Blogs


Λεπτομέρειες

  • Γράφτηκε Απο: Konstantinos Pantos
  • Δημοσιεύτηκε: Τρίτη, 17 Ιανουαρίου 2012

Catching up

A lot has been going on for the past couple of months that prevented me from keeping this blog up to date, so I feel it’s time to do some catching up and let you all in on some of the cool things that I’ve been involved with since my last post back in September.

This is going to be an ongoing list that’s going to be updated as soon as posts get published, so stay tuned for updates..

September 2011

Build Windows Conference

October 2011

ArabGames 2011 Info System

November 2011

Annual Digital Dialogue Microsoft 2011

PaoBC Azure Deployment

ITProDevConnections 2011

CloudCom International Conference Azure Presentation

December 2011

AskADev intervew

Three day Azure Workshop

Azure Web Camp

Λεπτομέρειες

  • Γράφτηκε Απο: Konstantinos Pantos
  • Δημοσιεύτηκε: Σάββατο, 31 Δεκεμβρίου 2011

Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure Announced

One of the questions I always got when presented Windows Azure “..is there a way to auto scale our windows azure based services?” with the answer being that unfortunately one will have to build its own custom logic for that at least till Wasabi is released.

Well the wait is over, the final release of the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure is now available, according to the blog post, “Announcing the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure with Autoscaling, Transient Fault Handling and more”, which posted last Friday to Microsoft Senior Program Manager Grigori Melnik’s “Thoughts on Agile Software Engineering and Beyond” blog.

According to the blog post, this release includes a comprehensive set of technical content, including:

  • Two new application blocks:
    • Autoscaling Application Block (“Wasabi”) to help you to automatically scale both web and worker roles in Windows Azure by dynamically provisioning/decommissioning roles or throttling.
    • Transient Fault Handling Application Block (“Topaz”) to help you make your Windows Azure application more resilient to transient errors when you are using these cloud services: SQL Azure, Windows Azure Storage, Windows Azure Caching, and Windows Azure Service Bus.
  • One new configuration source:
    • Blob configuration source to load configuration information from a blob in your Azure Storage account so that you can modify it without having to redeploy your application to Windows Azure.
  • Windows PowerShell cmdlets to browse and manipulate the Autoscaling Application Block settings directly from Windows PowerShell.
  • Protected configuration provider to allow you to encrypt sections of your configuration files in Windows Azure.
  • Updated database creation scripts so that you can migrate your code using the database trace listeners of the Logging Application Block and the Caching Application Block.
  • A substantial collection of experience guidance help you ramp up quickly, including:

The recommended way to obtain the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure is as NuGet packages. You can also download self-extracting zip files with binaries, sources (including tests) and the reference implementation from MSDN. The configuration tool is available as a Visual Studio extension package (VSIX) from the Visual Studio Gallery.

Rejoice …

Λεπτομέρειες

  • Γράφτηκε Απο: Konstantinos Pantos
  • Δημοσιεύτηκε: Σάββατο, 31 Δεκεμβρίου 2011

Speaking at ITProDevConnection 2011

WebSiteLogoV3If you liked the IT Pro | Dev Connections 2010 ... get ready to upgrade to version 2011! The technical community of Greek IT professionals, autoexec.gr, in cooperation with the relevant community of developers, dotNETZone.gr, are joining forces once again and will present an event with five parallel catting edge technical tracks!

The event is exclusively focused on professionals and developers who don’t want to lose time in presentations of products with information that can be found on the Internet.

I’m also going to participate in the event with a talk which is going to be titled

The Producer(s) - the most outrageous $1.000.000 scheme in the annals of... Windows Azure”

Here’s a small teaser of where the idea came from Smile (more will follow)

Looking forward to seeing you there at the 26th and 27th of November 2011 in the Educational Centre of the National Bank of Greece!

Λεπτομέρειες

  • Γράφτηκε Απο: Konstantinos Pantos
  • Δημοσιεύτηκε: Σάββατο, 10 Σεπτεμβρίου 2011

www.meteo.gr adopts Silverlight Bing maps

BingMapsOne of the projects we had the chance of working with a while back, but hadn’t gone live due to licensing and policy reasons, finally made it and is now publicly available at www.meteo.gr/bingmaps/.

We had a lot of fun in this project as there were a few challenges we had to overcome, let me give you the insights on one of them to get an idea and possibly help your future Bing maps projects Smile.

The biggest challenge we faced was how we were going to draw Contours over the map. To that end we read the very useful Practical C# Charts and Graphics book and found out all about Triangulation a technology widely used in Topography. Using Triangulation we’ve eventually developed a solution, only to find that it didn’t work as expected. The algorithm was correct, but when dealing with millions of points to draw shapes (vector graphics) over Bing maps performance degraded rapidly and this was unacceptable.

