Time Cockpit Blog - Tips and News from the Time Cockpit Team

Moving from SQLCE 3.5 to SQLCE 4.0

14 April 2011 - SQLCE

So today finally came that day, we put our first steps into moving to SQL Server Compact Edition 4.0 for our offline database. I was delayed by a day by introducing a new way of managing references to third party components in our build system because I didn't want to replace the Version for the assembly in every project file. How I did that is the content of another blog post though.

BIG DAYS 2011 - Parallel Programming

28 March 2011 - .NET

At the BIGDAYS 2011, the largest roadshow of Microsoft in Austria with approx. 1,700 visitors, I do a session about parallel programming together with Andreas Schabus. In the session we start with the basics of parallel programming in .NET 4 and C# 4. Based on that we discuss the importance of parallel programming in Windows Azure and do demos for scaling out compute tasks into the cloud as well as a demo for parallel querying using the concept of horizontal sharding in the SQL Azure database layer.

TFS Build and Checked-In Assemblies

23 February 2011 - TFS

Even though our core dev team is quite small, time cockpit's code base has grown quite a bit. It has grown in such a way, that having all of the code in one solution file and working with it from a day-to-day basis is not a feasible solution. As we have three different areas we work on, Data Layer (DL), Signal Trackers (ST) and the User Interface (UI) itself, we have created seperated solutions for each area. This would work fine just as it is, but the problem is, that ST depends on DL and the UI depends on the ST and DL Layers.

Powerworkshop C# 4 at BASTA Spring 2011

20 February 2011 - .NET

Tomorrow I will do a power workshop about C# 4 at BASTA Spring 2011 in Darmstadt.

Custom OData Provider for Windows Azure

16 February 2011 - Azure

Beside working on time cockpit I also do some consulting work regarding .NET in general and the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform in particular. In that context I had the chance to work as a coach in an Azure evaluation project at Austria's leading real estate search engine. Based on the research we did in this project I came up with the idea to build a custom OData provider that optimizes the way that real estate search requests are handled. It shows how sharding can be used in Winodws Azure to massively improve performance while raising costs moderately. In this blog post I would like to show you the architecture of the solution. You will see how I have built the provider and how the possibilities of the Windows Azure platform helped me to create an elastic solution that is able to handle high loads.

Session at ADC 2011 - Testing and build automation with Windows Azure

14 February 2011 - Azure

Today I will present about testing and build automation with the Windows Azure platform at the Advanced Developer Conference in Munich.

Automated deploying and testing of services in Azure

14 February 2011 - Azure

We have been experimenting with automated testing of our services against windows azure lately. Our goal was to deploy a service in the build process, run a unit test, and then undeploy the process. Assuming that you have a hosted service ready (something.cloudapp.net) and a solution with a unit test running locally against a service (running locally, when executing the unit test, there are a few steps one needs to take in order to test against an azure-deployed instance of this.

Windows Azure Workshop at OOP 2011

24 January 2011 - Azure

Today I will do a workshop about the Windows Azure Platform at OOP 2011. In this blog post I want to summarize the most important resources that I have used in the workshop.

Hands-On Labs StyleCop and Code Analysis

08 December 2010 - .NET

This week I will be one of the speakers at BASTA On Tour in Munich. One of the topics I am going to speak about is the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). In this blog post I want to share my slides and summarize the hands-on labs that I am going to go through with the participants.