New Technology on Beckshome.com: Thomas Beck's Blog

Technology Links - January 11, 2015

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Couple of exciting things to link to from last week:

Docker – O’Reilly released an awesome Introduction to Docker video. Total runtime is less than 2 hours. Definitely a recommended watch if you’re looking to get familiar with the Docker container. Free to those who have an O’Reilly Safari subscription.
Azure VM Images – Microsoft announces a host of Azure Virtual Machine Images for Visual Studio. A great way to get exposure to the other Visual Studio SKUs or run the newer versions of VS without having to deal with the headaches of an install.
App Development – Awesome article on how independent mobile app development works and can be quite lucrative.
Feature Toggles – Good course from Pluralsight on implementing feature toggles in .NET. Something architects should be aware but the process and patterns are not widely documented.

Top 5 Technologies in 2015

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The new year brought with it the chance to reflect on technologies that I see making a splash in the coming year. I’m enthralled by big data and analytics but I’m not a data scientist; likewise, I only see so much value in the wearables themselves, although they’ll certainly feed the big data beast. My list of technologies is strongly influenced by my background in software and devops — without being a list of language or tool features.

Offsite Backup Options

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been sitting on my offsite backup upgrade for a long while now and finally decided to pull the trigger this week. I’ve used MozyHome for many years but the Mozy rate hike 6 months back agitated me. Combine this with the fact that, for more money, I’m not even getting the amount of backup I used to get and it was clearly time to move on, even though I’m nowhere near the 18 billion Gigabytes of storage Mozy claims I’m using.

Top 5 .NET Developer Tools You Likely Never Heard Of

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Everybody loves lists of tools. Scott Hanselman’s annual list of Windows tools has been immensely popular over the years and has opened my eyes to a bunch of new tools. The topic of tools has also been the subject of some very popular books, such as Windows Developer Power Tools and Java Power Tools.

These tool discussions are also recurring themes on all of the major discussion forums. It seems that every so often one of these questions hits StackOverflow and everyone chimes in with their favorite current tools. Invariably, for the .NET tool lists, there are some tools that always show up and; enjoying near universal advocacy in the .NET developer community. This includes tools like Reflector and Fiddler on the free side and Ants Profiler and Resharper on the commercial side.

Fiddler Demo - Camtasia for Mac

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I was up at Penn State IST school this past week giving a lecture to a class as part of our recruiting. As part of the class, which was about application integration, I touched on the HTTP protocol. I believe that it’s extremely important that everyone starting out in web application programming or web-based integration have a deep knowledge of the HTTP protocol. Although you should eventually read a book about HTTP and ultimately read the protocol itself, sometimes it’s easier to learn by tinkering. Along these lines, I thought it would be interesting to provide a quick demo of using Fiddler to inspect the HTTP protocol. I’ve included the screencast here. My apologies for the speed of the screencast. I was in a hurry to get it done and it sounds like I had an energy drink of five too many when I did the voice-over.

Xobni - The Outlook Plug-In with the Wow Factor

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Outlook plays an important role in my day-to-day work. It’s the one omnipresent desktop application – the first thing I open when I start Windows and sticking around as long as Windows is running. Over the years, I’ve adopted, tailored, and shared several techniques for inbox, to-do list, and archive file management. Even with these techniques, I’m always looking for ways that Outlook can meet me half way and make the task of managing the daily email avalanche a little bit easier.

SEO with the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

When ScottGu puts the time into creating a mini-tutorial for a new technology, it’s usually something worth investigating. After seeing his tutorial / overview of the new IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit, I decided I ought to give it a look. With the new blog running WordPress on IIS, this seemed especially timely and relevant.

As Scott mentions in his blog, a prerequisite to getting the IIS SEO Toolkit up and running is the installation of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. I was surprised how easy this installation went. When the installation is complete, you’ll have a new icon on your desktop and a new “Management” section within the IIS admin tool. The Installer looks like a great tool although I’m sure that some (myself included) will be leery about Microsoft installing server-related software on their machines.

WordPress on IIS7

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I had long planned the move from the .NET-based DasBlog blogging engine to WordPress but just couldn’t seem to make the time to complete the move. I finally pulled the trigger and cutover to WordPress a couple of weeks ago. The process was not nearly as painful as I imagined and I’m now beginning to reap the rewards of working on a blogging platform that’s more broadly integrated into the Web ecosystem. This blog entry is a collection of the key technical takeaways from my migration. Hopefully they will be helpful for other people looking to migrate to WordPress, especially on the Microsoft IIS platform.

VMware Fusion

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been busy since returning from vacation on getting my new iMac up and running. Aside from the machine being a physical work of art, it’s also been performing very well and runs so silent that I’m hearing all kinds of new noises in my house that I wasn’t aware of before. This doesn’t mean that I’ve completely forsaken Windows. In fact, the move to the Mac has allowed me to finally move to Vista on my home machine and install Visual Studio 2008, which is killing my work laptop. For those of you remotely familiar with the Mac, running Windows side-by-side with OS X has been possible since the release of the Intel-based Macs. This started with Boot Camp and gained serious traction with the release of Parallels. Most recently, VMware jumped into this space with their Fusion product for the Mac. I went with Fusion due to reviews on both Apple’s site and Amazon.com that seemed to indicate that Fusion was more stable and that there were far more converts from Parallels to Fusion than in the opposite direction.

