NJ Geeks - New Jersey's IT Community

It is really great to see KickoffLabs (via @evolvingwe) published on the UserVoice and KissMetrics blogs.

Even better since they are two services we use daily and absolutely love.

KissMetrics: How to Measure Your Way to Startup Success

UserVoice: How to give a #@%! about your customers before you launch

In this post, I’d like to share with you a set of best practices we employ at KickoffLabs to constantly measure performance against our various assumptions and theories.

This looks like a great way to get a jump start on a project.

At $149, assuming it saves you 1 to 2 hours it more than pays for itself.

There is no need to establish yourself as an authority. People tend to be very good at detecting competence. If you have impressive credentials but don’t seem to know what you’re talking about, you’ll lose credibility rapidly.

Sound advice. Also looks to be part of an interesting book, Speaking for Hackers

Tomorrow (Thursday, 3/29/2012) at noon ET or 9am PT, we have our third screencast in the @home series: Diving into Windows Azure Storage Options!

During the first week of March 2012, my teammates Brian Hitney, Jim O’Neil, and I announced the re-launch of the @home with Windows Azure project. On March 15, we hosted a kick-off webcast providing an overview of the project.

This is the third in a series of five where we’ll dive into various aspects of Windows Azure.  In this third webcast, we’ll dig deeper into Windows Azure Storage and how it was used by the @home with Windows Azure project.  From the abstract page:

In the second webcast of this four-part series, the cloud gurus talk about the @home solution and how it leverages Windows Azure table storage. We examine how table storage differs from SQL Azure storage and why you might choose one over the other. Finally, since we're looking at data storage, we also cover other storage options—BLOBs and queues. 

If you can’t make this one, be sure to check out the rest in the series by watching the @home with Windows Azure website – we’ll be diving deeper into various features as the weeks progress. You can also watch the recordings of these webcasts as they become available on the site.

Microsoft provides a 90-day free trial of Windows Azure where you can learn to kick the tires and run an application in the cloud 24x7 cost-free.  The @home with Windows Azure project is an online activity where you use those 90-days of free compute time(or your MSDN Subscriber benefits) to contribute to Stanford University’s Folding@home distributed computing project.

The Folding@home project helps scientists provide insight into the causes of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow disease, ALS, and some cancer-related syndromes, by running protein folding simulations on thousands of machines world wide,

You deploy Stanford’s Folding@home application to Windows Azure, where it will execute protein folding simulations in the cloud, thus contributing to the research effort. In essence, your participation is a donation of your free compute time to the Folding@home project!

Additionally, from the start of March 2012, Microsoft is donating $10 (up to a maximum of $5000) to Stanford’s Pande Lab for everyone that participates!

You can learn more about the project and sign up to view a series of web-casts we will be delivering over the next month at the project’s website:

Hope you will join Brian, Jim, and I tomorrow!

If you want to see how Facebook will display your url as a link try the Facebook Debugger.

I love seeing post like this. I hope this trend continues to spread.

Remember, No-Reply Must Die!.

I love my customers and I love support. While any technology can be copied, the customer service experience you choose to offer is unique. It’s critical that you start these good habits BEFORE and during your launch.

What we believe in.

It represents exactly what I am opposed to, the perpetual and petty testing that has become a fungus on the foot of public education.

Broken.

The good news is that most businesses aren’t willing to go the extra mile. They’re content to sit in the “average-to-good” Customer Experience Zone, making it much easier for you to give your customers the premium experience they crave.

Last month, the NJ Windows Azure User Group had a successful kick off meeting at the Microsoft office in Iselin, NJ.  The group kicked off with me delivering an overview of Windows Azure and introducing the platform.  This month, Vineet Kumar, the group’s organizer has managed to line up another stellar speaker! 

Next Wednesday, on April 4th, Jim Priestley will be giving an awesome presentation on his experience leading a team to migrate a real-world app to Windows Azure.  Jim gave this presentation at the NYC user group earlier this month to great reviews.  Here’s his abstract on the NJ Windows Azure User Group website:

Real World Azure: Migrating e-Commerce to Azure

Presented by Jim Priestley, Azure Technical Solution Specialist

Jim Priestley will review his team’s experiences migrating www.plccenter.com from an on premise ASP.Net 2.0 application to an Azure hosted MVC 3 application that now serves over 30,000 unique visitors daily.

The session will include details of the implementation including storage, performance, payment processing considerations, and tuning SQL Azure for high speed searching.

Jim Priestley recently joined Microsoft as an Azure Technical Solution Specialist in the Mid-Atlantic District.  So recently in fact, that I’ll use this post to say, “Welcome aboard Jim!”

Date: Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Time: 6:30pm
Location:

Microsoft NJ Office
101 Wood Ave South, 9th Floor
Iselin, NJ 08830

On to the next goal. 25,000 users feels like a huge stretch, but no more than 5,000 when we first started.

Looking forward to this simply to ensure consistently across all my apps.

Legit is a complementary command-line interface for Git, optimized for workflow simplicity. It is heavily inspired by GitHub for Mac.

This is a great way to get started with git.

Back on March 13th, I announced a series of Windows 8 Developer Camps coming to cities up and down the US east coast starting this week and running through April & May 2012.  There was one location that eerily seemed to be missing from the list of tour dates:  New York City! (or as my teammate Rachel Appel likes to say, “The Capital of the World!”) So what gives?!

