Michael Iskiw's Blog

Today Amazon release an update to their popular CDN service CloudFront with support for secure communication over HTTPS.

Sometimes we use a different domain based on the language of the site, but technically the site code is the same on both domains.

From the creators of Google Maps comes Google Wave... integration with this service is going to take us in a new direction with the web.

A Simple tool to stress test your sql queries to ensure they are running at acceptable speeds under load.

I just want to share some of my thoughts about the whole REST vs SOAP debate. Previously I never really understood the whole REST philosophy but watching some of the Videos on MIX09 I am starting to feel the love.

So more info from my MIX09 video watching sessions again.. this time it was about caching RESTful webservices (here is the session: http://sessions.visitmix.com/MIX09/T64M).

I have been slowly making my way through the Mix 09 Videos (Some amazing stuff this year!) and I hit the Velocity Talk last night.

Another cool tool announce at Mix09 which might help with Prototyping and information architecture development in the future, Expression Blend Sketch Flow. Basically allows you to take "Sketches" or "IA Diagrams" and apply State Transitions and User flow to the diagrams.

I was just watching the Keynote for Mix09 in Las Vegas and they presented a new tool coming out, Expression Web 3. It has a feature called "Super Preview" which will surely fix all our Cross Browser testing problems in the future. It literally will let you see the rendering of a webpage in any browser you want.

There are a few scenarios that need to be followed when publishing Agility Modules and if you are unaware of how things work in Agility it can be a little confusing.

So I had a huge list of psds that were given to me for a project. I wanted to convert these suckers to jpg's so I could quickly flip through them.  I decided it was time to actually figure out how to batch convert psd's to jpg's.

We have been very JQuery addicted lately and maybe it is time to step it up a notch and check out some of the JQuery UI functionality that is available out of the box:

There is a new property on ASP.NET 4.0 controls called ClientIDMode. This will allow for easier client side coding since we will be able to control how the controls client id is generated instead of seeing something like this:

Google thinks of everything.

I found this post on how to improve the performance of Firefox and I must say it really improves page load performance!

Have you ever recievied the error message when opening a PSD file in photoshop??:
Unknow data has been encountered reading layer "XXXXX" and will be discarded. Continue? (Ok, Cancel, Read Composite Data)???

I came across this article on some cool Visual Studio 2008 Tips and Tricks. Basically little short cuts to make all our lives easier and more effiecent:

Ever wonder what method was calling your method and maybe causing an error?

It is starting to become the norm for websites to change their functionality or restrict functionality based on where users are coming from in the world. Google has a javascript API that allows us to figure out where a user is coming from based on their IP address.

This is a cool little demo of Silverlights Deep Zoom functionality.

The biggest feature of Windows Azure is Scalability. Everything that is built in Windows Azure was built to allow for Performance and Scalability. This is a good thing but it requires us to understand the architecture of the system when we are developing our code.

When you load a flash object in Firefox 3 (doesn't happen in IE7 or even Firefox 2) and click on the flash area in your browser you get a dotted line around the movie area.

Web Search bots are generally stateless and the url rewriting requires state of some sort to be able to perform the switch. The above line ensures the search bots are able to process the rewritten url properly.

I think Windows Azure is going to become an important tool for us in the future as it comes out of development. It provides us with the ability to produce applications and services that have 100% up time, unlimited scalability, unlimited storage potential an unlimited processing power.

LINQ can be super annoying when being developed in a Multi Layered environment. Until I found this post I thought Passing objects without a data context would make using LINQ in the data access layer basically useless...

This is pretty damn cool.

An easy way to quickly find LINQ properties and methods.

Wallace B. McClure, author of several books on ASP.NET programming, offers this solution for routing with web forms.

This is so simple but you got to love the simple things!

Skydrive is out of public beta and is finally available in Canada. It gives you 5GB of online storage for free.

...and my favorite feature... Full Web Service API. It's a happy day for Community Server integrators!

We  were recently working on a project and we were running into problems with random text on the page “Dimming” when a user would hover over items that had an opacity setting less than 100%.

Just a little coder-beware note:

The new version of SQL Server Management studio will support Intellisense. This should make coding those difficult queries a little more enjoyable.

A nice little program which will let you view your Web pages side by side in both FireFox and Internet Explorer at the same time.  As well as view and modify your CSS classes on-the-fly.

An interesting article on the inefficiencies of DataTime.Parse(string) and ways to significantly reduce processing time.

Here is another excellent demo/examples of how LINQ to XML can clean up your code when work with XML Files that are located locally or remotely. The ability to query XML data stores in a type safe and EASY way is something I personally have been wanting for a while. Normally it requires significant parsing and lots of code to accomplish what LINQ can do with a single LINQ Query. Check out the Link for some nice code snippets.

If only images knew what they were pictures of...oh wait these ones do.... check out the video on the link below... amazing concept and technology.

Why are we always coding to concrete implementations of classes when we can be “Coding to the Interface”.

Design patterns are not a new topic in the computer industry. They have been around for decades, but these techniques never seem to be taught to software developers directly. Generally software design patterns need to be studied for a developer to apply them in their own solutions. We shouldn’t be reinventing the wheel when fundamental solutions to problems have already been developed and verified in the form of a design pattern.

Data Access is the foundation of all data driven applications. Generally a developer has to start from scratch modeling Objects to reference their database schema (in a perfect world). The developer then has to develop all the "piping" required to create, update, and populate these modeled objects against the database. Most developers would say that this “piping” is boring simple code that takes a long time to develop for their clients and brings little or no value to the features of the solution being developed.