If you are writing a mobile or web application today, your requirements for backend functionality are quite different from what they were 5 or 10 years go. In this post I will introduce the concept of a webtask: a novel approach to running backend logic in modern mobile or web...

The Edge.js project allows you to use .NET Framework inside of a Node.js application. Why would you ever do that? Scott Hanselman puts it this way: One such problem is playing audio. Node.js core does not support this functionality, so one must resort to writing a native extension in C/C++....

Eleanor Roosevelt once said “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people”. During JSConf  ideas are discussed. This also leaves a lot of time for conversations between people. I had the privilege to speak during JSConf.US 2014 on the topic of in-process interop between Node.js and...

The latest release of the Edge.js project adds support for scripting Node.js from a .NET application. This enables you to leverage the power of Node.js ecosystem with the thousands of NPM modules from within a CLR application. Learn more Get the all-inclusive Edge.js NuGet package You can now script Node.js...

“Grand[m|p]a” (have to be careful with pronouns this year), “what did you use to write cross-platform software back in 2014? No, really… do tell… Wow, amazing… It is, like, they really did not have […]?” This post describes a cross platform development setup that proved efficient for me in the...

Hosting web apps in Azure, by the book Many web apps consist of web, worker, and storage components. The web component handles HTTP traffic from clients which results in new work items (e.g. uploaded pictures that need to be resized). The worker component performs the actual work independently from interactions...

Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS) allow your web applications to be exposed over HTTP and HTTPS. After you configure your Azure web site with an SSL certificate, by default your endpoints will be reachable over both HTTP and HTTPS. For some apps you may want to prevent the use of...

The Windows Azure Cache Service is a great mechanism for scaling out web applications deployed to Windows Azure Web Sites. It allows you to externalize and very quickly access session state from any instance of your web application. With the azurecache module you can now access Windows Azure Cache Service...

This post explains how you can remotely debug your Node.js application deployed to Windows Azure Web Sites using the node-inspector debugger. Node.js applications deployed to Azure are using the iisnode module to run. One of the features of iisnode is integrated debugging experience based on node-inspector. In order to enable...

Tired of seeing the “first request” to a Node.js app hosted in IIS taking long? This post describes how to configure your Node.js application running in IIS 8 such that the node.exe process is always up and ready to serve the HTTP requests. This is in contrast with the default...