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Showing posts from June, 2012

Background tasks (continuous code) in the Cloud: Cloud Foundry beats AWS and Azure

Introduction I have a background task collection I need run, continuously, but with different timer intervals for each task. It is a critical part of my web services and provides the data gathering and transformations the make the web service valuable. How should I package the code and where should I deploy it? Only in the cloud.   As the cloud space is moving faster than I can write this, any of this could be outdated by the time you reader it. Consider Time, Money, and Ease of Deployment In struggling with where to deploy the code, I considered the cloud cost, the time to learn and build the solution as well as any cloud gothchas. I’m now on my sixth cloud provider trying to determine if they are the best at background tasks. Why? Because background tasks are where the heavy lifting happens. I want to spend my time getting that heavy lifting correct and not fighting with the cloud environment. Background Task Defined Just to be clear, I consider a background task any co

Steps for Consuming XML data in .Net

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Introduction While consuming third-party RSS feeds, I found I had to relearn how to deal with XML data. This post is meant to prepare any developer who needs to consume XML which they do not control. While I used RSS feeds, any XML will apply. I wanted to change the meta data and data of the XML file into a model of data that I could control with .Net classes and conventional data storage.   This post is organized to take you from an xml file to .Net classes able to consume, serialize, and test the xml. Generating an XSD file from an XML file using Xsd.exe The first step is to make sure you have the XML Schema Definition tool, xsd.exe , installed. It is part of the .Net Framework tools . Make sure the executable location is part of the system path , user path, or command prompt path. On my computer the path is “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bin” and I added it to the system path so it is available at any command prompt, regardless of the user.   Separate ou