Dave Barrows Tech Blog

I got the idea of Quality with a capital “Q” ingrained upon me years ago when I read the philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance .  The main thing I took away from the book is that whatever human endeavor you are engaged in, you should let your actions be governed by a desire to do things well, with a constant and abiding interest in achieving the highest possible Quality.  Naturally this idea can (and should) be applied to the complex world of software development, particularly with respect to the question of Code Quality.  It’s not always easy to live this way.  Whatever point we happen to be at in our lives or upon our career path, our knowledge only goes so far.  And sometimes we take shortcuts; it’s often tempting to take the easy (or lazy) way out, thinking we don’t have time to do things well or to do them right. However, in this day and age, .Net developers are fortunate to have a plethora of 3rd party tools available to us to h...

This post is simply a brief moan about a particular instance of poor documentation on Microsoft’s web sites, and an attempt to fill that gap. I’ve been reading the Pragmatic Programmer which advocates learning new languages on a regular basis, and also learning your computer’s shell language instead of just relying on the GUI.  I’ve dabbled in a bit of PowerShell and I have a sense of how powerful it is for manipulating SharePoint, SQL Server, the Windows OS, and anything else you might like to manipulate with script, but haven’t made the time to really learn it, so I thought that would be a great way to apply those recommendations.  So I thought I’d get onto by Windows Server 2008 R2 development VM and download the latest version of PowerShell (2.0).  That’s why I thought I’d write this quick post.  If you followed the above thought process, you might experience the same confusion I did as a PowerShell newbie. You might run across pages like this one (which ...

This post is about a technique I developed on a recent project which may be of interest.  This project seemed naturally to call for SharePoint 2010 as it had a CMS component, but it needed to be hosted in the Windows Azure cloud.  As of this writing, (although some seem to have tried with an Azure VM role ) it generally doesn’t seem to be possible to host SharePoint in Windows Azure; I guess it’s because the kind of “wrapper” that they have you put around an Azure application (the “role entry point”) so they can manage it in the cloud, and the stateless nature of Windows Azure apps, doesn’t really lend itself to SharePoint’s architecture.  So I decided to do the project using ASP.NET’s MVC2 Framework and building a custom CMS, in which I used XML serialization to enable a simple publishing capability to provide users with “preview” and “live” versions of web pages.  I needed to ramp up quickly, and as I’ve generally been impressed with the quality of Apress tec...