Awkward Coder

Thought I'd note this down for anyone observing this in the future - this was purely down to user (me) error! If you ever find yourself using the embedded version of RavenDB in an asp.net based azure hosted service running in the azure emulator locally don't play around with azure instance settings as it can f**k-up royally and cause you no end of pain with your RavenDB instance. Specifically if you change the number of instance to anything other than 1 you start to observe race conditions in your app. Always keep the instance count to 1 when running in the emulator locally: If you don't you start to receive exceptions like the following: IT took me about an hour to figure this out, I only realised when I looked at the azure compute storage emulator and saw 2 instances running simultaneously. I would have thought these would be using separate physical database instances but after thinking about this it became obvious they weren't - the IIS instances wer...

Been playing around with Azure for a week or so now and I'm starting to get my head round it, to be honest it ain't that difficult. @RichGee & I are going to be deploying RESTful services into the cloud for our shiney ninja project and whilst we are spiking these out I wanted to be able to set the default page, you know something like 'default.html'. Now this was easy when hosting a service in IIS, all you had to do was specify the default document types: But in azure there isn't any visible way to access IIS from the management tools, you only have access to the 'Hosted Services' console:  I suppose you could remote onto the virtual box and set it up in IIS, but that feels overly complicated. There must be any easier way?   There is if you are using asp.net, the  element in the web.config. This allows you specify the default document at design time and will be injected into IIS when the web service\site is installed into I...

I was chatting with my good friend Denis ( @dhaman ) about user feedback for the apps he's produced for the iPhone & droid app stores and just like the WP7 app store they all fall short in supporting your app once released out into the wild. I was also reading the final post in the ' 31 days of mango... ' by  @jeffblankenburg  and he talks about promoting your app, he mentions the great work Nick ( @spacescape ) did originally for FINDaPAD  in producing a template you can use to provide a bespoke site for WP7 app - Nick pushed this out to codeplex here . Denis pointed out he started to explicitly put a feedback mechanism in the app blurb, ideally at the top. Initially I thought I don't need this, we've got http://findapad.biz with feedback via uservoice , but then I realised there isn't any way for a user viewing FINDaPAD in the app store to get in touch with us. This is a piece of functionality that should be in the app store and I don't mean a foru...