Dean Hume

Windows Azure

Guide to configuring custom domain names for a Windows Azure website

Creating a new website is easy and super-fast thanks to an intuitive UI on the Windows Azure portal. You can create a new website and be up and running in a matter of minutes. By default, your new site will normally have a host name that looks like yourdomain.azurewebsites.

Web Performance

Web Page Performance - Profiling paint times

I recently attended the Facebook Mobile Developers Conference in London. Throughout the day, there were a load of great talks, but the one that really stuck out for me was a performance talk entitled "Making m.facebook.com fast". It was all about how Facebook constantly strive to improve the

Leadership

The "ideal" sprint length

Many organisations today use Scrum as a framework for managing software projects and developing applications. As a certified ScrumMaster, I have been using Scrum for over five years and have seen it run in many different companies. When implemented correctly, I have seen that Scrum can be extremely successful. However,

Web Performance

WebP - Advanced image optimization using ASP.NET MVC

Most modern web pages contain a lot of images. These images often make up the bulk of a web page request. According to the HTTPArchive, images make up over 50% of the average web page and if you are looking to optimize on the performance of your web page, the

ASP.NET

Twitter bootstrap typeahead and ASP.NET MVC - Key/Value pairs

I suck at creating CSS. As a backend developer, I've always managed to get by with my CSS skills, but I've always been jealous of my front end developer colleagues when it comes to their ability to create beautiful web pages. Fortunately, the guys at Twitter have developed a great

Icons

Free icon packs for developers

Over the years, I have started to hoard a collection of links to various free icons that I find on the net. Often, I use these icons to spruce up simple prototypes or just make my web pages look livelier. Unfortunately, I've been collecting these links to icon packs and

ASP.NET

The Google PageSpeed API & MVC 4

I often use tools such as Yahoo! YSlow and Google PageSpeed to profile the performance of my websites. These tools offer useful performance suggestions that will improve the speed and performance of my sites if implemented correctly. They both plug into the browser and can be run at the click

Web Performance

Frontend Single Point of Failure

At this year's Velocity Europe conference, I watched a great talk by Google's Patrick Meenan about 3rd party scripts and frontend Single Point of Failure (SPOF). A single point of failure is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. Quite often,

Web Performance

I'm writing a book! Fast ASP.NET Websites

Ever since I first started writing code, I've always been interested in the performance of websites and making them faster. It's amazing how a slow website can be brought to life with a few simple tweaks to your website setup. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing someone use a

Web Development

How to disable Flash in all browsers

I am currently working in a team where we are replacing an older Flash implementation of a product with a shiny new HTML5 version. Quite often we find ourselves needing to disable Flash in many different browsers as we run through the testing process with the new product. I often

ASP.NET

.NET Caching - File Dependencies

In a previous blog post, I wrote about the built in support that .NET has for in-memory caching. It sits under the System.Runtime.Caching namespace and can be easily added to any application to give you a great improvement in performance. You can store any type of object in

Leadership

The Five Whys

I've been reading a book called the Lean Startup recently. It is filled with great advice and the Lean Startup is basically a business approach that aims to change the way that companies build and launch new products. Whilst reading the book I came across a chapter that dealt with

Web Performance

Improve Page Load Times With DNS Prefetching

I'm often looking for ways to improve the performance of my websites and provide a better experience for users. Quite often you may find that your site is running efficiently and performing well. You may also have run your application through Google PageSpeed or Yahoo! YSlow and come out with

Web Performance

Velocity Conference Europe 2012 - Roundup

This week saw the return of Velocity Conference Europe to our shores. With a great line up of speakers, this conference is a gathering of hundreds of web ops and performance professionals that get together to share their ideas and expertise. Without a doubt, this is one of my favourite

ASP.NET

Visual Studio 2012 - A week in perspective

I am one of the lucky ones. Fortunately my company gives us a MSDN subscription and this goes a long way toward keeping up with the latest Microsoft Software. I have been eagerly awaiting the release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 which came out last week. I was a little

Web Performance

Net Magazine Article

An article that I recently wrote for Net Magazine is coming out in the September 2012 issue. The article talks about Content Delivery Networks and the benefits that using one can bring to the speed of your page load times. I am a big fan of the magazine, and it's

ASP.NET

Hidden Gems inside .Net Classes

Surprisingly, there are loads of great data snippets hidden inside .Net classes. If you've ever found yourself adding localization to your website, you may have come across the CultureInfo Class in .Net. I know that sometimes I have needed to get a list of country ISO codes and have struggled

Web Performance

Lazy Loading Social Sharing Buttons

Social sharing buttons play a big part on the web today. They are used to drive traffic to the site, and if done correctly can be very successful. Unfortunately, the loading of these buttons has its downsides on performance. Having many social sharing buttons on your site can slow it

Web Performance

HTML5 Asynchronous JavaScript

HTML5 has a handy little attribute called 'async'. This attribute can be used together with Script tags to asynchronously load JavaScript. No more fancy code to get your JavaScript to run asynchronously - you just need to add this to a script tag and it just works. In order to

Google Chrome

A Basic Guide to Building Chrome Extensions

Google Chrome has come a long way since it's early days. I am a big fan of the Chrome Developer tools and use it in my day to day development. There are also loads of great tools and extensions that are on offer at the Chrome store, and most are

Testing

Running multiple browsers in one test run with Selenium

The beauty of Selenium is that it allows you to test your UI against all of the common browsers out there at the moment. Writing the code to test for a test scenario is quick and easy and getting up and running with Selenium can be done in a matter

Testing

Selenium WebDriver - Using a Headless Browser in .Net

If you have ever run a large suite of automated tests using Selenium WebDriver, you will know that sometimes it can take ages to complete. This coupled with different versions of browsers can be a bit of a pain. This is where Headless Browsers come in. In the simplest of

HTML5

Dynamic Favicons using HTML5 Local Storage and TinyCon

I was perusing Github the other day and I came across this awesome little JavaScript library. It's called TinyCon and it's a small library for manipulating the favicon in your browser. It adds alert bubbles and changing images pretty similar to the way Gmail does. It's basically a really fun

ASP.NET

MVC Asynchronous Controller : The Basics

When I first saw the Asynchronous Controllers introduced in MVC 2, I couldn't wait to start playing around. I thought that it would be a really easy to get up and running with a simple example, but after searching online for a few working examples - pretty much all of

ASP.NET

MVC and HTML5 Web Workers

HTML5 Web Workers are cool. As a developer that spends most of his time working with server side code, I like to think of Web Workers as .net's System.Threading for the front end. Basically, Web Workers allow you to run client side scripts without interrupting the page or any