Blog

Utilize our Wardley Mapping Templates for PowerPoint & Visio; and enhance your situational awareness and technical decisions with this technique.

Tour our OceanMind project using Azure Functions for real-time marine telemetry processing. Learn optimization techniques for serverless environments.

Explore C# 7.2's ref structs, use in high-performance scenarios, their constraints, and techniques for overcoming challenges in unit testing the Ais.Net parser.

Endjin applies scientific experimentation to software development for validated solutions, using hypotheses for confident designs.

Here is the second blog in a series around learning DAX and Power BI. This post focuses on row contexts, which are used when iterating over the rows of a table when, for example, evaluating a calculated column. Row contexts along with filter contexts underpin the basis of the DAX language. Once you understand this underlying theory it is purely a case of learning the syntax for the different operations which are built on top of it.

As part of my series on guidance for CTOs, I discuss using the Office of the CTO (OCTO) approach to management, its strengths and limitations.

Learn to use Azure Analysis Services in custom apps via REST API in .NET for efficient async model refreshes.

Endjin's high-performance .NET AIS parser, built for OceanMind to track commercial ships — 2.6 million messages per second using ref structs and Span<T>.

Every DAX formula runs inside a filter context - the set of rows it can see. Row selection, column selection, slicers, and report filters all shape that context and change your results.

Explore Power BI data types across mediums, learn their corresponding names, and simplify query conversions with this informative blog and report.

Discover the challenges and alternatives of managing scoped component lifetimes with dependency injection.

Explore endless possibilities with dynamic DAX queries in C# for Azure Analysis Services integration in custom apps using the provided code samples.

Salaries. What a nightmare! Hardly anyone likes talking about money. Technical people don't like talking about money. Even a lot of sales people don't like talking about money. When a CTO comes into an organization (even a brand new start-up) one of the first things you need to sort out is the salary quagmire. In this article we look at the strategies and pitfalls of introducing open, capability-based pay levels for a product development team.

The theme of this year's British Science Week (6 - 15 March 2020) is "Our Diverse Planet". We'll be getting involved by speaking to school children about the work we've been doing with Oxfordshire-based OceanMind (part of the Microsoft AI for Good programme) to help them combat illegal fishing, hopefully inspiring some of the next generation of data scientists!

Ian spent a big chunk of last year writing an update to his book, Programming C# 8.0. Books continue to be Ian's preferred source of learning because nothing else offers the combination of depth, breadth, and coherence. His goal with Programming C# 8.0 (and its predecessors) was very clear: to write the book that he would want to read if he were learning C# today. It is Ian's attempt to distil around 18 years of experience with C# (part of almost 30 years of work as a programmer) into a coherent, complete description of what you'll need to know to be productive today in C#.

The Azure CNAB Quickstart Templates we've created are only half the story. Much of the work we've done over the last few months involved the authoring, contribution and DevOps pipelines required to support an open source project. The project is inspired by the original Azure Quickstart Templates - which over the last 5 years has grown to over 850 templates. In this post we're going to explain how you can author CNAB templates and contribute them.

Porter: a CNAB-based tool for building, managing, and installing app bundles. Learn to set up Porter on Windows with this guide.

Enabling WSL 2 on Windows 10 and wiring it to Docker for Windows: Insider build, Virtual Machine Platform feature, distro install, and the WSL 2 switch.

The Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library helps you get up and running with CNAB and Porter. We've built quickstarts covering solutions like WordPress, Ghost, Mattermost, and data platforms like Apache Airflow, SQL Server AlwaysOn clusters and Kubernetes features like an nginx ingress controller and an Azure AD enabled OAuth2 Proxy. We've condensed all our learnings from the past 9 months of working on the project and turned them into a 10 minute video which explains all the key concepts. We hope this video helps accelerate your own CNAB & Porter epiphanies!

In partnership with Microsoft, we have released Azure CNAB Quickstarts Library on GitHub. CNAB (Cloud-Native Application Bundle) is a new specification designed for facilitating the packaging, installation, upgrading and uninstallation of cloud-native solutions in the cloud, on-premise or on the edge. We've created a number of quickstarts covering Apache Airflow, Azure Kubernetes Service, Ghost, Kubeflow, SQL Server Always On and Wordpress to help demonstrate the power of CNAB and Porter.

Changes to IR35 rules mean that if your business crosses certain size thresholds, you're now liable for assessing and reporting off-payroll contractors. Here's what CTOs need to know.

We all get nervous in the run up to a public speaking event. However, there are things we can do which help alleviate some of the pressure. Here are 5 quick tips around preparing for a talk!

Boost productivity & reduce stress with GTD workflow. Mike Larah shares insights from a recent course on this effective time management method.

Discover how Kubernetes, Azure Durable Functions, and Azure API Management transform legacy batch processing code into a RESTful API.

Explore .NET querying methods for integrating Azure Analysis Services beyond data querying into dynamic UIs and APIs.