Pie in the Sky (May 16th, 2014)

Back from TechEd, where there were a lot of announcements from Microsoft about working with various open source things. There were so many sessions, it was impossible to attend all of them. Good thing they put the videos online.

Cloud

• Deploy and customize FreeBSD VMs on Azure: And here you thought Azure VMs were only good for Windows and Linux.

• Azure Redis Cache: There's a bunch of blogs talking about the new Redis cache and how to use from .NET, but here's a page that has some PHP examples and links to clients for various other languages. In theory, you should be able to use it from any language with a Redis client.

• Virtual Machines best practices: Single VMs, temporary storage, and uploaded disks.

• Deploying antimalware solutions on Azure Virtual Machines: Protection for your VMs in the cloud.

• Reserved IP addresses for Cloud Services and Virtual machines: When you need to keep an IP address around for a while.

Client/mobile

• Sass mixing for CSS triangles: Making triangles through CSS.

• Lessons learned by building a single page application: Some things to consider when building a SPA.

• Preview of offline support for Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android: Offline mode for mobile apps that can't reach the Internet. Like when you're at a huge conference along with 80k other folks all trying to access data over cellular.

• Designer's guide to working with SVG: You are using SVG for your designs, right?

• Drignend: And iOS & Mac development environment on your iPad.

• Apache Cordova integration in Visual Studio: For creating multi-device hybrid apps.

• Refactoring your CSS with Less in Visual Studio Web Essentials: Web Essentials is pretty awesome if you are a Visual Studio user.

.NET

• ASP.NET vNext: There were a lot of interesting announcements about ASP.NET & .NET in general this week at TechEd. Like, ASP.NET vNext apps running on Mono on Mac and Linux.

Node.js/JavaScript

• Using npm link: Working with local modules.

• Understanding the four layers of JavaScript OOP: OOP can be confusing if you're coming to JavaScript from another language. This provides links to videos and other resources.

• Convert Github readmes into Ghost blog posts: Might be useful if you are using Ghost as your blogging platform.

• Realtime bandwidth: Strategies for high volume messaging over WebSockets.

• Connecting to an external database with Node.js backend in Azure Mobile Services: Using hybrid connections to let your Mobile Service in the cloud talk to a database outside the cloud.

Ruby

• Ruby 2.1.2 released: The latest and greatest.

• Crafting Ruby for performance: Getting better perf with Ruby apps.

Misc.

• 8 terminal utilities every OS X command line user should know: Some useful commands.

• PostgreSQL 9.4 beta 1: I don't normally post about database updates, but PostgreSQL has some interesting stuff going on here. Specifically working with JSON data, which is one of the big pulls of things like MongoDB. But JSON as a native type, queryable with honest-to-goodness SQL and side-by-side with relational data? That's pretty compelling.

• Trash: A cross-platform delete command that puts things in the trash vs. permanently deleting them.

• In browser RAW image processing: The folks at Pics.io talk a bit about how they worked out processing for RAW formats.

• Git for beginners: For folks new to git or that just haven't used it for a few months and need a reminder.

• vvvv.js: This is some sort of visual programming language, which might be interesting to some of you.

• Robots, Bluetooth, Windows runtime and LEGOS: This just hit the web this morning, so I haven't had a chance to try it, but sounds fun.

Enjoy!

- Larry