@ericchernuka @jaretis @rdotwoolley I've read the book now. My early adopters are testing and providing feedback and I'm iterating!
Web, mobile, cloud. It's all the rage.
New Relic NuGet package: Automatic building and publishing with TeamCity
I’m a big fan of New Relic server/application monitoring and last year I created a NuGet package for them. I wanted to make it easy for people to get New Relic going in an Azure environment and NuGet solves that problem. I’ve used it in production on Shuttr ever since. I approached New Relic when I began work on it, but they didn’t seem all that interested or maybe I didn’t find the right people to talk to. Just last week I was approached by…
Calgary condo parking limits are backwards
We’re currently in the market for a new place to live. We have a rental condo and are looking to either purchase a condo or build an infill somewhat near downtown. We like walking to work, and we like the atmosphere of downtown living. The hottest new project in Calgary is the East Village. We stopped in on the weekend and had a great talk with the developers of the first two condos going up: Evolution and First. They both had some cool layouts, decent…
Where’s the Azure focus Microsoft?
I moved Shuttr to Windows Azure a year or so ago and I’ve been very impressed with the platform. It’s been fast, stable, reliable, etc. There have been numerous reductions to their pricing model which have made it a lot more palatable. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/03/08/announcing-reduced-pricing-on-windows-azure-storage-and-compute.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/10/27/microsoft-lowers-storage-cost-for-blob-and-table-storage-in-windows-azure.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2012/02/14/announcing-reduced-pricing-on-sql-azure-and-new-100mb-database-option.aspx With these new pricing reductions we now have a full testing environment up in Azure permanently with a 100MB SQL Azure database and an extra small web role. It’s virtually free for that. Shuttr’s main expense is storage given that…
Office 365 ActiveSync fail, again
When Office 365 launched the mobile server address was m.outlook.com. This was a great address: easy to remember, pretty short, etc. A couple months ago my phone stopped syncing my mail. I went to the Office 365 forums and found that for some reason m.outlook.com was now broken and everybody had to switch to an address found by going into Options -> See All Options -> Settings for POP, IMAP, and SMTP access… Mine was pod51009.outlook.com. Then last night it went down again. I checked…
Silverlight 5 + Internet Explorer 9 using old Content-Type from POST in a subsequent GET
We’ve been running into a super annoying problem at work. After our Silverlight application makes it’s login POST the next GET that we send fails with a NotFoundException. This only happens when using the Silverlight 5 runtime and only happens in Internet Explorer 9. I have tested now with Silverlight 4 as well as Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari, and IE9/SL5 is the only bad combination. Here are the headers of our login POST: POST /login HTTP/1.1 Accept: application/xml Referer: http://localhost:8080/censored.xap?timestamp=1326148328000 Accept-Language: en-CA Content-Length: 38…
Canadian investing made lazy
It’s Easy One of the most common complaints that I hear about investing is that it’s too complicated and that people don’t have time to learn about how to do it. The good thing is, it pays to be lazy in investing! Canadian Capitalist – Lazy Man’s Portfolio Almost every stock or mutual fund will lose to it’s respective index. The concept of the “lazy” portfolio is just to buy something as similar to the index as possible. This way you will go up and…
Localizing a Silverlight DatePicker control, a study in pain thresholds
For shame Microsoft. There is currently no way to localize a DatePicker. Instead of letting us simply specify a format string or any of the other beautiful conventions we are forced to basically re-template the entire control. In our application, at my day job, we support many different languages/cultures. This was becoming a mess with the various date formats so we decreed that all dates would be in the ISO standard format (yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss). Styling everything in the app was a 10 minute job, until…
Mango App Challenge winner!
So a little bit ago my second Windows Phone app was approved. http://blog.shuttr.com/2011/11/20/shuttr-photographers-now-have-a-windows-phone-app-too/ Here are my two apps up on the Windows Phone Marketplace: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-CA/publishers/Shuttr Once the approval came through I filled out the form on the Mango App Challenge page. https://www.microsoft.com/canada/offers-promotions/mango-app-challenge/Default.aspx I didn’t hear anything back for a while, so I contacted Paul Laberge (@plaberge) on Twitter. He got back to me immediately and before long I was declared a winner! The phones that they were offering were a bit disappointing, so I have…