Life in HD

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:00 +0000

After a long hiatus, I just got done working my way through a 6 month photo backlog, arranging and backing up photos and picking the best ones out for uploading to Flickr. You can find the new photos in the photo section of my blog. I was working my way through videos as well and preparing to convert some of these to Flash for uploading. If you look at the videos section of my blog, you’ll notice that there are no new videos. So what happened?

Netbeans 6.0 as a Rails IDE

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve posted about how impressed I was with NetBeans as a Java IDE and the incredible progress this product has made in the last couple of years. I knew for a while that Ruby on Rails and JRuby support was coming for the next major Netbeans release (v 6.0), but I hesitated moving from RadRails to NetBeans until the feature set had stabilized. Last week, the Netbeans 6.0 beta was released and, with RadRails stagnating somewhat under the Aptana brand, I caved in and made the switch.

Web 2.0 Bus

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I feel as if someone tacked a “show me your enterprise service bus” sign onto my back and I’ve been walking around blissfully unaware of this fact for months now. Client presentations, vendor presentations, casual conversations – everyone wants to show off their visuals of an ESB, SOA, and next generation architectures. Thank goodness there’s no fine print on my sign restricting me from asking tough (and not so tough) questions.

Spring Batch - Java Batch Processing

Mon, 07 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Eliminating or reducing enterprise system batch processing is the bane of many architects looking to convert large-scale legacy systems to current platforms. Some believe, rightly or wrongly so, that mainframe-style batch has no place in modern system architectures and attempt to eradicate its existence entirely. Others are a bit more accepting and attempt to understand the role that batch processing fills in enterprise application architectural space. Even for these people, finding people with the skills to engineer batch processing systems with these newer technologies is not an easy proposition since little or nothing has been written about batch on the Java or .NET platforms.

Live Search Maps for Firefox

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The Microsoft Live Search Maps update to include Firefox support that I blogged about a couple of weeks ago was released sooner than I expected. The updated maps API supporting Firefox has not yet been released but word has it that this is imminent as well. I’ve put together a brief screencast of Live Search Maps running in Firefox. Omitted from the screencast are the features that have been available in Firefox for a while, like bird’s eye view. Focus is given explicitly to navigating with the 3D control.

RadRails Now Under Aptana

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

For those Rails developers using RadRails as your IDE, you might have noticed that, in the last several days, the RadRails site has slipped off of the face of the earth. Due to a very unfortunate run-in with their registrar and DNS provider, the nice folks at RadRails are apparently stuck in DNS purgatory. This little mishap coincided with the announcement of the Aptana IDE / RadRails merger. Due to the site outage, many folks missed out on the announcement all together… so I’ll repeat Aptana and RadRails are merging. The location of the RadRails download on SourceForge has not changed.

Building Applications in the Cloud

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In the first of my beginning-of-the-month speed blogs, I’d like to start with the topic that I’ve been putting off longest, building applications on top of Amazon’s Web services. For those of you that think of Amazon.com as just a book store, or an e-commerce platform, or [add your assumption here], think again. In the last year or so, Amazon has released a number of services that have not only established them as a first-class platform, but have pushed the envelope considerably on the idea of virtualization.

The Innovation Engine at Yahoo - Pipes, OmniFind and TagMaps

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The innovation engine at Yahoo is heating up, looking to get Yahoo back in the race with the “Big Boys”, rivals Google and Microsoft. In an environment categorized by copycat service offerings and one-upmanship, Yahoo’s offerings are refreshingly unique. I cover three of the most recent services that I’ve been playing around with and that I think will prove entertaining to my readers as well – Pipes, OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, and TagMaps.

Value == Services + Device

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The Technology and Venture Capitalism Podcast on IT Conversations featured some interesting guests who brought a lot of good ideas to the table. Phil Windley, the moderator, got the guests to kick around the concept of patterns for applications that are good prospective candidates for funding in the VC world. The discussion started with the simple advertising-only model (a’la Google) and the group then moved onto the Apple iTunes / iPod model.

Drinking from the Microsoft Fire Hose

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

What Tad Anderson said in a recent post about Microsoft as a “technology factory” really got me thinking. I particularly identified with his quote that “Microsoft has buried the average learner, and presented quite the challenge for the best workaholic out there.” With all of the things that he mentioned in his post plus the release of Vista, the coming release of Enterprise Library 3.0, software factory work from the Patterns and Practices group, not to mention C# 3.0, Lambda expressions, and… oh yeah, F#, it’s hard keeping your head above water as a Microsoft application development technology specialist these days.

Web 2.0'ish Tools

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Following up on my This Digital Life post last month, a couple of folks have sent me emails asking if I had some recommendations around other Web 2.0 tools. In the sprit of a recent podcast that defined Web 2.0 as “really anything that’s cool online nowadays”, I decided to post some Web 2.0’ish tools that I highly recommend. Some of these tools I’ve been using for a year or more (a mighty long time in the Web 2.0 world) and some I’ve been using for just a couple of weeks. Most are, with the exception of Central Desktop, free services. Enjoy and let me know if you find these useful.

This Digital Life

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’m often asked about tools and technologies that I use on a daily basis. Like everyone else out there, I lead a pretty busy life and I’m always trying to find ways to be more efficient or to use tools that better support the way I work and live. Below you can find a list of the tools and technologies that make my life easier in some way or the other. I’ve cataloged these tools using some general categories to help delineate functionality. As much as possible, I tried to avoid the mundane things and concentrate on smaller niche tools or new technologies that you might not have heard of or actively use and which might enable you to tweak a bit more efficiency or productivity out of your day. Enjoy and please feel free to add comments citing tools that you believe might be of interest to others.