taken from http://www.red-gate.com/products/dotnet-development/ants-memory-profiler/learning-memory-management/memory-management-poster

A lot has been going on for the past couple of months that prevented me from keeping this blog up to date, so I feel it’s time to do some catching up and let you all in on some of the cool things that I’ve been involved with since my last post back in September.

This is going to be an ongoing list that’s going to be updated as soon as posts get published, so stay tuned for updates..

September 2011

Build Windows Conference

October 2011

ArabGames 2011 Info System

November 2011

Annual Digital Dialogue Microsoft 2011

PaoBC Azure Deployment

ITProDevConnections 2011

CloudCom International Conference Azure Presentation

December 2011

AskADev intervew

Three day Azure Workshop

Azure Web Camp

One of the questions I always got when presented Windows Azure “..is there a way to auto scale our windows azure based services?” with the answer being that unfortunately one will have to build its own custom logic for that at least till Wasabi is released.

Well the wait is over, the final release of the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure is now available, according to the blog post, “Announcing the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure with Autoscaling, Transient Fault Handling and more”, which posted last Friday to Microsoft Senior Program Manager Grigori Melnik’s “Thoughts on Agile Software Engineering and Beyond” blog.

According to the blog post, this release includes a comprehensive set of technical content, including:

• Two new application blocks:
  • Autoscaling Application Block (“Wasabi”) to help you to automatically scale both web and worker roles in Windows Azure by dynamically provisioning/decommissioning roles or throttling.
  • Transient Fault Handling Application Block (“Topaz”) to help you make your Windows Azure application more resilient to transient errors when you are using these cloud services: SQL Azure, Windows Azure Storage, Windows Azure Caching, and Windows Azure Service Bus.
• One new configuration source:
  • Blob configuration source to load configuration information from a blob in your Azure Storage account so that you can modify it without having to redeploy your application to Windows Azure.
• Windows PowerShell cmdlets to browse and manipulate the Autoscaling Application Block settings directly from Windows PowerShell.
• Protected configuration provider to allow you to encrypt sections of your configuration files in Windows Azure.
• Updated database creation scripts so that you can migrate your code using the database trace listeners of the Logging Application Block and the Caching Application Block.
• A substantial collection of experience guidance help you ramp up quickly, including:
  • Reference documentation
  • Developer’s guide
  • Tailspin Surveys sample application (reference implementation)
  • On-premises sample application for hosting the Autoscaling Application Block and exploratory testing (included with source under (install location)/WindowsAzure/Autoscaling/Hosts/ConsoleAutoscaler)
  • Planning worksheet for Wasabi to help you understand the interactions between different timing values governing the overall autoscaling regime.

The recommended way to obtain the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure is as NuGet packages. You can also download self-extracting zip files with binaries, sources (including tests) and the reference implementation from MSDN. The configuration tool is available as a Visual Studio extension package (VSIX) from the Visual Studio Gallery.

Rejoice …

If you liked the IT Pro | Dev Connections 2010 ... get ready to upgrade to version 2011! The technical community of Greek IT professionals, autoexec.gr, in cooperation with the relevant community of developers, dotNETZone.gr, are joining forces once again and will present an event with five parallel catting edge technical tracks!

The event is exclusively focused on professionals and developers who don’t want to lose time in presentations of products with information that can be found on the Internet.

I’m also going to participate in the event with a talk which is going to be titled

“The Producer(s) - the most outrageous $1.000.000 scheme in the annals of... Windows Azure”

Here’s a small teaser of where the idea came from  (more will follow)

Looking forward to seeing you there at the 26th and 27th of November 2011 in the Educational Centre of the National Bank of Greece!

One of the projects we had the chance of working with a while back, but hadn’t gone live due to licensing and policy reasons, finally made it and is now publicly available at www.meteo.gr/bingmaps/.

We had a lot of fun in this project as there were a few challenges we had to overcome, let me give you the insights on one of them to get an idea and possibly help your future Bing maps projects .

