AltaModa Technologies

Best Practice for Endorsing on LinkedIn

JBurnett — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 15:34:37 +0000

“And now for something completely different!” Yes, this is a bit off-beat for us, but we think you’ll be glad to learn a better way to endorse people on LinkedIn. Recently LinkedIn has more aggressively elicited your endorsement for people…

azureQuery vs. Azure SDK for Node

JBurnett — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 20:11:26 +0000

One of our recent projects involved using JavaScript to access Windows Azure data and features. When considering the overall design, we discussed client- or server-side execution models (where the “meat” of the code will execute). In this post we…

How To Use Mocha for Node Testing in Windows

JBurnett — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 18:02:56 +0000

Even with some advice from other sites, we had trouble getting Mocha testing to work well in Windows. Well, we could get tests to run, but inefficiently and error-prone from a developer perspective. Our solutions are cross-platform, so we wanted…

Outlook.com / Live.com Enabling Spammers?

JBurnett — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 13:06:20 +0000

Microsoft’s Outlook.com email site is all the rage this week. With a clean, responsive interface, many are harping it as a symbol of “the new Microsoft.” Hope springs eternal. I was disappointed, however, to see this error message after incorrectly…

Windows 8 Installation Fails in VirtualBox

JBurnett — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 18:13:07 +0000

We wanted to tinker with the Windows 8 Release Preview, so we tried to install it on our tinkering box. Having two tinkering boxes, we started with the trashable tinkering box — a Dell Dimension from mid-2005. Admittedly, we attempted…

Windows Azure Management Portal in Firefox, Moonlight on Linux

JBurnett — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 17:35:00 +0000

We have Arch Linux running on a 7 year old Dell desktop. It’s an oldie, but a goodie. The combination of Arch with LXDE makes for a good administrative machine – email, web browsing, bittorrents, etc. We had tried…

A PowerShell Script to Assist WCF Service Hosting / Testing

JBurnett — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 20:27:23 +0000

When developing for WCF, I find situations in which I need to manually host the WCF services. (“Manually” == “not from within Visual Studio”). Sometimes I have to go back and forth between different services, etc. The command I really…

Azure: Flex on IaaS, Keep PaaS Pure

JBurnett — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:00:55 +0000

I recently commented on Mary Jo Foley’s post Can Microsoft Save Windows Azure? The key point of my post was that IaaS is good for Azure because it is good for adoption rate. This change does raise concerns for software…

Periodic Table of Cloud Computing

JBurnett — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:04:01 +0000

David Pallmann, General Manager at Neudesic has published one of the best explanations of Cloud Computing in Windows Azure Design Patterns. The title is a double misnomer – it isn’t just about Azure, and it is far more than Design…

Is More IaaS Good For Azure?

JBurnett — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:55:52 +0000

Mary Jo Foley recently posted Can Microsoft Save Windows Azure? on RedmondMag.com. Obviously the title is geared more toward grabbing your attention, but the article has some good content. One paragraph caught my attention in particular: Starting around March this…

TweetDeck: The Best of The Worst

JBurnett — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:43:09 +0000

Although I never liked Adobe AIR, TweetDeck on AIR was easily the best Twitter client for Windows. After Twitter bought TweetDeck last May, the company began the process of replacing TweetDeck on AIR with TweetDeck on HTML5. Unfortunately, the new…

Microsoft Product Identification in SharePoint 2010

JBurnett — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 11:23:12 +0000

You can determine which Microsoft products (SKUs) are available in a SharePoint 2010 farm using the following GUID values. Value Product 84902853-59F6-4B20-BC7C-DE4F419FEFAD Project Server 2010 Trial ED21638F-97FF-4A65-AD9B-6889B93065E2 Project Server 2010 BC4C1C97-9013-4033-A0DD-9DC9E6D6C887 Search Server 2010 Trial 08460AA2-A176-442C-BDCA-26928704D80B Search Server 2010…

Debugging .NET-based Windows Services

JBurnett — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 18:48:45 +0000

We haven’t needed to implement a Windows Service in a while, but certainly have experienced the pain of debugging them when run by Service Control Manager (SCM). Here are a couple of links to good tools and discussion on the…

Get-Sysinternals–Not for Windows Servers

JBurnett — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:10:56 +0000

I recently posted about Keeping SysInternals Up-To-Date. Since then I’ve had trouble getting it to work on any of our Windows Server machines. I couldn’t find much info on this online, so maybe it’ll be helpful to raise the problem…

Keeping SysInternals Up-To-Date

JBurnett — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 21:48:55 +0000

Ed Wilson, Microsoft Scripting Guy, has a good article on TechNet about automatically keeping your local SysInternals files up-to-date. If you use the SysInternals tools, you know that they are updated fairly frequently – often due to suggestions from outside…

“A Pass on PaaS”–Strategy That Won’t Last

JBurnett — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 22:45:34 +0000

Meme Today I noticed a @CloudBlogs tweet along the lines of “Taking a Pass on PaaS.” My first thought was, “That’s not a good idea!” Then I thought, “This must be a reverse psychology tweet crafted to make you take…

Why SQLCraftsman gave VirtualBox the boot

JBurnett — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 16:04:24 +0000

My friend Geoff, a.k.a., SQLCraftsman, recently tried to use VirtualBox 4.x for his SQL Server virtual lab needs. Here’s his post on why VirtualBox lost out to VMWare Workstation. In his post he mentions the lopsided nature of the VirtualBox…

To Block or Not To Block? That’s the Google+ Question

JBurnett — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 19:48:31 +0000

Ok, first let’s dispense with the Google+ Love – so far I really like it. Circles is a good advancement in social networking, and provides a base for much more advanced features. As I’ve been using Google+, however, I’ve run…

Avoid ACTK’s ModalPopupExtender Inside UpdatePanel

JBurnett — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 04:24:10 +0000

We were having some really strange behavior with the AjaxControlToolkit’s ModalPopupExtender – everything was fine on one page, but not on another. One major purpose of using MPE was to wrap a common control. So, as you can imagine, we…

GoDaddy! Really, it’s time for you to GO!

JBurnett — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 04:04:00 +0000

A few years ago I got sucked into GoDaddy’s low prices and (seemingly) cohesive capabilities across a wide technology spectrum. For the better part of a year, however, I’ve been reminded of the maxim, “You get what you pay for.”…