Sign-In parameters for WS-Federation when using OWIN

We are using OWIN to configure our WS-Federation, and our identity server requires sending certain parameters with the Sign In Request Message. In the old days that meant adding a well-known method to the Global.asax file. Using Owin, this has to be done slightly differently. The important part for…

SWOT analysis of Visual Studio Online

Deciding to go with a tool like VSO, for a company, is not easy. There are several alternatives, including free ones, that give you just as much, maybe even more - in terms of pricing and/or flexibility. So, in order to get our team to use it (or not)…

Accessing authorization rules (policies) on Service Bus

When developingoccasionally offlinedistributed systems, sometimes, you need to rethink the communication between them. Our architecture for the product we are building is composed ofAzure Service Bus Topics [http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-bus-dotnet-how-to-use-topics-subscriptions/] . Those are nothing more than a fancy queue, that allows multiple readers. More specifically, in…

Azure role recycle - What the hell

It was a long night - one lasting 27 hours, actually. It was the moments before deploy. Your team is counting on you. Your customer is counting on you. You are counting on you. You hit deploy. You wait. You pray. You've cut some corners to make the deadline, but…

ASP.NET MVC Partial Views and Forms

In MVC, there is this cool concept of a partial view. It sort of sounds like an old-schoolControl [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386416(v=vs.100).aspx].And in reality, it's pretty close to that. Except, there's a huge problem if you actually want to use them as…

Circuit Breaker Pattern

When preparing for my presentation at NTK [http://www.ntk.si], the largest IT conference in Slovenia, titledCloud Patterns: How to write applications for the cloud, I explored different architectural patterns that have to do with reliability of our cloud applications. One of the most interesting patterns, in my opinion,…