The biggest challenge we faced was how we were going to draw Contours over the map. To that end we read the very useful Practical C# Charts and Graphics book and found out all about Triangulation a technology widely used in Topography. Using Triangulation we’ve eventually developed a solution, only to find that it didn’t work as expected. The algorithm was correct, but when dealing with millions of points to draw shapes (vector graphics) over Bing maps performance degraded rapidly and this was unacceptable.

So next we thought that instead of drawing shapes over the map, it would be faster if we could just place another tile layer over the map, where all shapes would be pre-rendered. We were right the navigation was very fast but generating the Tiles still took very long and consumed a lot of resources which was a problem. The algorithm was still very complicated.

Finally, Dimosthenis had a very cool idea, that solved our problem. Since the data points are so close to each other, if we just drew a small rectangle (as you shown in the image) with the appropriate color for each point, the rectangles’ edges would create an area that with the proper imaging ease function would appear as a contour. We’ve started working on it and it truly not only drastically reduced the tile generation but also the result was very satisfying.

We hope you like it and use it.

As our company name "Techaholics" clearly suggests we are addicted with technology, whenever a new technology is introduced we’re the first to check it out and use it in our software. So when Microsoft announced its Cloud Computing platform, we almost immediately started exploring it. It didn’t take us long to see the huge business opportunity, so we’ve decided that we’re also all in .

We’ve started working on making all our software Cloud Enabled. We’ve worked hard, hit a few walls, had fun, learned a lot, managed to earn the MVP (Most valuable professional) award from Microsoft on Windows Azure and were able to produce ContentCommander.

ContentCommander is an enterprise level Content Management and E-Commerce platform that is the first in Greece (and among the few rest in Europe) that fully supports Microsoft Windows Azure. It’s designed using the ten year accumulated experience of working with similar systems discovering their strengths and weaknesses and built with a clear focus and target on cutting edge Microsoft Technologies.

Today we were very happy to see that our efforts on the particular area, were recognized by Microsoft in a full page article at the economy section of one of the largest Greek Newspapers, namely Kathimerini.

Yesterday I had the chance to talk about the Microsoft Windows Azure platform for a Microsoft hosted developers’ event called devdays.

I met and had a chance to chat with a lot of new faces which was very inspiring, as this means that more people become interested about cloud computing and Microsoft’s offering in this area, as time passes. What is more interesting is that many of them did not come from a Microsoft Computing background.

For those of you that couldn’t make it yesterday, I’m posting

my slide deck

and demos

Soon you’ll also be able to watch the recorded session from www.techdays.gr

Are you anxiously waiting this years Champions League final game between Barcha and MU? Well this doesn’t even come close to the ultimate football game of the year.

Can’t wait to see Messi, Iniesta, Xavi, Rouney, Giggs and Nani? Why bother, when you’ll get the once in a lifetime chance to see stars like djsolid, hyper-vangelis, spantos, ipplos, gvarakis, dstellakis, grandpa and others on the field.

Don’t miss it!!!

How do you handle exceptions in your live web app?

Windows Event Logs?

Log files on the web server?

Log tables on a relational database?

Are you using an exception handling framework?

Of course not….. why bother when you can let your users know what the exception was and how they can exploit it to bring your system down?!!!!!

I had the chance to speak at a Microsoft event this month (on April 6th) about the new mobile phone development platform unfortunately and due to my blog maintenance I wasn’t able to blog about it. Now that everything is back in order though, I can let you know about it and share some of the event’s content with you.

The event had three sessions and a demo fest where developers presented their applications.

On the first session Dimitris Gkanatsios gave an intro to the platform and spoke about the Pivot control, sensors (GPS, Accelerometer, Vibration), HTML parsing, WCF, Media Library, Navigation, Launchers and choosers, Isolated Storage and briefly talked about the market place and how can someone upload an application.

