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Showing posts from November, 2014

Messaging and transient issues.

Messaging and transient issues. A small post but something worth considering.  Recently when discussing a situation where a MongoDB replica set was in the process of failing over, concern was raised about writing data - whilst a new primary was being elected.  This is going to be a transient issue and issues similar to it - such as temporary server outages and routing  are too .   They are going to take a little time to resolve but should resolve fairly quickly. In the meantime, there a re a few solutions available whilst this transient issue sorts itself out:   Do nothing.  In this case give up and find another job  you lazy hacker. Let the process fall over, report  the failure to users and let them try again via a button click. A users experience might be sullied - in the opinion of some -  but it still could be a reasonable way to recover (this depends on what stakeholders/business think really).  This might not be reasonable for important information which must stored

Async/Await

Async/Await As I am sure you are aware, this is not a new feature in .NET - having been around for over a year as part of .NET 4.5. There have been plenty of posts about it, and so I'm not going to go into a great deal of depth, as I am not an expert and there are people who have gone into it in more depth than I could.  I just want to get a couple of  the key concepts up and provide a laymans tilt on it.  I've been using the language feature as part of a site I am developing as a platform to testbed a few technologies including: Knockout.Js,  The continuous integration and continuous deployment capabilities of  Visual Studio Online (formerly Team Foundation Service) WebAPI and integrating with 3rd party  web services Some of the newer C# language features  Bootstrap templates  Stanford Core NLP for .NET    The site is work in progress and is available @ http://wearedev.azurewebsites.net/ The main purpose of the site is as a front end for a simple aggregatio

MongoDB

Mongolicious MongoDB training, provided by MongoDB themselves, was up for grabs recently, so I put my name in the hat to get a keener insight into MongoDB and NoSQL databases, having used them only a few occasions. The training was attended by a near 50/50 split of devs and DBAs and this led to some interesting debates and reactions.   Like lots of the stuff I've been introduced to/have started looking at recently (I am late to nearly every technology party there is) they (Mongo and NoSQL) have been around for a while and have become established as a viable alternative persistence solution to the likes of MSSQL.  The main features: Its schema less Document oriented/No support for JOINs  Querying performed using JS/JSON Indexing Replication/Redundancy/High availability Scaling out via Sharding  Aggregation (unfortunately we ran out of time so this is not covered here) Authorisation (again ran out of time on this one)  Its schema less You'l