Awesome PluralSight course: Patterns for Building Distributed Systems for The Enterprise

I'm doing an awesome course on PluralSight - on Patterns for Building Distributed Systems for The Enterprise.

Check it out here.

Playing with Visual Studio 2015: control dot ( CTRL-. ) is your new friend

Because of the new C# compiler, Visual Studio now has all these productivity hacks if you will, or code suggestions for you. Much like ReSharper actually. That's why I didn't install ReSharper on my Visual Studio 2015 Ultimate preview installation.

So Control DOT / CTRL - . makes this stuff appear. Let's say you instantiate a class that doesn't yet exist, it will suggest to create it for you and preview the changes:

But you can do other stuff as well, like change signature or adding methods to classes:

Will I drop ReSharper from now and start using this new thing? Not yet, there's still a long way to go before this stuff is as powerful as ReSharper, but it sure is nice!

Google Polymer: encapsulated and interoperable custom elements that extend HTML

Interesting stuff this Google Polymer project. I'm getting the impression that this is very similar to AngularJS directives. But I'll look into it a bit better.

Windows 10 console improvements

I read that the console has been improved on the new Windows 10, so I had to give that a try. Indeed, you can finally do the basic stuff you would want, like copy-paste, jump left and right and other stuff.

Here are the things you can do with the new console: http://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2014/10/07/console-improvements-in-the-windows-10-technical-preview/.

It still looks the same though ...

Some of the stuff hasn't even been implemented yet, see the windows blog for what the shortcuts are and whether they're already implemented.

Transform XML using XSLT in SSIS

For the client I needed to change the datastructure of the incoming XML file in the SSIS package. In my previous job I did a bunch of things with XSLT transformations so that seemed like an OK way to transform the XML. Turns out it's really easy in SSIS.

Check out this blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mattm/archive/2007/12/15/xml-source-making-things-easier-with-xslt.aspx

If you want to see how I solved it, check out my StackOverflow question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25661709/ssis-xml-datasource-unbounded-elements-are-null

Awesome: I'm running Windows 10 with Visual Studio 2015

Nice, I got the Windows 10 preview iso and put it on my trusty HP DL 380. Then got the Visual Studio 2015 Ultimate preview, so I'm running stuff from the futue :).

Cool. Now I can play around with ASP.NET vNext and maybe the new C#, but I'm not sure about that.

Martin Fowler on MicroServices

I'm reading up on MicroServices architecture on Martin Fowler's blog . It's an architectural style that seems very appealing to me as a generalist but also because I think it matches very well with cloud architecture.

Let Mads Torgersen tell you what's new in C# 6.0

Increase speed of reading and fun with Spritz

I've known about Spritz for a while, probably through something like Hackernews, but didn't it could already be used. But it can! Here's a screenshot of reading Martin Fowler's blog using the Spritzlet:

Get it here: http://sdk.spritzinc.com/js/1.2/bookmarklet/index.html.

You go to a website, click the bookmark and off you go. Piece of cake. You need to create an account to go faster than 450 wpm.

Deploying cloud services to Azure with Powershell - by Kenneth Truyers

In my efforts to automate an Azure deployment for our current client, I needed a way to deploy some Azure cloud services. One Google search lead me to Kenneth Truyers' blog, which provides an out-of-the-box script for deploying Azure services.

Go check it out, it's up there for free. Thank you Kenneth!