Category: Presentations

Upcoming Manila Presentation: Your website is in production. It’s broken. Now what?

Next month I’ll be spending some time in the Readify Manila office catching up with some local colleagues. While there, I’ll be presenting a user group session at the local Microsoft office. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you there. (Did you know that we’re hiring in Manila too?)

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Manila, Philippines, Wed 12th Dec 2012. Free. Register now.

Big websites fail in spectacular ways. In this session, five-time awarded ASP.NET/IIS MVP and ASP Insider Tatham Oddie will share the problems that he and fellow Readify consultants have solved on large scale, public websites. The lessons are applicable to websites of all sizes and audiences, and also include some funny stories. (Not so funny at the time.)

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A tiny subset of your users can’t login: they get no error message yet have both cookies and JavaScript enabled. They’ve phoned up to report the problem and aren’t capable of getting a Fiddler trace. You’re serving a million hits a day. How do you trace their requests and determine the problem without drowning in logs?

Marketing have requested that the new site section your team has built goes live at the same time as a radio campaign kicks off. This needs to happen simultaneously across all 40 front-end web servers, and you don’t want to break your regular deployment cycle while the marketing campaign gets perpetually delayed. How do you do it?

Users are experiencing HTTP 500 responses for a few underlying reasons, some with workarounds and some without. The customer service call centre need to be able to rapidly evaluate incoming calls and provide the appropriate workaround where possible, without displaying sensitive exception detail to end users. At the same time, your team needs to prioritize which bugs to fix first. What’s the right balance of logging, error numbers and correlations ids?

Your application is running slow in production, causing major delays for all users. You don’t have any tools on the production servers, and aren’t allowed to install any. How do you get to the root of the problem?

New Talks: “Neo4j in a .NET World (Graph DBs)” and “You’re in production. Now what?”

Last week I was lucky enough to join an array of great speakers at the NDC Oslo conference.

The recordings of both of my talks are now online, along with 141 other excellent talks you should watch.

Neo4j in a .NET World (Graph DBs)

This year, a small team of developers delivered a ASP.NET MVC app, with a neo4j backend, all running in Azure. This isn’t in POC; it’s a production system. Also, unlike most graph DB talks, it’s not a social network!

https://vimeo.com/43676873

You’re in production. Now what?

A tiny subset of your users can’t login: they get no error message yet have both cookies and JavaScript enabled. They’ve phoned up to report the problem and aren’t capable of getting a Fiddler trace. You’re serving a million hits a day. How do you trace their requests and determine the problem without drowning in logs?

Marketing have requested that the new site section your team has built goes live at the same time as a radio campaign kicks off. This needs to happen simultaneously across all 40 front-end web servers, and you don’t want to break your regular deployment cadence while the campaign gets perpetually delayed. How do you do it?

Users are experiencing 500 errors for a few underlying reasons, some with workarounds and some without. The customer service call centre need to be able to rapidly triage incoming calls and provide the appropriate workaround where possible, without displaying sensitive exception detail to end users or requiring synchronous logging. At the same time, your team needs to prioritize which bugs to fix first. What’s the right balance of logging, error numbers and correlations ids?

These are all real scenarios that Tatham Oddie and his fellow consultants have solved on large scale, public websites. The lessons though are applicable to websites of all sizes and audiences.

https://vimeo.com/43624434

5 Minute Screencast: Stop helping your users. Help yourself.

A few weeks ago I spoke at Web Directions’ What Do You Know event. The event consisted of 10 speakers each doing a 5 minute presentation about some technique or idea that they find useful in web development.

Here’s my talk:

Ros Hodgekis won the night with her awesome email-related talk (all delivered with champagne glass still in hand):

.NET Rocks! #687: ‘Tatham Oddie Makes HTML 5 and Silverlight Play Nice Together’

I spoke to Carl + Richard on .NET Rocks! last week about using HTML5 and Silverlight together. We also covered a bit of Azure toward the end.

The episode is now live here:

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=687

JT – Sorry, I referred to you as “the other guy I presented with” and never intro-ed you. 😦

Everyone else – JT is awesome.

Node.js on Windows

Thanks to Sharkie’s ongoing organisation efforts, SydJS is a thriving monthly JavaScript meeting here in Sydney. This evening they welcomed me along to talk about Node.js on Windows. Afraid of a mostly non-Microsoft crowd I rocked up with all the anti-Unix jokes I had but they turned out to be all quite friendly and it was a fun little talk.

Here’s what I ran through…

Update 18th July 2011: The latest official builds of node.js now come with a Windows executable. This is thanks to support from Microsoft.

Cygwin

Cygwin gives you a full POSIX environment on Windows. It’s great for running apps designed for Unix, but it’s pretty heavy and not very … Windows-ey. It’d be like creating a “My Documents” folder on Ubuntu.

All that being said, it’s the simplest and most reliable way of getting node running on Windows.

