Offshoring – the business consultant's best friend. It's often used as "the grass is greener" answer to many large software development team's senior management. After seeing this sold in some way at nearly every role I've had for the last 10 years, the one question I don't often see asked alongside is what problem this solves and if there's other answers. Like many legitimate leadership questions this is overlooked not because managers are unintelligent, but because it's often a hard question to answer. Digging deeper delivers answers that can save a lot of time, stress and money.

Over the last few years we've seen a lot of blog posts floating around showing how to setup and deploy a website to Windows Azure. In my opinion they all cover the the "Azure 101" point of view and don't speak too much about migrating a website that already exists to Azure and some of the pains and gains experienced along the way. This post covers the migration of this very website to Azure websites and migration of my blogs database to SQL Azure.

Page level caching for ASP.Net webforms and MVC websites is pretty awesome, because it allows you to implement something that's quite complex; multilevel caching, without having to really understand too much about caching, or even write much code. But what if you want to clear a cached ASP.net page before it's due to expire?

Today starts this year's Microsoft TechEd conference up on the sunny Queensland Gold Coast and I'm lucky enough to be up here for the week watching many top Australian and international developers and IT professionals working on  the Microsoft stack, hacking on new frameworks and tooling, and perusing product wares. This is my second year at TechEd and I'm looking forward to more of the same awesome everything that we saw last year.

New Relic's Deployment notes features have definitely been around for a while, but like a lot of things experienced by developers outside Microsoft's ecosystem, this is another service where we're a bit late to the party. The ability to track application performance against a certain release of your application is a great way to track the progress of any work your team has put in to improve your application's performance and visitor's overall experience. Implementing it is surprisingly simple which begs the question, if you're not doing it, why not?

Now that we're all configured at Amazon and we've got our solution in a state where we can easily package and deploy it's time to automate it all with TeamCity so you don't have to have any human intervention when you want to fire up a new instance of your website for testing.

Now that we've successfully setup your Amazon AWS account start new machines and serve any WebDeploy packages we'll be using during automation, its now time to get our website project in a state that will work with our Amazon AWS account and this includes some PowerShell Automation to bring it all together.

Over the last year I’ve gone crazy for some of the new automation tooling that developers have had made available to us to help setup continuous integration. The whole idea of infrastructure as code isn’t a new thing, the *nix crowd has had Chef and Puppet for years – last April Amazon added support for batch and PowerShell scripting on Windows EC2 instance initialisation, and this gives us the ability to do some pretty powerful server and website automation such as servers that initialise and install their own services and websites – potentially on command to fire up a new testing instance or automatically handle load.

Continuous Deployment is an time-saving, team-loving, kudos-earning, stress-reducing capability that any team is wise to implement. OnCheckin is definitely aiming to bring this awesome’ness to as many ASP.Net developers as possible by making it fast and easy to setup. Once you’ve started out automating deployment though iteration is the key. Deploying your website early and often is great but with OnCheckin this goes further – Add-ons. And where better to start than helping developers out than with an often overlooked part of web development: Application Security.

Recently I’ve had the pleasure of setting up a new build environment at work to replace our TFS Team Build setup and its build-information-opaqueness. In the process I uncovered a lot of not-so-fun-to-be-a-developer things that our large corporate IT Infrastructure team have in place to keep the masses at bay – one of those things is an NTLM proxy server. And so the head banging began – hopefully I can save you some brain cells and get you home on time.