Back to my core
I've spent a large part of the last two years playing the role of a technical marketeer. Call it developer advocate, API Evangelist, or my favourite title, API Concierge, my role was to engage with developers and help them, in any way I could, to build better HTTP APIs. I have really enjoyed the experience and had the opportunity to meet many great people. However, the more you hear yourself talk about what people should do, the more you are reminded that you aren't actually doing the stuff you are talking about any more. The time has come for me to stop just talking about building production systems and start doing it again.
Azure API Management Resources
Although I know my HTTP and Web API pretty well, becoming an API Evangelist on the Azure API Management team means also needing to know the nitty gritty of the Azure API Management product too. In my learning process I have discovered a wealth of useful information, but it is scattered around a little. Some is on the Azure documentation site, some on Channel 9, some on YouTube and some awesome content from our Microsoft MVPs. This post is my attempt to gather it together to make it a bit easier to find.
Add Runscope logging to your ASP.NET Web API in minutes
If you are building an ASP.NET Web API and want a view into the HTTP traffic that is hitting your API then this is a really quick solution that might prove useful.
Convert attributes to elements in XSLT
I was working on some reporting stuff and thought I had an issue where I needed to have elements instead of attributes. I found that the following XSLT would do that conversion for me.
A Mercurial changelog
I need to write this somewhere or I’ll forget how to do it. I’ve recently started using branches in hg for my target environments instead of using separate repositories as is recommended by Kiln. I got a request to produce a list of changes that would be going into the next production release and knew there must be a way of doing it in hg. This is what I found,
Experiments with Katana
A few months ago I put up a site http://hypermediaapi.com with the intention of using it as place to aggregate links to all things hypermedia related. I built the site using Web API because a) I know how to use it, and b) I wanted to prove a point that a Web Site is really just a special type of Web API.
Convert XML to JSON using XSLT
How about that for acronym soup? In the spirit of doing smaller posts but more often, here is a handy little XSLT.
It is not that we don’t like the convenience of Windows Installer
I just had a fight with an installation of Sharepoint and it dawned on my what I don’t like about Windows Installer. It is a black box. You click on the file and press next, next, next and magic happens. Personally, I would like to know where files are being put, which registry hives are being touched, are services being installed, are accounts being created. Did something go in the GAC, was a COM DLL registered.
Net Sourcing
Scott Hanselman has a post talking about how his cousin's company ran into some difficulty recently, that Scott believes could be resolved by "net sourcing" certain functionality.
My first MGrammar
To say that I am fascinated by the Oslo project is a bit of an understatement. I think the mGraph and mSchema capabilities are very interesting and my subconscious mind is working overtime to try and figure out how it fits into my database design, deployment and upgrade scenarios.