This is a “must-watch”, I tell you : https://www.destroyallsoftw... ......

---

I've been doing a bit of external API integration work lately. Sounds mundane (and it is for the most part) - but there was one notable "gem" I had to tackle. To make long story short, there's this external source written in PHP and exposed as a web service. The operations are simple and there isn't much to it, except one little detail - this service ......

---

Auto-Suggest (Auto-Complete) “thing” has been around for a few years. Here’s my little snippet on the subject. For one of my projects, I had to deal with a non-trivial set of items to be pulled via auto-suggest used by multiple concurrent users. Simple, dumb iteration through a list in local cache or back-end access didn’t quite cut it. Enter a nifty ......

---

There’re frequent times when I need to perform some sort of periodic tasks within the application: refresh in-memory shared data from the backend, status checks, emitting a health beat (pulse) with some sort of statistics to a log or UDP broadcast, and so on. As a bonus, it’d be nice if such tasks were to be non-blocking and thread-safe. Since, the ......

---

For one of my projects I've been using Windows Server AppFabric Caching (on-premise) (http://tinyurl.com/2usm9bs). I've setup a simple cluster: 2 nodes, with 4 Gigabytes in total, running in a high-availability mode – data is auto-replicated, so I can take down one node for maintenance (or allow for one-node asteroid strike) and client applications ......

---

Being able to change file-based configuration settings in runtime is a nice facet in the ASP.NET world. Low-friction and seamless, this little feature allows for traffic to go on uninterrupted and helps avoid flushing AppDomain memory just to reload config. settings. It's a different story when dealing with Console or Service applications, though. One ......

---

I’ve been a frequent to SoCal Code Camps (if you’re in the area, check ‘em out: http://www.socalcodecamp.com/ they’re held couple times a year). The next one coming up just posted the schedule – with an addition to a new session “Geeks Anonymous”. Anyway, I thought it hilarious. Kthxbai ......

---

Sometimes there's a need to communicate explicitly that value variable is yet to be "initialized" or in other words - we’ve never changed it from its' default value. Perhaps "initialized" is not the right word since a value type will always have some sort of value (even a nullable one) but it's just that - how do we tell? Of course an 'int' would be ......

---

Just a small tidbit that's sprung up today. I had to book-keep and emit diagnostics for the average thread performance in a highly-threaded code over a period of last X number of calls and no more. Need of the day: a thread-safe, self-managing stats container. Since .NET 4.0 introduced new thread-safe 'Collections.Concurrent' objects and I've been using ......

---

I'm moving my blog content to GeeksWithBlogs.com who have graciously accepted my application to host here. Over a period of time I'll be putting up my older posts from original sources to here (after careful editing to fit new format). The dates and ordering might be odd but I'll do my best to minimize the confusion. Cheers!

---