I haven't posted anything for awhile due to being busy with my ecommerce project. Recently, I have just started to deploy the project up onto Windows Azure for testing. I had held back deploying until I could deploy on SQL Azure more easily. Previously, you could only execute commands to SQL Azure via a query window and you had to create tables manually via a new query. The good news is, there's ... [More]

AreYouFollowingMeToo? is a simple twitter app that gets a list of twitter users who you are following who aren't following you back. I have decided to release the code for this app under a MIT License.The app supports deployment on Windows Azure. This decision was based on the fact that it was brought to my attention that there was another site that is providing the same functionality. Also, I ha... [More]

LINQ to SQL is a neat way to do your SQL queries under ASP .NET. It is so good that I have used it until a stage where I cannot remember my T-SQLs. But then that probably is just me, my memory isn't very kind to me. However, one of the problems with LINQ is that it is not very flexible when you want to have the option of creating queries on the fly. This is especially true in situations where you ... [More]

I had a quick look into the Twitter API today. It turns out it was quite easy to get started and to quickly develop a twitter application. Resources The main Twitter API documentation page is located at http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-API-Documentation. There are two .NET twitter clients available tweetsharp, http://code.google.com/p/tweetsharp/ twitterizer, http://code.google.com/p/twit... [More]

The following describes my experience trying to get raya running on Windows Azure based on the July 2009 CTP of Windows Azure. Task List Add Blob support to allow uploaded photos to be stored in Azure Blobs Add support for Azure Storage Tables to replace all SQL database operations   Just 2 easy tasks... 2 easy and loooong tasks. Luckily the SDK abstracts away some of the nitty gritt... [More]

Usually, the exceptions thrown while debugging Windows Azure Table Storage is quite helpful. The message that I normally get is in the following form "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\" standalone=\"yes\"?>\r\n<error xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata\">\r\n  <code></code>\r\n  <message xml:lang=\"en-NZ\">SOME ERROR... [More]

I hope the following will save some people time. The above exception occurs while developing using the July 2009 CTP of Windows Azure. The following query throws the above exception when the oauthConsumers table has no entry. I have not checked if it will occur if there is already an entry in the table or whether it occurs when published to the cloud. var result = db.oauthConsumers.Where(x => ... [More]

One of the first few questions that someone starting to write unit tests for ASP .NET MVC would be "How do you mock HttpContext?". The following is done using Moq and creates a fake HttpContext to be passed to the MVC Controller. public static HttpContextBase FakeHttpContext() {     var httpContext = new Mock<HttpContextBase>();     var request = new Mock&... [More]

Recently, I've realised that I have not implemented the deserialization methods for the OpenSocial API for pesta. I found out while trying to deserialize Google Friend Connect data. Oops. I guess my memory is not as good as it used to be. I found out that the DataContractSerializer is not effective when some fields are missing in the JSON string. So I finally implemented the Deserialize method fo... [More]

Finally managed to get pesta running under Windows Azure. It wasn't too difficult actually. The July CTP of Windows Azure SDK supported MVC projects as a web role out of the box. No hacking necessary. However, when I first got it running, pesta did not seem to inject the javascript libraries and gadgets were not rendered properly. It turns out that when deploying the MVC project, the CloudService... [More]