By way of exception, this post is not it-related. Since I have struggled to find some information on the web, I think this still could be interesting for some folks out there. A couple of days ago my wife noticed that our refrigerator is quite warm inside and it does not get to the specified temperature anymore. As you can see on the following photo is was quite hot inside: ...

If you are interested in cloud technologies, this is a great place to learn more about all Microsoft Cloud Technologies. You will find information on topics such as Hyper-V, SQL Azure, Windows Azure, virtualization and much more. I think it is a great source of information and learning experience.

For all you Java developers out there, have a look at this link in order to learn more about C# and the .NET framework.

Last week I learned a very interesting lesson. I am just in the end phase of a custom software delivery project. Using OLIVANOVA’s model driven software development approach, I created a three-tier application with an ASP.NET client, a COM+ based server tier and MS SQL Server as the persistence layer. The COM+ application is deployed to a dedicated server along with the SQL Server database management system. The ASP.NET application is created on another server that lives in a DMZ (demilitarized zone). This web server does not have access to the Internet from inside, but is accessible from outside of this company. A connection (HTTP) from the web-server to the database server is then responsible for communication between the user-interface and the server tier. ...

A couple of days ago I did some performance tests between Oracle 10g (Express) and Oracle TimesTen. As with any commercial products, there is some licensing and costs involved. Obviously, our idea was then to look for a more cost efficient solution in order to get the same results. We specifically looked at H2, a Java SQL Database. This DBMS can operate in several different modes such as embedded, server and in-memory and has compatibility modes for certain commcercial database products like DB2, MySql, MS SQL Server, Oracle and some others. So, looking at the feature list, this seemed to be a good fit. ...

A couple of days ago, I bought some new Windows Phone 7 (WP7) devices for my wife and myself. I really love the new look & feel and the live tiles and hubs.One of the things I kind of struggled was the ability to sync calendars on both of the devices. After entering your Windows Live ID, you already get your contacts, email and calendar. However, only the primary calendar is synced to the device. I usually have several calendars in order to organize things. The screenshot on the right shows some of my calendars, whereas “My calendar” is set-up to be the primary. ...

If you care about privacy when sharing status updates then have a look at this Windows Phone 7 app named tickWell. tickWell is a social networking platform with a focus on privacy which enables you to record and share selected moments of your life.

Just recently, I had been asked to compare the performance of Oracle 10g and Oracle TimesTen In-Memory database. We wanted to evaluate to what extent the performance of a mission critical system could be increased by using an in-memory database like Oracle TimesTen compared to a “regular” RDBMS like Oracle 10g. I used a sample application generated from OLIVANOVA in order to compare these different scenarios. The application is based upon a three-tier architecture with a JSF client, J2EE business logic and a RDBMS. The JSF client as well as the business logic have been deployed on a JBoss application server. ...

Microsoft has released a security advisory about a vulnerability in ASP.NET. A security patch is already available here. Below are some details on how the vulnerability works: “To understand how this vulnerability works, you need to know about cryptographic oracles. An oracle in the context of cryptography is a system which provides hints as you ask it questions. In this case, there is a vulnerability in ASP.NET which acts as a padding oracle. This allows an attacker to send cipher text to the web server and learn if it was decrypted properly by examining which error code was returned by the web server. By making many such requests (and watching what errors are returned) the attacker can learn enough to successfully decrypt the rest of the cipher text.” (quoted from Scott Guthrie’s blog)

As stated in a recent post, I’ve been able to create a Silverlight 4 client that accesses an OLIVANOVA generated business logic using WCF RIA Services. Well, the actual code to enable this scenario is in fact not that complicated (once you learned how to write Silverlight enabled WCF RIA Services). The big advantage for me is that the complete business logic can be generated with OLIVANOVA’s model driven software development approach. ...