Richard Astbury’s Blog

Aug 22, 2018

Rendering leaflet.js tiles in the browser

I wrote a fractral viewer using Leaflet.js which renders map tiles in the browser using a pool of service workers.

May 1, 2018

Lego House

On a recent family trip to Denmark we spent a day at the Lego House in Billund. It's set back behind the Lego theme park, and has only been open for about a year.

Feb 21, 2018

Dev East

Dev East is a single day, single track software developer conference running on 16th March 2018 at Ipswich Town Football Club.

Nov 28, 2017

Bulk inserting data into SQL Server

Let's say with have a simple table in SQL Server in which we want to insert thousands of values (Guids) from a .NET application.

Mar 22, 2017

I was in the market for a new laptop for work. I wanted a 13" (ish) Core i7 (7th gen), 16GB RAM and a 512 GB SSD to replace my 6 year old Lenovo X1. I compared a few laptops on the market, here's the summary

Aug 10, 2016

Benchmarking Image Interpolation in .NET

I am attempting to improve the performance of image resizing in C#.

Jul 8, 2016

Comparing Microsoft Orleans and Azure Service Fabric Actors

Never has there been such a good time for C# developers wanting to develop software based on Virtual Actors. At the moment there are two systems available, Orleans and Service Fabric Actors.

May 25, 2016

The Good Parts

Yesterday I was trying to learn F# by reading through the O'Reilly book and trying a few code samples. I then made a flippant remark...

May 19, 2016

Orleans Hello World - 2016 Edition

Orleans has seen lots of improvements over the last year, in terms of the client APIs, the configuration and installation. So the process of getting started is now a little different. Let's walk through setting up a grain, with a silo host and client application.

Apr 6, 2016

Continuous Integration on the Cheap

I used Azure Web Apps to build my small .NET application, which is held in a private BitBucket repository, without having to pay anything for a CI service.

Nov 19, 2015

Syncing data with SQL Server

When building occasionally connected apps, we frequently want to synchronize data between client and server. It's common to build REST APIs to retrieve records from a database that have changed since we last connected.

Nov 6, 2015

Reactify

In this post we'll look at using react to render the data on the screen

Oct 2, 2015

Enter the Browser

In this post we'll look at moving code into the browser, to make a single page application - the node way!

Sep 25, 2015

Storing Data

In this post we'll look at persisting data to a database. The node way.

Sep 21, 2015

Serving Angle Brackets

In this series of blog posts, we're looking at how to set up a simple web app in node. In this post we're going to put the plumbing in for serving html, both static and dynamic pages.

Sep 18, 2015

Setting up Node and Express

I've been talking to a few people lately about how I build web applications. There's no single right-way of doing it, but here's my workflow, split into small blog posts you can follow.

May 21, 2015

Setting up a Google Hangout On Air

Setting up a Google Hangout is not obvious, here are the steps I take to create one.

Jan 22, 2015

Optimistic Concurrency in Orleans

the Storage Provider infrastructure in Orleans exposes an 'Etag' field representing a particular revision of the data in the underlying storage system. This can be used to detect writes competing writes to overwrite grain state.

Jan 13, 2015

Thoughts on Deploying Orleans

A post discussing a future possibility for deploying Orleans to Azure

Jan 12, 2015

Running io.js on Azure Websites

You can run io.js on Azure Websites easily, by configuring azure to use a custom node version. This blog shows you how.

Rendering leaflet.js tiles in the browser

Lego House

Dev East

Bulk inserting data into SQL Server

Review of the HP Envy 13

Benchmarking Image Interpolation in .NET

Comparing Microsoft Orleans and Azure Service Fabric Actors

The Good Parts

Orleans Hello World - 2016 Edition

Continuous Integration on the Cheap

Syncing data with SQL Server

Reactify

Enter the Browser

Storing Data

Serving Angle Brackets

Setting up Node and Express

Setting up a Google Hangout On Air

Optimistic Concurrency in Orleans

Thoughts on Deploying Orleans

Running io.js on Azure Websites