Studio Pešec Lab

Have a successfully compiled New Year

Anže Vodovnik — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 15:43:06 +0000

It’s that time of the year, where everyone wishes everyone a happy new year, full of new challenges, solutions, ideas and fantastic problems to solve. We, like everyone else also wish you a happy new year – and may it successfully compile at the end. We hope that you enjoy every minute of it and that it provides you with new challenges along the way.

It’s also the time when we make resolutions – and we promise to do our best to keep this blog filled with the challenges we face and the solutions we create. If you have any suggestions on topics, feel free to let us know in the comments or via email at lab@studiopesec.com.

Decoupled web applications (with AppFabric)

Anže Vodovnik — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 09:38:31 +0000

Web applications are growing increasinly more complex, and to speed up development, it makes sense to use pipelined development. This is one of the benefits afforded to the development team using decoupling as an architecture best practice. This deck contains a quick overview of decoupled apps, and how we can use AppFabric to handle decoupling.

Decoupled web applications (with AppFabric)

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Developing a Web App from UX to Finish

Anže Vodovnik — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 09:23:48 +0000

At Bleeding Edge, I gave a talk about developing a modern web application, going from user experience design to finish (implementation). I am publishing the slide deck here. The demos are available here, and the full source code is available here.

Developing a Web App from UX to Finish

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SLODUG: Injecting your dependencies

Anže Vodovnik — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 09:17:35 +0000

At SLODUG, I have a talk about dependency injection, describing why it’s useful, when it becomes useful, what are the benefits, pitfalls, and how to incorporate it into your applications.

The talk & Slide deck is in Slovene, but we’ve decided to post it anyway. The demos will be uploaded soon as well.

Inject your dependencies

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SharePoint Conference, Bled 24. & 25th October 2011

Anže Vodovnik — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 20:00:59 +0000

Our friends at Kompas Xnet are organizing a SharePoint conference. It’s the leading SharePoint event in Slovenia. If any of you are doing SharePoint development. There will be some interesting talks given there, even one on Azure.

metro:wife

Anže Vodovnik — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:08:05 +0000

We are announcing a Lab product, called metro:Wife, your most loved address book. This product is a showcase of some of the technologies we use at Studio Pešec to develop the products that we do. It’s a combination of JavaScript (backbone.js), Azure integration, even iOS and Windows 7 development. It’s all coming in the next couple of weeks and months.

Coming to a browser near you…

[TALK] Developing a site from UX to finish

Anže Vodovnik — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:09:27 +0000

Come meet us at this year’s Bleeding Edge in Gozd Martuljek, Slovenia – on the 29th and 30th of September. I will be hosting a talk about how to develop a site from UX to finish. We’ll cover topics like front-end development using Backbone.js and UX planning, interaction design, communication strategies and some other fancy stuff. As always, we’ll post the slides here when I’m done.

If you’re coming, let us know! Let’s meet & talk. For more info, check out http://www.bleedingedge.si/

Code Samples for Windows Azure

Anže Vodovnik — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 06:54:31 +0000

This post serves more as a reminder to its author but may prove to be useful to people coming in from Google as well . Microsoft has all relevant Azure samples available for download at one simple place: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazure/. If you’re looking for something, check there. If it’s more complex, you can check here as well or ask via StackOverflow.com. We’re always watching the questions.

Autoscaling Windows Azure applications with the Enterprise Library

Anže Vodovnik — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:46:58 +0000

Microsoft’s Grigori Melnik has posted some insight on the upcoming Windows Azure Integration Pack for Enterprise Library. An interesting read into the detailed thinking behind the process. After a quick read, it seems our cloud applications will now (finally) be ready to scale, true to the marketing promises from the initial years. We have a blog post pending, about writing and architecting scalable applications, so keep checking back or subscribe to our RSS feed.

A property with the name ‘httpRequest’ is not present. (WCF and REST services)

Anže Vodovnik — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 07:31:00 +0000

When using the Microsoft’s Azure .NET Management API we’ve ran into an interesting predicament. On one of our projects we started getting “A property with the name ‘httpRequest’ is not present” exception. It happened sporadically and we could not reproduce it. But we needed it to work in this project.

After a lot of debugging and trying to find the issue we finally found some helpful posts, specifically this and this. For some unknown reason, this error occurs when dealing with operation contexts in WCF. I have yet to discover the actual reason for this, and specifically, why it only happens some times, but I figured I’ll post to the blog to help people who get this error.

The detailed exception stack trace was:

Server stack trace:
at System.ServiceModel.Channels.MessageProperties.get_Item(String name)
at Microsoft.Toolkit.WindowsAzure.ServiceManagement.ClientOutputMessageInspector.BeforeSendRequest(Message& request, IClientChannel channel) in C:\Development\Zebra-V3\External\Azure.ServiceManagement\ServiceManagementHelper.cs:line 197
at System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ImmutableClientRuntime.BeforeSendRequest(ProxyRpc& rpc)
at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel.PrepareCall(ProxyOperationRuntime operation, Boolean oneway, ProxyRpc& rpc)
at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel.SendAsyncResult.Begin()
at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel.BeginCall(String action, Boolean oneway, ProxyOperationRuntime operation, Object[] ins, TimeSpan timeout, AsyncCallback callback, Object asyncState)
at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannelProxy.InvokeBeginService(IMethodCallMessage methodCall, ProxyOperationRuntime operation)
at System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannelProxy.Invoke(IMessage message)

The solution turns out to be “simple”:

var serviceManagementChannel = Microsoft.Toolkit.WindowsAzure.ServiceManagement.ServiceManagementHelper.
    CreateServiceManagementChannel("WindowsAzureServiceManagement", cert);

using (new OperationContextScope((IContextChannel)serviceManagementChannel))
{
    var hostedServices =
        serviceManagementChannel.ListHostedServices(WellKnownConfiguration.General.SubscriptionId);

     ... other stuff here ...
}

Hope it helps some people.