New York City is a special place… being the capital of the world and all.  Microsoft wanted to be able to do something special there for the first big Windows 8 Developer event there. As such, the details were not all in place when I announced the Windows 8 Developer Camps earlier this month.  Now they are, and I’m happy to announce that April 19, 2012 will be the Windows 8 Developer Event in New York City!!!  The event will be at Center 548 on the West Side near Chelsea Piers.  Read on for registration & details…

Learn everything you need to start building Metro-style apps for Windows today at our free, full-day Windows Developer Event.

We'll show you how to use Visual Studio to code fast, fluid, immersive and beautiful Metro-style applications in HTML5/JavaScript, XAML/C# and C/C++. Your investments in these languages carry forward, making Windows a no-compromise platform for developers.

Whatever language you choose, your app gets deep integration with the Windows shell, including notifications, live tiles, deep links, and contracts with other apps. And now you can build once and support all Windows customers, no matter what type of PC they have—from tablets to laptops to convertibles to desktops.

Seating is limited and registration is not guaranteed. Secure your spot today!

Date: April 19, 2012
Time: 9:00am – 5:00pm
Location:

Center 548
548 West 22nd St
New York, NY 10011

• Please bring a notebook computer and your personal identification.
• Be sure to download the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.
• And, don't forget to download Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows 8 and seize the future of development.

This free event is brought to you by Microsoft. However, you are responsible for booking and funding your own travel and accommodations. Please note that there is limited space available for this event, so be sure to register early.

This is going to be an exciting event.  I can’t wait to be there myself and hear about what types of experiences folks will interested in building. Hope to see you there!

In the spirit of both the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns book and the SOA Patterns book/site,  I’m going to try to document a couple different SOA Patterns that I’ve found useful, but haven’t seen documented anywhere else.  This is a work in progress, and as always, feedback on theses patterns is appreciated.

To test a client configuration to a known service endpoint.  Ping allows for the testing of the communication channel between a client and a service endpoint, without testing of the service implementation.

When building and deploying services it is easy to build integration tests that will test both the configuration of the service and the implementation of the service, but it is just as important to test the service implementation and the service communication channel configuration in isolation.  By isolating what is under test using a Ping, we reduce the number of variables that may affect the results so we can derive useful information on whether the unit is actually correct.  Since many service frameworks (like WCF) allow for the communication channel to be configured using a configuration file the service configuration can easily be changed without updating the service implementation code.  Since these configuration files are typically part of the deployment process, these Ping tests can be used to test the service after deployment.

Use the Ping Pattern when:

• You want to test just a service endpoint’s communication channel configuration to a known client configuration.
• You want to test that a service endpoint is available and ready to accept requests
  

The Ping pattern can be implemented 2 ways

1. Adding a Ping Method to the service that has no parameters and an empty response.
2. Adding a Ping Header to the request message header and sends back an empty response
   

• Client
• Defines the expected communications channel configuration, sends the Ping Request and expects an empty response
• Service Endpoint
• Defines the location of the service and a specific communication configuration.
• Service Ping Behavior
• Intercepts the Ping request message before calling the service’s implementation, and returns an empty response.

The client sends a Ping Request to the Service Endpoint and expects an empty response to signify that the request was received.

The Ping Method and Ping Header have different trade-offs.

Ping Method

• Pros
• Gives a simple, easy to use, and known, method to call when implementing the Ping Pattern.
• Easier to secure, since most services secure at the method level.
• Does not require a request body
• Cons
• Adds an extra method to a service’s contract that is not part of the service’s implementation.
• If the service is unable to intercept the ping, then the service implementation could be executed.

Ping Header

• Pros
• Does not change the service’s contract
• Tests security for the method that is used as part of the Ping Request.
• Cons
• Does not explicitly indicate which method for a service to call.
• May require a request body.

The Service Ping pattern is implemented by way of adding a Service Ping Behavior to the Service.  The Service Ping Behavior should be intercept the request just before the Service Implementation is called, but after the request is validated by security.

The Tellago Studio’s Product, SO-Aware implements the Ping Pattern, using the Ping Header implementation.  SO-Aware enables an enterprise to store their service configurations in a service repository, which makes it easy for the enterprise to monitor and manage service configurations without having to access the servers the services are deployed on.  Any changes made to the service  endpoint configuration can easily be regression tested using the Ping Pattern tests, immediately verifying that the changes will not adversely affect clients.

• Dependency Ping

Even though I live in NJ, I don’t get to hang out  with my friends in the local developer community that often.  So, I’m taking a couple days off of work next week, and figured with the holiday that week, it made sense to try to get together. I pinged Scott Watermasysk, (we have been trying to get a Dev Dinner going for a while now), and he was available.  Sooo….

If you happen to be in NJ, and want to hang out at a cool brewpub with some fellow developers, you are welcome to stop by The Harvest Moon Brewery, New Brunswick on Tue. Nov 23rd.  I’ll be there around 6PM, and should be there for at least a couple hours (free wireless internet access and fresh brewed beer, great combination).

Feel free to spread the word.

If you attended my HDC 2010 session “From Datasets to Data Services” and want a copy of  the slide deck and code, you can get them from my HDC10 Skydrive folder.

As usual, the Heartland Developers Conference was killer.  If you want to attend a great conference and don’t want to spend a ton of money, you may want to look into the next HDC.