Anthony Turner

Automated Azure Template Validations

October 31st, 2016

This past year, Azure introduced the concept of ‘Resource Groups’ and the ability to write templates to deploy resources to Azure. This makes it easy to describe your infrastructure as code which you can easily redeploy. The Azure engineering team maintains an open source repository of sample templates where anyone can contribute a ...

Cordova IoT Simulator

August 31st, 2016

Overview of the Solution Building Internet of Things (IoT) solutions often involves creating a complex pipeline of software that originates at a device and sends telemetry to the cloud. These devices also consume commands from the cloud to alter their configuration and operating behavior. Once this is done for a small number of devices, it ...

Compiling Electron Apps for the Windows Store

May 8th, 2016

Electron apps are a powerful cross-platform solution for developers: Combining Chromium, Node.js, and a thick layer of APIs to integrate with the operating system, Electron enables developers to build Desktop apps using JavaScript and Node modules. Electron applications run on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux - but they are not able to take ...

Categorizing Driver Risk with Machine Learning

January 7th, 2016

Categorizing Driver Risk with Machine Learning Usage-based insurance (UBI), also known as pay as you drive, is a type of automobile insurance whereby the costs of motor insurance are dependent upon the type of vehicle used, measured against time, distance, behavior and place. One important requirement of UBI is the ability to quickly ...

Dynamic Web Test Generation Using App Insights

December 4th, 2015

SiteCore is a business intelligence company based out of Copenhagen Denmark. They provide a solution that allows developers to understand deep business analytics in their own services. We had the opportunity to work with SiteCore’s development team in Kuala Lumpur for a one-week hackfest in order to explore how they could use Application ...

Reading and Writing to the Windows Registry in-process from Node.js

November 9th, 2015

A single npm module that enables Node developers to update the Windows Registry, create file associations, and much more! As cross-platform application developers, we often need the ability to update the Windows Registry when installing our applications on Windows. Common features requested by app developers include reading and writing keys...

Streamlined Dokku Deployment on Azure

October 30th, 2015

Dokku is one of the most popular application frameworks for deploying apps for development and testing. With the tiny amount of code that is Dokku, you can git-push any application or any Dockerfile. It’s almost magic. Dokku is powered by Docker, and automatically builds a Docker image for any application you push to it. These apps can be...

Building a Radial Menu Control for Surface Devices

October 25th, 2015

User interfaces should not stand between user and content - a known golden rule that can be difficult to implement. For presentation-heavy applications dealing with notes, images, or documents, being as unobtrusive as possible has always been an important mantra. The most popular apps in those fields tend to have user interfaces that collapse ...

Using Travis CI to Deploy to Azure

September 30th, 2015

Travis CI is known as everyone’s favorite Continuous Integration system, offering free testing for open source projects. It also integrates seamlessly with GitHub, automatically testing all your branches, but also optionally pull requests. All around, it’s an amazing tool to test and build applications written in a variety of languages, ...

Upgrading to npm@3 on Windows

September 30th, 2015

Despite it’s popularity, there were always two major issues with running Node.js on Windows: First and foremost, the operating system maintains a maximum length for path names, which clashes with Node’s traditional way of nesting modules in node_modules. The second issue was a bit more subtle: The npm installer had a set of steps it ...