I’ve recently begun studying for the PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner) exam with a small study group. Last week, we had our first meeting, and it has really made me reflect back on previous projects in which I’ve participated and see how we’ve applied Agile principles without calling them Agile. As our study group was reviewing the 12 Agile principles, the…
Month: August 2014
Creating an Azure DocumentDB
Microsoft has been providing (in opinion) the best cloud platform for developers for quite a while, and their newest preview feature (DocumentDB) continues to add features modern developers have been asking for. Azure’s DocumentDB is a NoSQL document database service that supports JSON document storage and rich, native JavaScript query support. I’ll spend the next posts reviewing the new DocumentDB…
Why To Use the Repository Pattern
I felt it was time to update and clarify some previous thoughts on the use of the Repository pattern. Previously, I had indicated that a Repository did not provide much benefit, as ORMs act as a Repository. Although true, I had a very specific context in mind when saying this – anemic domain models. When you’re working with anemic domain…
Disabling the Windows 8 On Screen Keyboard – Scott Hanselman Saves the Day
It looks like I’m not the only one that does not have the need for the Windows 8 On Screen keyboard. See Scott Hanselman’s blog post from 2013. Just like Scott, I also have a Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch (1st gen). Save for a few small hardware-related issues I encountered early on, I have loved (and continue to love) this laptop. I…
Why Not to Use the Repository Pattern
The Repository pattern, as described by Edward Hieatt and Rob Mee in Martin Fowler’s Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, is a layer of abstraction that is used to mediate interactions between the domain and the data mapping (ORM) layers. You can use a repository to minimize the duplicate query logic that a can arise in larger domains. Often times, I…
Beginning with the Nest API – Take 2
A while back we took a look at starting development using the Nest API. In my original post the end user was required to enter a pin code after they authorizing the client application to access Nest data. This is a bit of an undesirable workflow. The authorization should be fluid and unobtrusive to the end user. Luckily the OAuth…
Activating Your MSDN Azure Benefits
I love Microsoft Azure. Perhaps I could even be considered an Azure fan boy, but there’s some great reasons I’m an Azure fan boy. Limiting the discussion to Azure websites, the Azure management portal makes it simple to create websites, customize the domain name, dynamically enable load balancing and auto scaling, diagnostic logging (to the file system, or Azure table/blob…