Database sharding has long been known as a technique for increasing the scale of an application. By placing data in multiple databases, each with only a portion of the data, increases the reach of an application by distributing the load across multiple servers. This technique of sharding has been extended to not only SQL Relational storage, but is the foundation […]

Surprisingly this pattern was introduced to me a couple days ago in the Microsoft Fail Safe presentation from their virtual conference this week. A number of patterns were introduced as techniques to mitigate issues where failure may occur. The presenters have a book soon to be released on the topic of resilient patterns which I will introduce in a future […]

While watching the presentations today from Microsoft Virtual Training Academy on Modern Cloud Architectures one key word was emphasized; Resilience. In terms of software architecture, the need for Resilience has overtaken the need for Reliability. Resilience is the ability to continue operations when something fails. Reliability is the ability to not fail. They demonstrated the concept by comparing the performance […]

Why should a company keep current as technology grows? I have been thinking on this specific topic from many perspectives the last few days. There is a cost associated with keeping current with technology. Is there a cost for not keeping current? Here are a few things I have observed in my career at different companies. One company had a […]

I was reading Dino Esposito’s article in Code magazine today regarding the differences between ASP.Net, ASP.Net MVC, Web API and STAs. He did a really great job comparing the different technologies at a high level, which was his goal. The main point he made is that there was a good reason for ASP.Net Web Forms to work the way they […]

In response to the introduction of tools for writing mobile apps for multiple platforms Bob Writes: I can predict with some confidence that these tools will work "ok" but will suffer as they all do with the same traditional issues. Either you have to work to the lowest feature set and the Apps look rubbish, or you will have to […]

You Do Backups, But Are You Covered? When you set up your SQL Server backups, it’s a great feeling to go and see the nice BAK, DIFF, TRN backups accumulating in your storage system (you do check to make sure they’re happening, right?) But there is much more to rebuilding a system that has failed in a big way. If […]

Modern software and hardware is all about the User Experience. Most users want computers to work without having to know all the nuts and bolts that put it together. My wife downloaded a book off Amazon the other day. She didn’t have the correct reader installed on her tablet to read the book. However, her computer took her to a […]

Alert Numbness – How Do You Cope? When you get that shiny new monitoring software set up, often the first few steps you’ll take include setting up new alerts. "Let the system watch things and let me know how it’s going…" is the thought. This is great, but you can quickly be faced with a stead flow of alerts, both […]

PhoneGap has been the major player in establishing a common platform for mobile devices. It is a library that exposes native device capabilities to a JavaScript interface, making it possible to program many different mobile devices in JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS, and compile it to operate on different platforms. PhoneGap was purchased by Apache, and a new name given, “Cordova”. […]