People often ask me which books I’d recommend on ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, or Silverlight. They’re sometimes taken aback when I reply that I can’t recommend one because I don’t read computer books any more.
Which isn’t quite true. I do read computer books every now and then when I’m trying to get the lay of the land with a new technology. But I rarely read books on Web stuff because I do ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, and Silverlight for a living and if I don’t already know everything that’s in those books, I’m not doing my job.
Nevertheless, publishers frequently send me books in hopes that I’ll recommend them to colleagues. Recently two ASP.NET AJAX books have come across my desk that I like a lot and can heartily recommend to anyone. The first is Programming ASP.NET AJAX by Christian Wenz. (Full disclosure: at the publisher’s request, and after reading galleys of the first edition, I contributed a quote/endorsement that appears on the back cover.) The second is ASP.NET AJAX In Action by Gallo, Barkol, and Vavilala. Both offer great background on AJAX as a technology, both have juicy details that will make you a smarter ASP.NET AJAX programmer, and neither regurgitates the documentation. What’s more, each book tends to answer questions that the other does not.
In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft has just announced that they will publish the source code for version 3.5 of the .NET Base Class Library. For details, check out this blog post from Scott Guthrie.
As if that weren’t exciting enough, I am now the owner of my very own gas turbine engine (see below). It’s a JetCat P-60. It weighs slightly less than 2 pounds and produces 13 pounds of thrust with a maximum rotational speed of 165,000 RPM. It burns real jet fuel with a max consumption of 8 oz. per minute. This is a dream come true for me, because when I was in aero school years ago, my professors told me that it was impossible to build a miniature gas turbine engine. I’ve wanted to build one ever since, but now I don’t have to because you can buy them off the shelf. How cool is that?
So what am I going to put it in, you ask? I could mount it on my desk and use it to heat the office this winter, but I have a better idea: put it in something that flies! I have a nice little aircraft sitting in the spare bedroom (what my wife refers to as “hangar 2”). As soon as I get the turbine and electronics installed, I’ll post pictures.
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We have developed a core methodology to ensure we accurately capture your needs and translate them into the best solution possible. This process gives you the peace of mind that your cloud investment will be aligned with the return you seek. We can be counted on to bring our industry experience and real-world best practices to operate Azure environments.
Our methodology involves 4 steps:
Assess > Migrate > Re-Platform > Operate
Moving into the cloud is not a one time event. With every customer engagement, we deliver a structured approach as follows:
ASSESS:
Rely on our team to map your existing environment to a corresponding Azure cloud.
Prioritize your business needs.
Understand options and tradeoffs.
Build a comprehensive plan.
We partner to understand what your needs are and map them to the best combination of services and products to address them
Together we explore various options and our experts will explain clearly when compromises are required and their possible ramifications.
We work closely with your team to plan against your immediate requirements with careful considerations for future needs.
MIGRATE:
Easily move from your existing environment to a public or private Azure cloud.
Overcome cloud lock-in.
Minimize re-development.
Migrate to a private or public cloud.
We help your team quickly and easily migrate existing deployments away from other environments, including AWS, to an open platform.
Together we can move existing applications and data without recoding or impacting your existing environment.
We work with you to pick the best destination for your applications and data.
RE-PLATFORM:
Understand how to transform your applications to better take advantage of Azure capabilities.
Break 3 tier architectures.
Evaluate licensing needs.
Engineer an end-to-end solution.
We help you take advantage of modern practices to reduce complexity, increase scalability and maximize return on investments
Together we determine the best combination of products and licensing to meet your needs and ensure you only pay for what you truly need.
We employ workarounds when needed to reduce the impact to your applications and always consider all aspects of the solution from networking and firewalls to InfoSec and compliance.
OPERATE:
Our team performs all the ongoing maintenance and tuning to keep your environment running at its best.
Monitor performance and utilization.
Optimize and keep systems in sync.
Proactive workflows and corrective actions.
We help you understand what is happening with your environment using customized reporting and business intelligence (BI) dashboards.
Clouds require ongoing tuning to keep them running at their best and our team vigilantly tracks all conditions which could impact performance and availability.
We proactively keep an eye on the entire solution and offer remediation workflows with complete audit trails.