I was lucky enough to get a ticket to ng-cong in Salt Lake City this year. It was a great conference, much different from the tech conferences that I’m used to.

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• Part 1 - EPark
• Part 2 - EPark Rebuilt (Coming Soon)

The City of Edmonton has removed all the parking meters and replaced them with an electronic parking system called EPark. The EPark system allows you to pay at either a kiosk or through your mobile phone, which sounds awesome until you try to use the mobile app. EPark is an example of an application that had no usability testing done and very little thought put in to how users will use the application, which explains it’s one star ratting in the app store. In this post we will investigate some of the issues, in part two we will look at some solutions.

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We’ve looking to use a custom OAuth/OpenID provider for a few of our projects and after reviewing the options available we decided to use Identity Server as it looked to be the most stable and feature rich. Currently we use ServiceStack for our backend and while ServiceStack has build in support for OAuth and OpenID it doesn’t appear to have any support for OpenId Connect. And while we will be using OAuth tokens we will be using the OpenId Connect configuration endpoints for configuration.

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I have been working on a small content editing tool for an internal project and decided to try using angular 2. For this project I want to use the TinyMCE.js. In anglar 1.x I would wrap it in a directive and work with it that way. This code was testing with alpha 48 In angular 2.0 there are no directives, instead we use a component which ends up being much simpler than a directive. Read on →

I’ve been doing a fair bit of android development using the Xamarin to allow me to code in c#. I personally like to do all of my development in a virtual machine which allows me to have separate environments for different project. This works well for most development, but for mobile development it posses some challenges when trying to run emulators.

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Debugging in azure mobile services can be frustrating, it only runs on Azure servers and you can’t run any debugging tools on it. Logging is pretty much the only way to debug your services. The default logging using console.log is fairly limited. You can’t turn it on or off easily or change the logging level. It also doesn’t include the line number which can make it harder to debug a large service.

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In Part 1 we looked at how to set-up a simple script to shut down an azure virtual machine after a period of inactivity. The problem I had with the previous solution was determining the amount of inactivity time to set the script to run at. I often found the machine was shutting down when I didn’t want it to. In this post we will add SMS notification when the machine is about to shut down and we will add an option for cancelling the shut down. Read on →

Thanks to the new MSDN credits that we get with our bizspack membership we have moved all of our development to Azure VMs. Now that stopped (deallocated) VMs don’t get charged we are able to have fairly large VMs for our dev machines as long as we remember to turn them off at night. In order to make sure that we don’t forget we put together a simple script that will shutdown the VM when called.

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