if the date is specified in UTC (which we do in our app) the calculation will be wrong. Fi ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 8/1/2007 10:56:00 AM
As I mentioned in my last post, I've been having some fun discovering what it's like to use patterns & practices deliverables on a real enterprise application. One of the challenges I've faced was figuring out an exception management strategy that included the ability to convert cryptic database error codes to .NET exceptions that are more meaningful for the business layer. My first instinct was to write code something like this:try{ Database db = DatabaseFactory.CreateDatabase("MyDatabas ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 7/28/2007 12:37:24 AM
As a product manager at patterns & practices, I got to write a lot more code than most people would expect from a product manager. However the nature of the job and the team meant that it was basically all prototypes and samples. So after over 3 years, it's very exciting to be working as a solution architect in Microsoft's Solutions Development Centre where I am able to get my hands dirty with real enterprise projects again. And for the first time in ages, I get to experience ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 5/25/2007 11:34:00 PM
Those with a keen eye may have already discovered the 3.1 release out in the wild, first inside the new Smart Client Software Factory release, and in the last couple of days the complete MSI has been available if you searched through the MSDN download centre. But now the final pieces have come together, and the release is there for everyone to discover and download from http://msdn.microsoft.com/entlib. As mentioned in my last post, this is basically a bug fix release, so while it's not the most ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 4/25/2007 4:03:39 PM
Right about the time we released Enterprise Library 3.0, Ed and I presented a webcast that gave a quick tour of all of the new features of the release. We got a lot of attendees, downloads and good feedback, however since we covered so much ground it wasn't possible to go into too much detail on any particular new block or feature. To bring you the next level of information, we're about to run two new webcasts, each focusing on one of the new blocks in EntLib 3.0. As always, you should register ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 4/6/2007 9:26:00 PM
I hope you're enjoying the new release of Enterprise Library! One of the more interesting inclusions in this release is the new Policy Injection Application Block. The goal of the PIAB is to make it easier to separate cross-cutting concerns from business logic, using declarative policies. A policy consists of a set of matching rules, which indicate which objects and methods the policy applies to, and a chain of handlers, which are objects that execute before and/or after a method is called ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 4/5/2007 10:13:48 PM
Yes, it's finally here. The patterns & practices team is pleased to announce the official release of Enterprise Library 3.0 - April 2007 for the .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0. Highlights of this Release If you've been keeping up with the Community Technology Preview releases, there shouldn't be anything too surprising in the final release, although the overall quality should be much higher. All of the major new features have already been described on this blog or in other place ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 3/14/2007 3:43:00 AM
After a false start a couple of weeks ago (when it was still February), we're pleased to announce that we've finally released the February 2007 CTP of the Guidance Automation Toolkit and the Guidance Automation Extensions. These technologies are increasingly important to patterns & practices, and to many of you, since they form the foundation runtime and authoring platform for our software factories. You can download the new releases of GAT and GAX from here. But first, here's what you ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 3/7/2007 5:31:00 AM
I wanted to quickly fill you in on a couple of new additions we've made to the Policy Injection Application Block since last week's CTP that will give you more control over which objects and members your policies are applied to. In the CTP, the only way of applying policies to members is via Matching Rules. A matching rule encapsulates logic that determines if a member should have a policy applied to it. Matching rules included with the block include ones that check for assembly, namespace ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 3/2/2007 6:01:00 PM
In my last post I promised you a bit of help in evaluating the preview of the Policy Injection Application Block which is in the February 2007 CTP of Enterprise Library 3.0. I know Olaf is working on a tutorial (and knowing David I'll bet he's cooking up something too), but I wanted to give you a few brief pointers in the meantime. In particular, the current implementation relies heavily on configuration, but without support from the configuration tool or any samples, it's pretty hard to fi ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 2/19/2007 1:32:00 AM
One very cool new feature which will debut in the next (and final) CTP of Enterprise Library 3.0 is something we call "Environmental Overrides". In short this feature makes it much easier to manage configuration files for applications that are deployed to multiple environments (such as dev, test, staging, production etc). Typically the application's configuration settings will be almost the same in each environment - but with a few important differences such as connection strings or logging thre ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 1/20/2007 1:33:43 AM
The second CTP of Enterprise Library 3.0 is now available to download on our CodePlex community site! Full details on this release are in the included release notes, but here are a few highlights: Validation Application Block (also see my previous post on this) Near-complete validator library Configuration tool support ASP.NET integration Winforms integration Quickstarts and preliminary documentation Data Access Application Block TransactionScope enlistment Logging Application Block Rolling ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 1/18/2007 2:06:00 AM
Our team is hard at work putting the finishing touches on the January 2007 CTP of Enterprise Library 3.0. This new preview release will be available on our community site any day now, but in the meantime I wanted to tease you a bit by showing you a few things that will be available in this release of the newest member of the EntLib gang, the Validation Application Block: Validator Library: We're very close to finishing all of the validators described in my earlier post. There are still a few rou ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 1/12/2007 6:23:00 PM
Via Don: the December 2006 release of the Web Service Software Factory is now available! This is a major new release that supports building services with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Don (ever so eloquently) lists his highlights as: WSDL-first support. This feature definitely wasn't the most challenging to include, but I still love it. I've spent a lot of time over the years monkeying around with WSDL files. The fact that Service Factory has a single recipe (wizard) that will take a ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 1/9/2007 9:04:00 PM
We're making great progress with the Validation Application Block in Enterprise Library 3.0, and one of the last remaining tasks is to make sure we include a compelling set of validators with the block. While it's very easy to build your own validator, we don't want everyone to need to build the same validators for each project just because we forgot to include something important. Here's the set of validators we're currently planning to include ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 12/29/2006 4:57:00 AM
I hope you all had a great Christmas, or whatever else you may or may not choose to celebrate at this time of year. (I've probably been in the USA too long, with this amount of political correctness showing through ;-). This was my first Christmas in the northern hemisphere - we went skiing in Whistler so we had the full-on "white Christmas" experience. It was great fun, but very different to what I'm used to. But I'm back in Seattle now, still taking a few more days off work but you should ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 12/14/2006 2:16:00 AM
One of the coolest new capabilities we're building for Enterprise Library v3 is the Application Block Software Factory. As its name ever-so-subtly suggests, this will be a software factory for building your own application blocks. We'll be including an early drop of this factory in the first preview release of Enterprise Library v3 (soon, I promise!) - but in the meantime this blog is, as always, your best bet for some early details. First, let me explain why we wanted to include a block factory ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 11/27/2006 8:15:00 PM
I'm sitting at home, still slowly digesting turkey, watching the snow fall outside the window, and trying to deal with the prospect of the imminent full work week. But while the 4 day weekend has definitely been a welcome break, the next week should actually be pretty interesting, with almost all of the Enterprise Library team in the same city for a change (alas, it's Redmond :-) and the project starting to take shape. Probably the most interesting new inclusion in the v3 release will ...
by tomholl via Tom Hollander's blog on 11/26/2006 11:37:39 PM
Now that Windows Vista is here, I know a lot of people are going to want to run GAT/GAX and Software Factories on the new OS. While it is possible to run these on Vista, there are some known issues with the June 2006 CTPs of GAT/GAX, especially around installation. As we discover these issues and hopefully find workarounds, we'll be publishing them to the GAT Forum site - there are several there now which you should check out if you're running, or planning to run guidance packages on Windows Vis ...
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