I'm working on an application that lets users run tasks that are "long-running" (could take 5-10 seconds depending on the server load). For one or two users, this would practically be real time. However, when I start to scale I need to be able to let users know how long they will need to wait and optionally throttle how often they can run these tasks. Since I also have a general need for push messages from the server, I decided to give Websockets a try.

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First off, please see my internet PSA at the bottom of this post on the difference between “yea”, “yeah”, and “yay”. Now that that is out of the way, I want to talk about settings. Almost every settings example provided by Microsoft will look something like this which happens to be from the Azure queue documentation: <configuration> <appSettings> ......

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In my previous post, I outlined a general structure for setting up an application using node.js and other open tools in Visual Studio Express. Now I would like to expand this to show how I would host the angular-seed starter application for AngularJS. If you aren’t familiar with AngularJS or the seed app, you might want to take a look before continuing ......

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In the beginning, there was GET and POST. In those days, most of the World Wide Web was read-only and browsed with text-based browsers. Then came graphical browsers, CSS, e-commerce, SSL, streaming video, mobile devices, etc. Two things withstood the test of time: GET and POST (we’ll ignore the other request methods for poetic license). Web applications ......

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Open source tools and frameworks are great, but when you use frameworks like AngularJS and LESS you can end up with a many files that get compiled down to just a few. Keeping these files separate is good for development and debugging so it is important to keep all of the original source files under source control, but you don’t want them published to ......

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I have two quotes from old friends that have stuck in my head in certain situations. The first is, "dancing is like standing still, only faster." As a runner, I have adapted that to, "running is like falling down, only slower." The second is, "when you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras." As a programmer, I have found there is not much better ......

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In Part III, we started creating a very basic MVC application to host our store. We also created a simple table to store products and methods to perform CRUD transactions and validate data. Now we we introduce building product categories that can be related to products in a “many-to-many” relationship. This means that multiple products can be assigned ......

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To keep things simple, I am going to retain the default security framework created by Visual Studio when I created the application. However, I am going to change the database name to something more meaningful. So in web.config, I am changing the connection string to this: <add name="DefaultConnection" connectionString="Data Source=(LocalDb)\v11.0;Initial ......

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In Part I, I introduced the concept of the Streetlight Store and the architecture. In this segment, we will walk through the creation of a data contract for products, interfaces for managing transactions, and a database-first Entity Framework implementation of the interfaces. The initial plan was to distribute the store as a single library with the ......

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After looking at FluentValidation, I decided that most of what I needed was a way to do server-side validation of more complicated rules. While this is something FluentValidation does, it seemed like more than I needed so I set out to create a simple extension method to do what I needed. While it is still not necessarily perfect, it is simple and works. ......

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