Works for 0.2.6 -> 0.3.1 and 0.4.0+. Anything between 0.3.1 and 0.4.0 won’t compile.

The steps (and common pitfalls) are well documented at https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Building-node.js-on-Cygwin-(Windows)

Once you’ve got it running in Cygwin, if you jump out to a standard Windows command prompt and run c:\Cygwin\usr\local\bin\node.exe you’ll get a nice big error. More on this later.

MinGW

The next step up from Cygwin is to compile it under MinGW. MinGW (Minimal GNU for Windows) provides the bare minimum set of libraries required to make it possible to compile Unix-y apps on Windows, avoiding the full POSIX strangehold environment that Cygwin provides.

Works for 0.3.6+.

Again, there are well documented steps for this: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Building-node.js-on-mingw

Once you’ve got it running in MinGW, jump out to a standard Windows command prompt again and run c:\wherever-you-put-your-git-clone\node.exe you’ll get a nice big error.

Standalone

Now that we’ve compiled it with MinGW (you did that in the last step, right?) we’re ready to run it on Windows natively.

From a native Windows command prompt:

  1. Create a new folder (mkdir node-standalone)
  2. Copy in the node.exe you compiled in MinGW (xcopy c:\wherever-you-put-your-git-clone\node.exe node-standalone)
  3. Copy in the MinGW helper libraries (xcopy c:\mingw\bin\lib*.dll node-standalone)
  4. Run node-standalone\node
  5. Voila! It works!

Running as a Service

Next up, I wanted to host node as a service, just like IIS. This way it’d start up with my machine, run in the background, restart automatically if it crashes and so forth.

This is where nssm, the non-sucking service manager, enters the picture. This tool lets you host a normal .exe as a Windows service.

Here are the commands I used to setup an instance of the SydJS website as a service:

nssm.exe install sydjs-node c:\where-i-put-node-standalone\node.exe c:\code\SydJS\server.js
net start sydjs-node

What We Achieved

We now have node.js, running natively on Windows, as a service. Enjoy!

(Just please don’t use this in production – it’s really not ready for that yet.)

Announcing: one awesome Windows Phone 7 app + the Open Conference Protocol

This weekend, off the back of Web Directions South, the awesome conference team also organised the Amped hack day. Sponsored by Adobe, Microsoft, PayPal, the Powerhouse Museum and Yahoo, there were a number of coding challenges throughout the day.

Aaron Powell (@slace), Brendan Forster (@shiftkey) and I attended in the capacity of mentors for the Windows Phone 7 track. In the end though, the ratio of mentors to participants and one awesome idea threw us down the path of competing instead.

Here’s what we built:

I was talking at a mile a minute because we only had 3 minutes to pitch in the final. (You might notice me glancing at the stopwatch in my left hand.)

Lucky we decided to compete, because in the end we won the whole day! That means we’re off to Web Directions East in Tokyo next month.

We’ll progressively release resources once we polish it up a bit more, take the mirrors down and let the smoke clear out. In the mean time, start with http://openconferenceprotocol.org.

Talk Resources – Internet Explorer 9 for Developers

At REMIX10, TechEd AU 2010 and TechEd NZ 2010 I’ve been showing some of what’s new in Internet Explorer 9 for developers.

Here are the slides and code: http://db.tt/JvEUu3o

The recording from TechEd New Zealand (the third and best version!) is available here: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NewZealand/WEB304

IE9NZ

The recording from TechEd Australia (version 2 of the talk) is available here: http://www.msteched.com/2010/Australia/WEB204

IE9AU

And finally, here’s a recording from REMIX10 Australia (version 1 of the talk): http://www.microsoft.com/australia/remix/videos/default.aspx

IERemix

If you’ve attended any of these talks, thank you for your feedback! The session evals at conferences are like crack for speakers. We read every single one, and then we read them again.

— Tats

Talk Resources – Riding the Geolocation Wave

At both the REMIX10 conference in Melbourne, Australia and more recently TechEd New Zealand I presented on geolocation for developers.

This was the abstract:

It’s pretty obvious by now that geolocation is a heavy player in the next wave of applications and APIs. Now is the time to learn how to take advantage of this information and add context to your own applications. In this session we’ll look at geolocation at every layer of the stack – from open protocols to operating system APIs, from the browser to Windows Phone 7. Building a compelling geo-enabled experience takes more than simple coordinates. In this session Tatham will introduce the basics of determining a user’s location and then delve into some of the opportunities and restrictions that are specific to mobile devices and their interfaces.

The talk was filmed at TechEd New Zealand, and is available for download here: http://www.msteched.com/2010/NewZealand/WEB205

(Note: this version has a Windows Phone 7 demo in it too.)

GeoNZScreenshot

The first version of the talk was also filmed at REMIX10, and is available for download here: http://www.microsoft.com/australia/remix/videos/default.aspx

GeolocationScreenshot

Here are some links to the code and resources (but you really want to watch the talk first):

(Post last updated 7th Sep 2010 with new links and videos)