Microsoft has a great collection of pre-built solutions for Azure Automation that you can leverage to realize many common use cases. One of these common scenarios is when a company has many virtual machines that are only producing business value during specific times and the company wants to avoid paying for the time that the virtual machines are not ......

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Microsoft made their new Azure App Service Tools extension available today in the Visual Studio Marketplace. I had the opportunity to preview this extension and was very pleased. The process of provisioning and deploying the app service from VSCode was quite intuitive. I was able to "guess" my way through the process with my only wrong guess being how ......

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Everybody has a slightly different learning style that works best for them - often with different forms of content working best at various stages in their learning. I've always been an avid reader and tend to "index" most everything that I read for reference later when it becomes important. That being said, the first thing I do when getting ready to ......

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UPDATE: I have just received confirmation that the source code is now available from the book's product page on the Apress website (http://www.apress.com/9781... Thanks to everyone that waited patiently for this to be made available.I've been contacted by several people through this blog asking about the missing source code for the "Beginning ......

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I have been working with the Technical Preview of Sitecore 6.6 on a project and have been for the most part happy with the way that Sitecore (which truly is an MVC implementation unto itself) has been expanded to support ASP.NET MVC. That said, getting up to speed with the combined platform has not been entirely without stumbles and today I want to ......

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In this posting, I will discuss the motivation behind keeping View code as thin as possible when using patterns such as MVC, MVVM, and MVP. Once the motivation is identified, I will examine some ways to determine whether a View contains logic that belongs in another part of the application. While the concepts that I will discuss are applicable to most ......

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I’ve been doing quite a bit of work in Sitecore recently and last week I encountered a situation that it appears many others have hit. I was working with a field that had been configured originally as a grouped droplink, but now needed to be updated to support additional levels of hierarchy in the folder structure. If you’ve done any work in Sitecore ......

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Things have been pretty quiet on this blog for the last couple of months because I have been immersed in learning and writing about developing applications for Windows 8 using C# and XAML. I have been working on authoring “Beginning Windows 8 Application Development – XAML Edition” which will is scheduled for release by Apress in November and is currently ......

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Since I have been interested in cross-platform mobile application development, but reluctant to leave behind the IDE goodness that is Visual Studio, I was invited to participate in a private early beta program for VSNomad and asked to share my thoughts. One of the coolest things about the tool is that there is hardly anything to it, so most of this ......

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The Service Locator pattern and Dependency Injection clearly take a much different approach to achieving Inversion of Control and these differences often lead to philosophical discussions about which is better. Rather than tag either as "better", it is much better to look at the advantages and disadvantages that each bring to the table and understand ......

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