Author Archives: joelfillmore

Compressed UTF-8 Strings in SQL Azure

SQL Azure costs are primarily based on which size database you choose to provision. Given the premium over the cost of blob storage you’ll want to avoid storing large amounts of data that could be kept in files. However, most … Continue reading

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Performance of jQuery UI and Public CDNs

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all have content delivery networks (CDNs) to provide common JavaScript libraries for public use. This is a great service which helps to speed up the web by allowing many different sites to link to the same … Continue reading

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Years and Months Between Dates

At first glance, calculating the difference between two DateTimes seems easy. Simply subtract the first date from the second and you’ll get a TimeSpan which can be used to get the total number of days elapsed. With the 4th of … Continue reading

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Changing IIS Logging Fields in Windows Azure

Windows Azure makes it pretty easy to enable IIS logging for your web roles and the logs will periodically be transfered to a storage account so you can analyze them. A typical IIS installation will include some essential fields and … Continue reading

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Serving GZip Compressed Content from the Azure CDN

GZip Compression There are two big reasons why you should compress your content: time & money. Less data transferred over the wire means your site will be faster for users and bandwidth costs will be lower for you. Compressing the … Continue reading

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Throttling Web API Calls

Sign outside Wallington, England (CC-BY by anemoneprojectors) From Amazon to Zillow, there are thousands of sites which provide access to data via an API. At FilterPlay we use lots of e-commerce APIs to retrieve product data and update prices used … Continue reading

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