Will Beattie's Blog

I know it's been a long time between drinks. But I've finally found the time to post about my latest discoveries from the land of the Bleeding Edge. I'm currently rebuilding my PC with Windows 7 Release Candidate, more on that later and have some free time. So as you would know if you have read the rest of my blog I have settled for a hosting solution of this. Go Grid – App & DB Servers EC2 - Transcoding, File Processing Services S3 - Media Storage CloudFront – CDN As we near the release date for our product we have been doing substantial testing in the area of uploading from the Client directly to S3 using Flash and then performing Transcoding in EC2. Anyone who's tried to play with the S3 API knows that it is a beast to say the least, so I choose to use the very good wrapper from Affirma called ThreeSharp . If you're doing development in .NET with S3 then you would be mad not to use it. However I have come acro

The beauty of working for a small dynamic company is that we aren't restricted by corporate policies and can make changes as and when it makes sense. Recently a colleague of mine came into the office raving about Windows 7 Release Candidate . My ears pricked up at this and it certainly tickled my underlying desire for shiny new toys, however it got put on the backburner. It wasn't until I heard Visual Studio 2010 Beta was going to be released that I decided to make the shift. The prospect of having Code Contracts was just far too compelling. Fortunately we have a spare PC at the office with the following specs. 500 GB 2.66 GHZ Quadcore 3.25 GB Ram Our dev environment requirements are Sql Server 2008 Developer Edition SP1 Visual Studio 2010 ReSharper Dynamsoft Hosted Anywhere Client So I decided it was time for an upgrade and I agreed that if we could get a stable version of our development environment then we could all upgrade. Here are some install timings. Windo