Sevket Seyalioglu, a .NET Blog

I still can’t believe there is still no support for Azure in Dev 11 / .Net 4.5

There are ways to do so but not nice yet.
I would like to get the bits to publish my .Net 4.5 ASAP!

Key benefits

1. $5 per month
2. 99.99% SLA on monthly basis

Details about service: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/sql-azure/

Migration made easy: http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/documentation

Building a new tool for personal use which can become commercial later on (so many alternatives already out there in market anyway) where my “My Documents” to be synced with the blob account using sync framework.
I am totally amazed with the amount of work Microsoft did for sync framework, it is really awesome.
Very well done and most problems are just simplified.

Starter blog/code for this is: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazure/Synchronizing-Files-to-a14ecf57

Next: Syncing database to SQL Azure using sync framework (I see lots of work done around this only)

Currently working hard to define multiple Career Paths for better and brighter future

• Professional Track
• Developer/Engineer up to Enterprise Architect
• QA up to Lead QA & QA Architect (mutliple subjects)
• Management Track
• from Tech/Team Lead (Developer Engineer) up to Director
• from Lead QA to QA Manager & QA Director

This should have been done long back but fixing the missing link is much more important now than asking why.

Azure is so powerful and it is increasing its power with new use cases.
I am totally amazed and I see that the game will change  completely in 10 years where cloud will be a MUST!

Given that, let’s take a look into some challenges in Azure specifically.

Azure has a nice & simple management portal and it allows to add co-admins which is extremely nice however at the same time it is damn too powerful.
Once you have access, you simply can do anything and so far there  is no role based management.

Your team may want to see what is going on Azure and you simply can’t give this access to anyone.

At this exact moment, Management API comes to our help which has all the powers as the management portal but you can simply make a simple website which just gives existing setup to your employees as a read only portal.
Details of the API can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee460799.aspx

And one of the most important thing to implement Management API is, the Management Certificate (well, you need some sort of security to give access to the system and can’t really have the password shared anywhere)
Certificates in Azure is an important subject where this article in TechNet explains all details about that: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg607453.aspx

Note: Soon Azure Readonly Portal will be live

Finally SevDer ORM+ had a long way so far and almost ready.
I would like to share the first  preliminary screens.
Tool will be completed by tonight/tomorrow I hope.

Here you just need to select the profile or just start building one.

Very simple profile setup..

Code Generation based on selected Profile (ORM)

Here you go with code generation, ORM kicks the way you need!
As you see even it generates ASCX files (I will in the future add ASPX option and MVC/RAZOR too, but not yet)

After getting frustrated with the fact that Entity Framework and NHibernate does not resolve my needs, I am writing my own ORM tool to finalize one very important part of enterprise architecture.

Here are the features that are included (hope to finish by tomorrow)

1. Mutliple entity classes (one per each)
2. Single Data Provider Class
1. One Interface IDataProvider
2. One Class which inherits I[Model]DataProvider (SQL[Model]DataProvider)
1. [Model] to be renamed by the model name provided
3. One mocked class using moq framework (http://code.google.com/p/moq/)
3. SQL[Model]DataProvider will also implement retry logic in case of certain cases such as
1. Deadlock
2. Connection Timeout etc.
3. In a nutshell the following error codes : -1,-2,2,53,1222,1205
4. Will obviously generate related stored procedures and utilize them
5. Entities will be able to track simultaneous changes and will be able to throw exception if data changed before update!
6. Entities will implement [DataContract] & [DataMember] so that usage in WCF will be a lot easy
7. As you may see from here generated codes will implement Abstract Factory (Provider) design pattern and possibility of Singleton is also there.

So far, the best tool I’ve seen is Selenium (with Firefox recorder of course) for functional testing.

It covers most things that one may want to achieve.

Here are the points where Selenium (http://seleniumhq.org/) shall be used

1. Functional testing of web pages (not only web of course)
2. Validation content on the page
1. Image
2. Text
3. Source code (rendered of course)
4. css
5. Note
1. And above things by specifying where you expect it
2. You don’t need to code for that, you just specify those using the recorder tool (it does it for you)
3. Run complete tests as unit test
1. by default it is Nunit but it is not a big deal to convert into MSTest format
2. Just imaging adding function UI test code coverage results into all other unit test coverage results
4. Regression testing
1. All test scenarios combined
2. All browsers and versions for all scenarios
5. Simply stop doing manual test please, it is very easy to do with this tool (not limited to .NET etc.)

After doing enough research on both, what we’ve end up doing is; not using any ORM tool.

ORMs are designed to do rapid development for RIA (Rich Internet Applications) where performance is not a big concern.
Yes, ORM can speed up your development such as EF 4.0 or NH but they all lack one very important thing which is support for Stored Procedures for general select which shall be by default. All ORMs are focused on eliminating that and trying to optimize queries without SP.

If you ask me, SP are most useful when you use for select in general because you can really optimize the execution plan and it will be cached on SQL server. So in all subsequent calls to the database with same routine, SQL server will always know the execution plan and it will save time. [SP's execution plans are cached on SQL server.]

Therefore not using ORM is my choice.

Here are what I lose by not using ORM

1. oData
2. Extra quick development
3. Default behavior of throwing exception on an update where data was already changed before the update (concurrency handling)