jQuery AJAX POSTing to ASP.NET MVC 3
Getting your model binding to work properly with jQuery takes a bit of trial and error if you’re just getting started. There are a couple ways to send your data and you don’t really know which way is going to bind properly to which C# type. Here is a quick example for reference after I got multiple photo deletion working on Shuttr. The basic gist of this is that binding an array of ints in Javascript requires an ICollection in C# to make the magic…
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…
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…
Writing a JSON API in ASP.NET MVC 3
Here is a snippet of the source for the current API on Shuttr. The repositories are bound using Ninject so that our code is unit testable. As you can see, the actual call is pretty simple using LINQ, anonymous objects and the new JSON helpers in .Net.
Windows Phone AppHub Developer Account Update – Day 4
Here’s the day 4 update on my Windows Phone On Friday I applied for my developer account. Filled out a couple pages of forms, paid my $100 fee, etc. I was then emailed to verify my account, I clicked that link and it said my account would be fully verified shortly. On Monday I got an email saying that Shuttr wasn’t found in their business database and that I needed to submit additional paperwork to verify my business. I emailed them back my registered trade name…
Windows Phone 7 development beginning
So Microsoft just launched a cool program for Canadian developers, the Mango App Challenge. Basically, if you write two Windows Phone 7 apps you get a free Windows Phone. I have plans to develop mobile apps for Shuttr for Android, iPhone and Windows Phone but this contest just pushed Windows Phone to the front of that list instantly! I added some new RESTful JSON APIs to Shuttr pretty easily. ASP.NET MVC makes this dead easy. I downloaded the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK and created my…
New Relic + Windows Azure package for NuGet
Installing New Relic on Windows Azure is a bit of a pain so I’ve created a NuGet package for it to make it dead easy. I’ll keep it updated with the latest NewRelic releases. Make sure you go to New Relic first to sign up and get your key. Performance monitoring will never be the same after you do! http://newrelic.com The package will be available through your NuGet package manager. You can view it on the web as well: http://nuget.org/List/Packages/NewRelicWindowsAzure Once you install the NuGet…
Shuttr – The Concept
I began taking sports photos after retiring from rowing and needing something new to fill up my spare time. I photographed several of the rowing races in Victoria and began having friends ask if they could buy the photos off of me. I was a Computer Science student at the time so I decided to go all out. I registered mikecousins.com, setup an e-commerce site and threw all of my photos up on the web for purchase. I began taking on different sports and the…