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Alex blogs at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alexhomer/
February 05 2012
My wife will tell you that I'm really not very good at getting the point of things. I mean, when it comes to making typically vital choices such as whether I want brown sauce or ketchup on my sausage sandwich, I can't see the point of long-winded pondering and tortuous… read moreAn Enduring Documentational Experience
January 29 2012
Unless you write books or guidance for long-lived technologies, such as assembly code programming or software design patterns, the products of your IT documentational effort tend to have a somewhat limited shelf life. There's always a new version of ASP.NET, Linux, J2EE, or C# just around the corner, ready to… read moreJanuary 22 2012
One of the major advances in politics in recent years has been the evolution of “The Third Way”. You know the kind of thing: Given a choice between two approaches to a problem, neither of which are politically palatable, politicians invent a “third way” that relieves them of the requirement… read moreJanuary 15 2012
It's been a long time since I studied particle physics in my spare time at university. However, as it looks like the clever people at CERN will soon be publishing photos of their new baby - the delightfully named Higgs Boson - I thought I ought to get caught up… read moreHands Up If You're Doing Hybrid...
January 08 2012
After several months of diligent dappling with documentation, comprehensive confrontations with code, and seriously systematic study of system architectures, we've managed to toss together most of the content for our upcoming guide to Windows Azure hybrigation techniques. "Integrating with the Cloud on the Windows Azure Platform" covers all kinds of… read moreLeaping To Conclusions - Predictions for Leap Year 2012
January 01 2012
After my resounding success predicting that 2011 would finally see the lingering and painful death of JavaScript, and that the interface of Windows 8 will consist solely of one large Flash animation, it's time to apply my unerringly accurate predictional capabilities to this squeaky clean New Year. So if you… read moreDecember 25 2011
I just found out that, fifty years ago, somebody told me a lie - though I suppose I can't really blame him. Let's face it, when you ask your grandfather a question to which he doesn't know the answer, but he feels he really should (and you are of a… read moreHow Much Is That Stamp On The Website?
December 18 2011
How about we start this week with a short quiz: What do you reckon is the most common thing that visitors to the Royal Mail website will be looking for? I'll give you a clue: Christmas is coming and it's likely that you'll be sending out lots of items using… read moreDecember 11 2011
One of the nice things about working for a UK company but being on permanent assignment to a US one is that you get twice as many public holidays. While I'm not sure we want a Black Monday here in Little Olde England, maybe we could come up with some… read moreIt Was Missing When I Opened The Box...
December 01 2011
It's becoming clear that creating guidance on cloud computing is great deal more difficult than for most other development environments. Or, to be more precise, following our usual practice of combining written guidance with a reference implementation (RI) code sample is turning out to be what you might whimsically call… read moreNovember 27 2011
I discovered this week that I was severely overcharged when I bought a new TV from our local branch of Comet (a national electrical retailer) some months back. According to a back of an envelope calculation, my TV was actually worth somewhere around one five thousandth of a penny....(read more) read moreNovember 20 2011
According to folklore, in 1943 IBM's chairman Thomas J. Watson said that the world would only ever need five computers. Whether he actually did say this is doubtful, but according to various archives this was the general opinion around that time. And it prompts the question: how many computers actually… read moreNovember 13 2011
Buried in a recent issue of my newspaper the other day, squashed into a corner between an advert for luxury cruise holidays and a delightful close-up photo of some newly-discovered bacterium, was a short item about a recall by a major UK-based motor manufacturer. It said that in some circumstances… read moreFire(wall)fighting Lync and Service Bus
October 30 2011
I once went to a security conference presentation where the speaker explained that blocking ports in your firewall was fine, but developers simply get round this limitation by making everything work over HTTP through port 80. And it seems, in most cases, he was correct. However, I sometimes encounter situations… read moreBuy Now and Save
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