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...

In this post I will show how you can access SQL Azure data from an Express.js Node.js application deployed to Windows Azure Web Sites, and expose that data over HTTP in 31 lines of Node.js and T-SQL code. This post demonstrates collaboration between several technologies: in-process interop between Node.js and...

Prerequisites Before you can save $5 million, you must be spending more than that. One way to spend over $5 million is to run a large Node.js web application. For example, an application that requires 10,000 CPU cores to handle its traffic. For the purpose of this napkin math, let’s...