So next we thought that instead of drawing shapes over the map, it would be faster if we could just place another tile layer over the map, where all shapes would be pre-rendered. We were right the navigation was very fast but generating the Tiles still took very long and consumed a lot of resources which was a problem. The algorithm was still very complicated.

TileGenerationFinally, Dimosthenis had a very cool idea, that solved our problem. Since the data points are so close to each other, if we just drew a small rectangle (as you shown in the image) with the appropriate color for each point, the rectangles’ edges would create an area that with the proper imaging ease function would appear as a contour. We’ve started working on it and it truly not only drastically reduced the tile generation but also the result was very satisfying.

We hope you like it and use it.

Λεπτομέρειες

  • Γράφτηκε Απο: Konstantinos Pantos
  • Δημοσιεύτηκε: Σάββατο, 4 Ιουνίου 2011

LogParser GUI

If you ever tried to analyze IIS Logs, you might be familiar with the LogParser tool from Microsoft, which allows you to make sql-like queries to many text-based log files, such as IIS logs and XML files, and also on other windows data sources, like the event log, registry, file system and Active Directory.

Unfortunately, this great tool comes as a command-line utility without a user interface, making its use difficult. Fortunatelly, I have come across a nice graphical user interface tool called Log Parser Lizard GUI.

 

Log Parser Lizard GUI uses LogParser under the scenes to provide a much better user experience, while maintaining the power of LogParser. Some of its features include an sql query editor window, results pane, multiple queries, export to multiple formats, charts, and the ability to save your queries for later use.

Λεπτομέρειες

  • Γράφτηκε Απο: Dimosthenis Stellakis
  • Δημοσιεύτηκε: Τετάρτη, 1 Ιουνίου 2011

Techaholics part of Windows Azure Early Adopters

KathimeriniAs our company name "Techaholics" clearly suggests we are addicted with technology, whenever a new technology is introduced we’re the first to check it out and use it in our software. So when Microsoft announced its Cloud Computing platform, we almost immediately started exploring it. It didn’t take us long to see the huge business opportunity, so we’ve decided that we’re also all in Smile.

We’ve started working on making all our software Cloud Enabled. We’ve worked hard, hit a few walls, had fun, learned a lot, managed to earn the MVP (Most valuable professional) award from Microsoft on Windows Azure and were able to produce ContentCommander.

ContentCommander is an enterprise level Content Management and E-Commerce platform that is the first in Greece (and among the few rest in Europe) that fully supports Microsoft Windows Azure. It’s designed using the ten year accumulated experience of working with similar systems discovering their strengths and weaknesses and built with a clear focus and target on cutting edge Microsoft Technologies.

Today we were very happy to see that our efforts on the particular area, were recognized by Microsoft in a full page article at the economy section of one of the largest Greek Newspapers, namely Kathimerini.

Λεπτομέρειες

  • Γράφτηκε Απο: Konstantinos Pantos
  • Δημοσιεύτηκε: Κυριακή, 29 Μαΐου 2011

Windows Azure DevDay material

Yesterday I had the chance to talk about the Microsoft Windows Azure platform for a Microsoft hosted developers’ event called devdays.

I met and had a chance to chat with a lot of new faces which was very inspiring, as this means that more people become interested about cloud computing and Microsoft’s offering in this area, as time passes. What is more interesting is that many of them did not come from a Microsoft Computing background.

For those of you that couldn’t make it yesterday, I’m posting

my slide deck

and demos

Soon you’ll also be able to watch the recorded session from www.techdays.gr

Λεπτομέρειες

  • Γράφτηκε Απο: Konstantinos Pantos
  • Δημοσιεύτηκε: Πέμπτη, 26 Μαΐου 2011

MVPs vs Blue badgers

Are you anxiously waiting this years Champions League final game between Barcha and MU? Well this doesn’t even come close to the ultimate football game of the year.

mvps

Can’t wait to see Messi, Iniesta, Xavi, Rouney, Giggs and Nani? Why bother, when you’ll get the once in a lifetime chance to see stars like djsolid, hyper-vangelis, spantos, ipplos, gvarakis, dstellakis, grandpa and others on the field.

Don’t miss it!!!

Λεπτομέρειες

  • Γράφτηκε Απο: Konstantinos Pantos
  • Δημοσιεύτηκε: Τετάρτη, 11 Μαΐου 2011

Exception handling! #FAIL

CaptureHow do you handle exceptions in your live web app?

Windows Event Logs?

Log files on the web server?

Log tables on a relational database?

Are you using an exception handling framework?

Of course not….. why bother when you can let your users know what the exception was and how they can exploit it to bring your system down?!!!!!

Λεπτομέρειες

  • Γράφτηκε Απο: Konstantinos Pantos
  • Δημοσιεύτηκε: Πέμπτη, 5 Μαΐου 2011