Enterprise Application platform with Microservices – A Service Fabric perspective

21st of June, 2016 / / No Comments

An enterprise application platform can be defined as a suite of products and services that enables development and management of enterprise applications. This platform should be responsible of abstracting complexities related to application development such as diversity of hosting environments, network connectivity, deployment workflows, etc. In a traditional world, applications are monolithic by nature. A monolithic application is composed of many components grouped into multiple tiers bundled together into a single deployable unit. Each tier here can be developed using a specific technology and will have the ability to scale independently.… [Keep reading] “Enterprise Application platform with Microservices – A Service Fabric perspective”

Cursor-Scoped Event Aggregation Pattern – for high performance aggregation queries

1st of June, 2016 / / No Comments

Often, stateful applications executing enterprise scenarios are not just interested in the current state of the system, but also in the events which caused the transition that resulted in the particular state. This requirement has exponentially increased the popularity of the Event Sourcing Pattern.

Event Sourcing Patterns ensure that all changes/events that caused a transition in application state are stored as a sequence of events in an append-only store. These events can then be queried for tracking history or even be used to reconstruct system state in case of an unexpected application crash.… [Keep reading] “Cursor-Scoped Event Aggregation Pattern – for high performance aggregation queries”

Inside Azure – Deployment workflow with Fabric Controller and Red Dog Front End

5th of May, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Abstracting complexities around developing, deploying and maintaining software applications have diminished the importance of understanding underlying architecture. While this may work well for today’s aggressive delivery cycles, at the same time, it impacts the ability of engineers to build an efficient, optimal solution which aligns with the internal architecture of the hosting platform. Architects and engineers should be cognizant of the architecture of the hosting environment to better design a system. The same holds good for Microsoft Azure as a hosting provider.… [Keep reading] “Inside Azure – Deployment workflow with Fabric Controller and Red Dog Front End”

Moving SharePoint Online workflow task metadata into the data warehouse using Nintex Flows and custom Web API

23rd of April, 2016 / / No Comments

This post suggests the idea of automatic copying of SharePoint Online(SPO) workflow tasks’ metadata into the external data warehouse.  In this scenario, workflow tasks are becoming a subject of another workflow that performs automatic copying of task’s data into the external database using a custom Web API endpoint as the interface to that database. Commonly, the requirement to move workflow tasks data elsewhere arises from limitations of SPO. In particular, SPO throttles requests for access to workflow data making it virtually impossible to create a meaningful workflow reporting system with large amounts of workflow tasks.… [Keep reading] “Moving SharePoint Online workflow task metadata into the data warehouse using Nintex Flows and custom Web API”

Designing for emotion

9th of April, 2016 / / No Comments

What is it that makes us advocates of the products we love? Why are we loyal to a few bunch of apps and websites? When I connected the dots, I realised that all the things I love in my life has one thing in common – emotional attachment.

What is emotional design?

Emotional design is a technique of infusing the elements of emotion into product design. It aims to evoke positive emotions and engagement with consumers.… [Keep reading] “Designing for emotion”

When to use an Azure App Service Environment?

5th of April, 2016 / / 44 Comments

Introduction

An Azure App Service Environment (ASE) is a premium Azure App Service hosting environment which is dedicated, fully isolated, and highly scalable. It clearly brings advanced features for hosting Azure App Services which might be required in different enterprise scenarios. But being this a premium service, it comes with a premium price tag. Due to its cost, a proper business case and justification are to be prepared before architecting a solution based on this interesting PaaS offering on Azure.… [Keep reading] “When to use an Azure App Service Environment?”

Introduction to User Experience Design

30th of March, 2016 / / No Comments

User Experience is everything that affects a user’s behaviour and interaction with a product or service. It’s about how a person feels, understands, and perceives a product.

Many people confuse User Experience with aesthetics of a product. User Experience Design – rather than focusing just on visual or technical aspects, largely deals with the psychology and behaviour of people.

Also, UX is an umbrella term which comprises of four major disciplines:ux

  1. Information architecture
  2. Interaction design
  3. Visual design
  4. User research

When someone refers to themselves as UX designers, it usually means they have a good understanding of all the four disciplines and are experts at probably a couple of them.

… [Keep reading] “Introduction to User Experience Design”

Highly available WordPress deployment on Azure

15th of March, 2016 / / 8 Comments

WordPress is the leading content management system today owning more than 50% of the market share. WordPress on Microsoft Azure is becoming a very popular offering with the ability to host WordPress as an Azure WebApp. While Microsoft has made the process of spinning up a WordPress site very easy with built in gallery images, running business critical applications on a cloud platform also introduces challenges in terms on availability and scalability.

WordPress Architecture

A typical WordPress deployment consists of the following two tiers:

  • Web Frontend – PHP web site
  • Backend Data store
    • Relational data store – Hierarchical entity store
    • Object data store – Used to store uploaded images and other artefacts

In order to guarantee high availability and scalability, we need to ensure that each of these service tiers are decoupled and can be separately managed.… [Keep reading] “Highly available WordPress deployment on Azure”

A Journey of Hunting Memory Leaks in Xamarin

8th of March, 2016 / / 2 Comments

My client was reporting performance issues with an existing app that was developed internally, and I had to find the problems. So, here is my journey on finding the issues and resolving them. The resolution was a reduction of the memory usage to 1/4 of what it was and usage was stabilised to this level (1/4). I am hopeful that this blog post can help you too in refining your app and pro-actively resolving any performance issues.… [Keep reading] “A Journey of Hunting Memory Leaks in Xamarin”

Why you should use Git over TFS

8th of March, 2016 / / 3 Comments

I have been an advocate of git for long time now and I might be biased a little bit, but take a moment to read this and judge for yourself whether git is the way to go or not.

If you are starting a new greenfield project, then you should consider putting your code on a git repository instead of TFS. There are many reasons why git is better suited, but the two main ones in my perspective are:

Cross-Platform Support
Git tools are available for all platforms and there are many great (and FREE) GUI tools like GitExtensions or SourceTree.… [Keep reading] “Why you should use Git over TFS”