Article: Scaling Azure Table and Blob Storage

Posted 3:43 PM, 12 October 2009 by charbdm333
This article is excerpted from Chapter 4: Scaling Azure Table and Blob Storage of the Wrox book Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform by Roger Jennings, and is reused by permission of the publisher. This may not be reused without publisher permission.

Scaling Azure Table and Blob Storage

Achieving high scalability requires cloud-based applications and services to be stateless so as not to rely on the data center’s load balancing devices or software to route successive requests from a specific client to a particular logical node. However, most applications and services require access to data persisted in tables that share some characteristics of relational database tables, as well as individual binary large objects (blobs) for storing unstructured data such as images and text documents. Azure Storage Services consist of highly scalable and available persistent storage for the following three types of data:
 
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jQuery with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1

Posted 4:11 PM, 22 July 2009 by charbdm333

Excerpted from the Wrox blox PDF Download, New Features in ASP.NET 3.5 Service Pack 1

By Wally B. McClure

jQuery

While technically not a feature of .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1, Microsoft announced shortly after the release of Service Pack 1 that the open source jQuery JavaScript library would be included in future versions of Visual Studio. In the meantime, they have released an IntelliSense-encoded version of jQuery, and it has been donated to the jQuery organization. This IntelliSense-encoded file can be used to get full IntelliSense support for jQuery within Visual Studio 2008.

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JavaScript Best Practices: Performance - Be Scope-Aware

Posted 3:04 PM, 17 July 2009 by charbdm333

Excerpted from chapter 20 "Best Practices" of the Wrox book Professional JavaScript for Web Developers, 2nd Edition

By Nicholas C Zakas

Chapter 4 discussed the concept of scopes in JavaScript and how the scope chain works. As the number of scopes in the scope chain increases, so does the amount of time to access variables outside of the current scope. It is always slower to access a global variable than it is to access a local variable because the scope chain must be traversed. Anything you can do to decrease the amount of time spent traversing the scope chain will increase overall script performance.

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Using Dojo to React to Page Load and Unload

Posted 2:54 PM, 17 July 2009 by charbdm333

Excerpt from The Concise Guide to Dojo

By Leslie Michael Orchard  

Reacting to the successful load and unload of a page are two basic event hooks that are the most convenient in setting up and tearing down a user interface. Dojo offers two methods to allow registration of handlers on these events, named dojo.addOnLoad() and dojo.addOnUnload(), used like so:

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ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Script Combining

Posted 2:34 PM, 17 July 2009 by charbdm333

Excerpt from Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX 

Script compression allows you to reduce the size of scripts sent to the client, but it doesn’t reduce the number of separate scripts an ASP.NET AJAX page may be using. Besides the framework scripts MicrosoftAjax.js (the core framework) and MicrosoftAjaxWebForms.js (for partial rendering), there may be additional script references specified in the ScriptManager. ASP.NET AJAX compatible controls and components on the page may each require additional scripts that are embedded in their respective assemblies, adding even further to the number of scripts the page requires. A page can easily require a dozen or more scripts, even if there are no script references declared.
 
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Using the Android Camera

Posted 2:10 PM, 17 July 2009 by charbdm333

Excerpt from chapter 10: Accessing Android Hardware of the Wrox book Professional Android Application Development

The popularity of digital cameras (particularly within phone handsets) has caused their prices to drop just as their size has shrunk dramatically. It’s now becoming difficult to even find a mobile phone without a camera, and Android devices are unlikely to be exceptions. To access the camera hardware, you need to add the CAMERA permission to your application manifest, as shown here: 

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Script Task (.NET) in SQL Server 2008 Integration Services (SSIS)

Posted 1:50 PM, 17 July 2009 by charbdm333

Excerpt from chapter 3, SSIS Tasks of the Wrox book Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services

By Brian Knight, Erik Veerman, Grant Dickinson, Douglas Hinson, Darren Herbold
 
The Script Task allows you to access the Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) environment to write and execute scripts using the VB and C# languages. The VSTA environment is new in the latest version of SSIS and replaces the Visual Studio for Applications (VSA) environment from the 2005 version. Scripting now is almost a misnomer because the latest SSIS edition solidifies the connection to the full .NET libraries for both VB and C#. The latest addition to SSIS of the VSTA environment and the Script Task in general also offer these extra functional advantages:
 
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Cross-Site Scripting

Posted 1:30 PM, 17 July 2009 by charbdm333

Excerpt from Professional ASP.NET 3.5 Security, Membership, and Role Management with C# and VB

By Bilal Haidar 
 
Cross-site scripting, also known as XSS or CSS, is a direct result of not having proper user input validation and failing to encode output to be displayed. The consequences of having improper input validation have been mentioned explicitly in detail. XSS is no different!
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Implementing the DotNetNuke CAPTCHA Control

Posted 12:38 PM, 17 July 2009 by charbdm333

Excerpt from  Professional DotNetNuke Module Programming

By Mitchel Sellers

With the exception of Label and a handful of other controls, all DotNetNuke Web controls are contained as compiled controls inside the DotNetNuke.UI.WebControls namespace. Therefore, a single Register tag can handle registering them for use. This Register tag must be added at the top of any .ascx control that needs to use the controls.
 
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Creating a New Silverlight 2 Control for SharePoint 2007

Posted 11:09 AM, 17 July 2009 by charbdm333

Excerpt from Professional Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Development Using Microsoft Silverlight 2 

By Steve Fox and Paul Stubbs

The first thing you need to do is create a simple Silverlight control. In this case, you will create a very simple control that has a textbox and a button. You could also use one of the controls you created in one of the previous chapters or download one of the samples from http://silverlight.net/. The example uses the most basic control possible so that you can focus on the interactions with SharePoint. In this case, we will not get into the XAML very much but focus on using the visual designers or Visual Studio and Expression Blend to do most of the work.

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