MCS UK Solution Development Team

The blog of the UK Solutions Development Team of Microsoft Consulting Services.

Why building highly scalable applications is hard – Part 2

In the first part of this 2 part article I described what a Primary bottleneck is, defined what...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 02/09/2015

Why building highly scalable applications is hard – Part 1

In this first part of a 2 part article (click here for part 2) I’m going to discuss what causes...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 01/22/2015

Access to an ASP.NET website via multiple authentications – revisited (v4.0)

Hi all A couple of years ago I posted an article entitled 'Access to an ASP.NET website via multiple...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 11/27/2014

LINQ, collections and null reference exceptions

This short post describes an idiosyncrasy of LINQ that, for someone with several years of C#...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 10/27/2014

Adding Trace to Azure Web Sites and Web Jobs

Using standard .NET trace in Azure Web Sites and Web Jobs is an extremely simple affair, with trace...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 09/04/2014

Video Streaming with a custom IRandomAccessStream on Windows and Windows Phone (Universal App)

Overview We encountered a challenge on our project where we wanted to play videos in MediaElement...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 07/12/2014

Using Application Insights to track Unhandled Exceptions in Windows Phone and Windows Store Apps

Application Insights is a preview service offered as part of Visual Studio Online.  If you...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 03/14/2014

Creating a DNS Server in Azure IaaS

Scenario I have multiple Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) Virtual Machines (VMs) running...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 03/04/2014

FloodHack

On Friday evening (14th Feb 2013), as I was walking out the building for the weekend, I was grabbed...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 02/18/2014

Hosting a TFS Build Controller on Windows Azure and connecting to Visual Studio Online

The Visual Studio Online Hosted Build Controller will serve you well for 90% of scenarios, but there...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 02/12/2014

Azure: Knowing the limitations with Point-to-Site VPN connections via Authenticated Proxies

There are two options currently available for secure cross-site VPN connectivity between a virtual...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 12/16/2013

Implementing LOB Storage in Memory Optimized Tables

Introduction Memory optimized tables do not have off-row or large object (LOB) storage, and the row...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 12/09/2013

Pulling data from SharePoint 2013 in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 apps

In a recent project a Windows Phone 8 Line of Business (LOB) App was required to pull data from...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 10/14/2013

Managing Entity Relationships with MVC Scaffolding

Using MVC Scaffolding is a great way to rapidly develop a website that provides basic CRUD...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 09/20/2013

Azure: Calling the Azure Management Rest API

The Azure Management REST API exposes a series of endpoints that allow you to perform various...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 08/08/2013

Unit Testing Delay Signed Assemblies on the Hosted TFS Build Service

Using the hosted build service available in the Team Foundation Service is great because you don't...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 05/23/2013

Building an SCCM Self Service Portal for Deploying Applications – Part 3 (Example Code)

This article is the third in a series of three. The first article looked at the context of the...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 05/14/2013

Building an SCCM Self Service Portal for Deploying Applications – Part 2 (Design)

In the previous article (The Background) we looked at why a Self Service portal for developers...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 05/14/2013

Azure PowerShell: Provisioning Multiple VMs

To create new VMs for use with the Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks preview feature for Azure,...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 02/25/2013

Exploring Dynamic Access Control Part 4 – Central Access Rules

In this series I have looked how we secure and classify resources (such as Files and...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 02/19/2013

Exploring Dynamic Access Control Part 3 – Properties and Claims

In the previous post I looked at Classifying resources. In this post I will be looking at setting up...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 02/01/2013

Exploring Dynamic Access Control Part 2 - Classification

Dynamic Access Control is a way for you to secure your resources (such as files and folders) without...

Author: MCS_UK Solution Development Date: 01/25/2013

Execution Time Based Heuristic Custom Task Scheduler

If you follow the samples for Parallel Programming with the .Net Framework, you may have come across...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 12/06/2012

Workflow Foundation (WF 4.5) - Designer Improvements

.NET 4.5 has introduced some great new features to improve the usability of the Workflow designer....

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 11/07/2012

Azure Access Control Services: Creating a Custom Identity Provider

Azure Access Control Services (ACS) allows you to secure an application (i.e. Relying Party, RP), by...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 11/02/2012

SAML 2.0 tokens and WIF – bridging the divide

Background We all know the following limitations about Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) and passive...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 11/02/2012

Dealing with an XSD Choice when XSD.exe doesn’t add XmlChoiceIdentifierAttribute

On my current project we are dealing with some quite complex xsd schemas. Whilst working with one of...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 10/26/2012

Access to an ASP.NET website via multiple authentications

Background Is it possible to secure a website using Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) without...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 10/18/2012

Co-occurrence Approach to an Item Based Recommender

For a while I thought I would tackle the problem of creating an item-based recommender. Firstly I...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 07/01/2012

.Net Implementation of a Priority Queue (aka Heap)

I thought I would take a break for a while from Hadoop and put together an F# .Net implementation of...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 05/10/2012

ADFS 2.0: Single sign-on when a website references remote images

I recently had an issue where a website, secured with Active Directory Federation Services 2.0...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 05/02/2012

Generic based Framework for .Net Hadoop MapReduce Job Submission

Over the past month I have been working on a framework to allow composition and submission of...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 05/02/2012

Framework for Composing and Submitting .Net Hadoop MapReduce Jobs

An updated version of this post can be found at:...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 04/16/2012

Workflow Foundation (WF4) – Rehosting The Workflow Designer

​Rehosting the WF designer in an application outside of Visual Studio is nothing new and since WF4,...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 03/26/2012

Hadoop Binary Streaming and F# MapReduce

As mentioned in my previous post Hadoop Streaming not only supports text streaming, but it also...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 01/08/2012

Hadoop Streaming and F# MapReduce

As you may know Microsoft has recently announced plans for a Hadoop adoption for both Windows Server...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 12/22/2011

Mutual authentication with a IIS hosted WCF data service installed in a workgroup environment

This post covers the steps required to secure communication between a WCF client and a WCF data...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 12/14/2011

Adventures in TSQL: SQL Server Query Performance Analysis using DMVs

From the development perspective I often have to perform an analysis of a database application. More...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 11/27/2011

Creating a Partitioned View in the BAM Archiving Database

When you run the BAM data maintenance package (BAM_DM_<activity name>) BAM copies each...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 11/15/2011

Adventures in TSQL: Comma separated string from column values

It seems that several times now I have had the requirement to create a comma separated string from...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 11/04/2011

Preventing Build Hangs and File Locking on Build Servers When Running Unit Tests (revised)

Recently I was tasked with changing our daily and Continuous Integration builds so that they would...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 11/02/2011

FSharpChart release supporting Stacked Charts and Markers (version 0.60)

FSharpChart now supports binding for Stacked Charts and for modifying the Marker associated with a...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 11/01/2011

String extension methods rather than using RegEx

In a recent project I was using regular expressions a lot for validating string expressions such...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 10/19/2011

Preventing Build Hangs and File Locking on Build Servers When Running Unit Tests

Note : An updated version of this post can be found here. Recently I was tasked with changing our...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 10/12/2011

FSharpChart new release available (version 0.55)

If you have been using FSharpChart you will have seen some recent activities around documentation. I...

Author: MCS UK Solution Development Date: 10/11/2011

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