Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

In this post we will talk about the value and the importance of deployments scripts and what a deployment script should contains where we are working with a cloud environments (in our case Azure). A deployment script(s) is a collection of scripts that are used to deploy a solution (in one or multiple environments). In general, deployments scripts are reused between different deployments of the same solutions, the only thing that we need to configure is the custom configuration for that environment (naming, custom folders path, connection strings and so on). A deployment script that serves a cloud application is no very different from a deployment script used for on-premises systems. Sometimes there are small things that are forgotten or ignored for the deployments scripts that serve a cloud application. This happens because we forget that each Azure resource is like an external dependency that should be treated separately.    Visual Studio Deployment With the latest ver...

I see in many companies the culture where people should improve their technical and soft skills by they own, especially in their free time. This is not a bad thing but not all the time the skills that needs to be learned by the employee are the same with the one that the company prefers.  Let’s assume that the employee would like to learn JavaScript and Angular.JS, but based on the company vision and forecast, you need to increase the skills on desktop application. In this case, people will be oriented to learn and increase their knowledge in the area where company needs. Until now, we could say that we are fine, the need from the market needs to be full field by the company. Because of this there is a direct inters for it, for company and people that are working in that company. In an ideal world, the company will invest the time from normal working hours to improve and increase the skills on desktop applications or the area where they need. In reality we all know that the ...

In this post we will talk about source control merging when a demo needs to be prepared. I expect that all of us knows what a branch is. To be sure that we are talking about the same thing, let's see the definition from Wikipedia: Branching, in revision control and software configuration management, is the duplication of an object under revision control (such as a source code file or a directory tree) so that modifications can happen in parallel along both branches. I don't want to enter in the different strategies of branching topic. There are multiple ways to do it in different phases of a project. Usually, during the development of a project we will have multiple branches in parallel or in different moment in time. For example: Main Development Testing Integration Production , on top of this if we have multiple versions of a product supported in parallel that we will have for each version another group of branches. And this is not all, based on the...

There are more than 6 months from the moment when we started to use Visual Studio Online for a real project. Until then we use it only internally on small internal projects. Nothing real. Initially I wrote a post about our first impression related to VS Online. More about this can be found on the following post  http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.ro/2015/01/first-impression-of-visual-studio-online.html Initially we started with an estimated team of 4-7 people. This was our initial estimation, 6 months ago: Build Duration: 20 minutes Working window on a day: 10 hours Number of build per day: 30 builds Number of developers: 4-7 people Number of days per month: 23 days Total minutes per month: 13.800 minutes Minutes cost: 60 minutes free + 1140 minutes at 0.0373e + 12600 minutes at 0.0075e Cost: 0 + 1140*0.0373+12600*0.0075  Total Cost: 137.022e Now, let's see how reality looks like. All information is from the billing information and is 100% real. No estimations, actual f...

In one of my latests post I wrote about  Hybrid Code First . When I started to write about it I realised that it is not very clear and transparent what does Code First, Database First and Model First are and what are differences between them. The main scope of this post is to define in a few words each of this mechanisms and what are the main difference between them. Code First - Define the domain first in code. Based on this domain, the database will be created on the fly by Entity Framework. This approach is used very often in combination with DDD (Domain Driven Development) Database First -  Define the database schema first. Based on it, EF generates the code that maps the database to our entities and the access mechanism Model First - Define the model in a design tool. Based on this design, EF will generate the entities and the database structure that is needed Now, that we know what are the available mechanism to define and map our model, let's see what are the...

This week I had the opportunity to hold a private two day training about Microsoft Azure. This was the first training of a serious of training about Azure, C# and Web development. During this training, attendees had the opportunity to learn and discover: VMs Web Roles Worker Roles Web Apps Azure Storage Azure Service Bus Event Hub Stream Analytics Monitoring and deployment cloud solutions If you are interested to find more about the custom trainings that I hold you can contact me directly.

Let's talk about an interesting subject related to Entity Framework (EF). When you are using EF there are different mechanism to map your model: Code First - we write the code first and the DB is generated automatically based on the code Database First - we define the DB structure and POCO entities are created automatically Model First - we design the model in a 'nice' designer. This designer will generate the classes and the database model All of them are perfect and works great. Based on our needs, preferences and team skills we can decide to go with an approach or another, but in the end we will end up with the same thing. I will follow up later on with a different post where I will compare them. Now, let's talk about different scenarios that is used by people. I saw in a lot of implementation where people are afraid of Code First or Model First. Because of this I realize that most of them are using a hybrid solution that I called Hybrid Code First . W...