Last week, I gave an in-house presentation on cloud computing. I walked through an overview of cloud computing – characteristics (on demand, elastic, fully managed by provider), why are we interested (virtualization, distributed computing, increased access to high-speed internet, weak economy), various types (public, private, virtual private cloud) and services models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS.) Though [...]
One may quickly build and deploy an ASP.NET web application via the Publish option in Visual Studio. This option works great for most simple deployment scenarios but it won’t always cut it. Let’s say you need to automate your deployments. Or you have environment-specific configuration settings. Or you need to execute pre/post build operations when [...]
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SubText is the engine behind our company blog. With the goal of ensuring a smooth transition between the main website and the blogs, I spent some time tightening up the styles for the aggregate and individual blogs last week. This required a custom SubText skin and lot of css tweaking.
Though I’ve previously had the [...]
For the first time in years, I needed to distribute my application to the end user’s machine via an online download. To do this effectively and professionally, I, of course, needed an install package. Over the year, I have used both Wise and InstallShield but they both cost money and I don’t recall them being [...]
I am releasing/distributing a Windows application and service in a couple weeks. Both application use the .NET 3.5 Framework and are wrapped up in a custom installer. Rather than having my installer prompt the user to download the .NET 3.5 framework installer, I’m packaging it up with my setup program. Very simply, I check to [...]
I woke up this morning (whew) wondering what percentage of the development community is privileged enough to deploy their own stuff. I wonder because I think I’m out of touch in this area. Over the past 6 or so years I’ve been handing off installation/deployment duties to other groups. My development teams and I were [...]
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Whenever I can get away with it, I include basic troubleshooting information in the footer of my web applications. So it isn’t distracting (or blatantly exposed) to the standard user, the text is hidden. In other words, I make the font color the same as the background color so the text is only visible when [...]
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There are a few primary reasons why Windows Authentication should be considered a best practice. Since passwords aren’t visibly exposed in configuration files and credentials are not sent over the network, your systems tend to be more secure. Additionally, password management (expiration periods, minimum lengths and account lockout after multiple invalid logon requests) becomes a heck [...]