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SQL Server Managed Backup to Microsoft Azure
Recently we migrated one of our projects to SQL Server 2016. As part of migration we enabled TDE for some databases. Next step was to configure backups.
On our old SQL Server 2008 we already used to backup to Azure. It’s very convenient! So we were happy to use Managed Backup feature of SQL Server 2016.
There is really good step-by-step tutorial on how to setup it on MSDN I just want to note that then you configure “instance level” backups, keep in mind that you will have to apply the same settings to existing databases manually. So it makes sense to first configure “Instance Level” backup settings and then restore your databases. It might save you a bit of time.
It was a breeze to configure Managed Backup… very smooth experience. Highly recommend!
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Rethink DB - The open-source database for the real-time web
Couple of months ago I came across Rethink DB - The open-source database for the real-time web.
I’m fascinating about real-time web tools and technologies.
Last year I played with Meteor. And I still think it’s pretty nice framework. It’s great especially for simple projects. What I don’t like about Meteor is that you have to opt-in into all decisions them made. For example, you have to use MongoDB (at least at the moment) you can’t use npm packages (at least at the moment). As I know Meteor team is moving to elaborate these issues.
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Smart Screen & EV Code Signing
Recently our QA team started to get “Windows protected your PC” messages from the Windows SmartScreen. They saw that message each time they launch the app I’m working on at the moment. That warning message even didn’t display the Publisher correctly.
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Front-End development
I did some research lately on ECMAScript 6 and ES6 Module Loader Polyfill and I’m very exited!
That’s pretty cool how easy it is to use latest technologies (ES2015 or TypeScript) to develop browser applications and let the tools to transform latest & greatest into the JavaScript understood by the browser. Things such as jspm… that’s all so exiting!
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Consul - REST service discovery
If you didn’t hear about Consul I encourage you to read a nice introduction to it.
It looks really interesting
- Service Discovery
- Failure Detection
- Multi Datacenter
- Key/Value Storage
More details at https://www.consul.io/
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Sauce labs
Last week I came across a really efficient way on UI testing automation. Just imagine you don’t need anymore to configure all those VMs and devices to test your product!
Source Labs allows:
- Automated Cross Browser testing using Selenium for web apps on desktop and mobile browsers
- Automated Mobile testing for native & hybrid mobile apps
- Even Manual testing is possible on over 500 browser and platform configurations
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Best practices for DevOps, data storage, high availability, and more
Just read Building Cloud Apps with Microsoft Azure. It’s available as a free ebook on Microsoft Virtual Academy. I’d like to say that it was a really interesting reading!
In my opinion most of the patterns and ideas described in the book could be (and should be!) applied in on-premises as well. For example
- Octopus allows you to setup a very nice DevOps workflow on-premises.
- In any .NET application you will benefit from using Async/Await approach.
- Any big application should have a good Monitoring and telemetry. I'm personally very happy with Serilog and Metrics.Net
- Using Cache is a great idea for most of the applications. I'm a big fan of Redis
- Dependency Injection is also a must have in most of applications. I like Simple Injector very much.
- Queue-centric work pattern also could be applied in on-premises scenario. You would use RabbitMQ, Redis, Service Broker, etc. for that purpose
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Service Broker in a nutshell
Lately I was looking into different Queuing Technologies to choose the best fit for the upcoming project. In that post I just want to summarize my finding.
I was already familiar with Azure Service Bus and Rabbit MQ. But we didn’t need advanced routing capabilities they both provide, hence I decided to look into alternative solutions. By the way here’s a very nice Service Bus for Windows Server & RabbitMQ comparison.
We were already using MS SQL Server to persist the data. So using Service Broker was an appealing choice from the very beginning.
Advantages
- Very easy to backup/restore
- Sequential Delivery & Related Messages Locking (plus it allows to access internal Sequence ID & Sequence Number)
Disadvantages
- To en-queue message you should have a conversation first. It means you en-queue message into one queue and listen for messages to appear on another queue
- Index fragmentation then Dealing with Large Queues
Alternative solution is to use tables as queues. The main disadvantage of it is the lack of Activation. Which means you will have to Pull messages from the queue. While Service Broker, Rabbit MQ and others provide Push mechanism to notify listeners about newly added items.
I highly recommend you to read in-death book on Service Broker Pro SQL Server 2008 Service Broker so you will know better in which cases you can leverage Service Broker capabilities.
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Meteor got Cordova support!
I never mention it on the blog, but I really like Meteor framework it’s a really exciting way to build single page JavaScript application (running on NodeJS).
Meteor is an open-source platform for building top-quality web apps in a fraction of the time, whether you're an expert developer or just getting started https://www.meteor.com/
Today I was really excited to read that they are working on Cordova support.
Supported Platform(s)
- Android
- iOS
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Structured Logging
On weekends, I was reading latest Technology Radar from Thought Works
It’s fascinating! Some of the things they mentioned we are already using here at Compellotech (such as HAL, Angular JS, Nancy, TypeScript, etc.) Others are good not know about, for example Structured Logging.
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