On the second one I got to speak on more advanced topics like Data Binding, Panorama Pages, RSS, Video, Notifications, Application Bars, Application Lifecycle, and the Web Browser control. You can find my slide deck here.

The third session was about XNA and how someone can use it to build killer gaming apps in 2D and 3D for WP7and was given by Ioanins Panagopoulos.

In the demo fest slot I got the chance to speak about the news application I’ve developed for www.zougla.gr that is going to be published really soon.

If you missed the event, don’t worry you can still watch most of the sessions videos at www.techdays.gr really soon.

Microsoft announced today that the Caching service has been released as a production service.

The Caching service is a distributed, in-memory, application cache service that accelerates the performance of Windows Azure and SQL Azure applications by allowing you to keep data in-memory and saving you the need to retrieve that data from storage or database.

There are going to be 6 different cache size options for you to choose from, varying from 128MB to 4GB.

The prices of the different cache sizes are the following:

· 128 MB cache for $45.00/month

· 256 MB cache for $55.00/month

· 512 MB cache for $75.00/month

· 1 GB cache for $110.00month

· 2 GB cache for $180.00/month

· 4 GB cache for $325.00/month

In order for you to be able to start using the service and evaluate your needs though, there is a promotional period in which you will not be charged for the service for billing periods prior to August 1, 2011.

The service is billed on a monthly basis, based on the cache size you sign up for. You can also sign up for more than one cache and use these multiple caches in order to get a total cache size that is different or bigger than the standard cache sizes we provide.

To learn more about the Caching service please use the following resources:

· Windows Azure AppFabric Caching availability announced!! blog post

· Video: Introduction to the Windows Azure AppFabric Cache

· Video: Windows Azure AppFabric Caching – How to Set-up and Deploy a Simple Cache

· Windows Azure AppFabric FAQ on MSDN

· MSDN Documentation

You can access the service at: http://appfabric.azure.com.

Microsoft Hellas is holding a very interesting event in two weeks, on Thursday 12th of May, regarding application testing.

If you are interested to learn how to load test your application, how to use lab management using Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server then harry up and register.

As you probably can see I’ve decided to spent a little time renewing my blog. So there are a couple of things that changed.

First I’ve upgraded the engine version to Subtext 2.5.2. This wasn’t painless, my blog engine was pretty old and the migration steps seemed to fail. I didn’t want to loose my data though and thus I persisted and managed with a couple of tricks to finally move my data to the new engine.

Second, the blog is now hosted on a different server. I wanted to move to a server on which I would have more control to do things. So I’ve moved to a dedicated machine where I can VPN/RDP on.

Last but not least, I’ve changed my blog theme to a new one to give my blog a fresh view. The theme was picked up from the Subtext Skin Bonanza 2011 project.

So let me know if you have any problems and drop my a line and let me know what do you think of my new skin.

If you ever created a professional website/application you’ll probably know the value (you’ve probably learned it the hard way as I did ) of stress testing your web applications.

There are plenty of tools you can use in order to stress test your web site, ranging from Microsoft Visual Studio to CMD Line tools. Yesterday I found another one StresStimulus.

StresStimulus is an extension for Fiddler (an awesome and free web debugging proxy) which enables us to create instant load tests with virtual users.

You can record a browser activity (like creating a user), replay it under concurrent load and get the results for the performance of web pages and the entire test.

If you prefer a simple but powerful tool this one is for you.

Yesterday I presented a 200 level session on Windows Azure over Live Meeting. This was the first of a three part series of Live Meetings regarding Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform.

The session covered all of the fundamentals of Cloud Computing, the different types of cloud computing services (IAAS, PAAS, SAAS), and then went on discussing the Windows Azure Platform taking a deeper look into the Windows Azure OS (Computation, Storage, Management) namely Windows Azure.

For those of you that missed it there will be a recording available soon at www.techdays.gr. till then you can download the slide deck I used from my SkyDrive folder.

Register now here in order to catch for the second one next week.