Head in the Cloud

If you're developing WCF applications that will run over a WAN, VPN, or the public internet, then network bandwidth and latency is a concern. Messages take longer to transmit over these networks than over your local area network (LAN). As such, part of your development and testing needs to include testing the application over these typed of "slower" connection. To perform this testing there are two main options:  have a connection at your disposal, or simulate one.  Most of us will probably have to simulate one.  There are a few projects out there that are basically bridges, typically linux based, that you put between your client and server that allow you to simulate these slower connections. If you are a Java developer, you're probably familiar with JMeter. JMeter's approach doesn't involve a bridge, but rather simulates the latency at the client. I was chatting with Peter Lin, a friend, colleague, and JMeter committer, about it one night. After he mentio

If you're an Eclipse or Netbeans user, you'll be very familiar with this topic.  These IDEs automatically close braces, parenthesis, quotes, and brackets -- ( {},[],(),"",'' ) -- for you as you type in the code editors.  It may sound like laziness, but it can actually save you debug/troubleshooting time as it ensures (well, helps to ensure) that for every open you have a corresponding close. One complaint I've always had, along with many other people based on my Google searches, is that Microsoft Visual Studio does not have this functionality.  If you're like me and spend a lot if time in both the Java IDE's and Visual Studio, you probably find it very annoying that the editors don't behave quite the same.  It can really mess with your muscle memory and make you less productive. While there are a few very good commercial packages out there that provide this functionality (along with a host of other cool toys), I haven't been able to

Even before I founded Milestone Technology Group, LLC, I was, and still am, a proponent of open source software, and often looked there first when architecting business solutions.  Because of this, open source is very much part of the Milestone's culture.  It would be hypocritical to say we're a proponent and not also provide back to the open source community.  So in my spare time, and under the umbrella of Milestone, I've started putting together some open source projects and pushing them out to the community via my account on sourceforge.net.  These projects will also be available from Milestone's web site in the near future.