Blog

My Article on “Planning for Failure”

I wrote an article based on the half day workshop that Brent Stineman and I put together for CodeMash. The article is entitled “Planning for Failure in Cloud Applications” and it’s posted over on the Cloud category for Simple Talk. Brent and I collaborated on the content, and took a lot of it from our own experience as well as learning from others so it’s definitely more of a summary of prevalent practices.

Where Greatness Starts

I remember in school learning about great people in history: Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Amelia Earhart and the list goes on. One of the things that fascinated me for a while was just what was it about these individuals that really drove them to do the things they did. What made them confident in their decisions, gave them the strength to make hard choices and see them through? Now that I’m older (I won’t say I’m necessarily more mature), I realize that most likely these great people dealt with the same doubt and concern about their actions as I do with mine.

Using PowerShell to Remove Poisonous Messages

At work we ran into an issue where a few messages that were being written from an app running our logging framework (which sits on top of Enterprise Library using MSMQ) was pointed at an incorrect queue. When the process that reads off the queue and inserts into the database (the Logging Distributor) hit the first of these messages it failed attempting to case the log entry to the serialized object it was expecting, at which point it logged an error in the Event Log of the server and then shut down the service.