Here is a great customer story blog post from MSN engineering team with great bits of key stats compiled by Eric Passmore about our content management system that was also written ground up optimized for Azure stack. The MSN Case Study (pdf) goes in greater detail about our CMS at cloud scale.

I’ve been busy building the SDK used by the MSN network. Infact, my team was front and center of this project, building the core web infrastructure that powers the rendering of the entire MSN network of sites. We also built and optimized the crown jewel MSN Homepage for the unique high scale traffic the homepage receives. MSN ranks #8 in March 2015 Syndicated Ad Focus Entities with 132 million unique users. As any web app developer knows, one page-view results in more than 1 web requests to the server; and in our MSN scenario we serve upwards of a billion http requests (main page views, ajax responses, authentication etc.) every day.

The entire project took a little over an year, but each and every day was packed with exciting learnings and joys of working on a range of industry standard technologies (asp.net MVC, Azure technologies, RESTful service calls) and high scale and high availability computing challenges (caching considerations, optimal CDN usage, A/B flighting, RPS).

I hope to blog my learnings, techniques, MVC and Azure optimization tips gained while designing and shipping MSN network as one of the top 10 Internet web properties.

1. Launch Windows Powershell (type powershell on the start screen, it comes bundled in Windows 8)
2. Type “Unblock-File <<file_to_unblock.extn>>”
   (you can type unb and press tab to autocomplete the cmdlet, and the first few chars of the filename and tab to autocomplete that too)
3. A successful execution of the cmdlet shows no message.

If you need more info on the Unblock-File cmdlet, type “Get-Help Unblock-File” for the details on what arguments it accepts. Also available here.

1. Install Fiddler2 on your dev box.
   
   
2. Launch Fiddler2 and goto Tools –> Fiddler Options… –> Select the Connections tab.
   
   
3. Ensure you “check” the “Allow remote computers to connect” option (which is off by default). Pay attention to what Fiddler says when you click OK.
   
   
   
4. On this dev-box, open a command prompt and type “ipconfig” and note the IPv4 address.
   
   
5. Now, on the mobile device, enable WiFi and connect to your WiFi network. Once connected, configure your WiFi connection and set ensure that you enable “Proxy” and set the proxy server value as the IPv4 address noted in step 4. Ensure you also specify the port as 8888 (if you are using the default fiddler2 setting shown above).
   
   
6. Now all browser network activity is routed through Fiddler and you will have full access to all of what Fiddler offers. My favorite ones are the AutoResponder to intercept calls and respond with my own canned scripts/styles/markup etc, Rules –> Performance options to introduce latencies, and a few other plugins I will write in a later post.
   

Happy mobile web debugging.

I am extremely happy today to note the latest release from my team – a brand new design of the MSN Homepage for Mobile Devices. Its been a fast paced and hectic journey to get this new design shipped and to completely overhaul and improve page design.

Just type msn.com on your smartphone to see it for yourself.

@MSFTNews also tweeted about this release earlier today and for the full scoop on what this release is made of - here is the official release details for this mobile milestone.

If you are in the US you can check it out and give us feedback either here or in the official release blog link above.

First off, Windows Phone 7 provides an outstanding mobile phone experience. But like any software platform it too has some issues that catch developers by surprise. The browser used in WP7 is based on Internet Explorer 7 and so while it does inherit IE7’s issues, it also gives WP7 the predictability that is not found in the scores of Android devices that each use different versions of webkit.

So, back to the problem. The widget I was developing was using a transparent png as a background image to provide a translucent background effect for an overlay container that would show on top with widget content. The widget worked fine in the portrait mode, but when the device was put in landscape orientation (in WP7 only) the screen redraws were severely hampered, with 'patches of white’ showing up for many seconds before being redrawn correctly. There was a significant lag in screen redraws, and in even being able to type into a textbox on the page. But when the device returned to portrait mode the screen redraws among other things were just fine and performed returned to normal. This same markup and style configuration worked fine on iPhone and majority of Android devices.

After many attempts at rearranging the markup and styling failed to avoid this issue, the solution I turned to for this WP7 specific issue was to use the opacity filter rather than the transparent background image to achieve the translucent effect.

Before:

.overlay .translucent
{ 
  background-image: url('/path_to_transparent_background.png');
}

After:

.overlay .translucent
{
  background-color: #000;
  filter: alpha(opacity=50);
}

Excerpt from Scott Guthrie’s blog

I’m excited to announce the release today of several products:

• ASP.NET MVC 3
• NuGet
• IIS Express 7.5
• SQL Server Compact Edition 4
• Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0
• Orchard 1.0
• WebMatrix 1.0

The above products are all free. They build upon the .NET 4 and VS 2010 release, and add a ton of additional value to ASP.NET (both Web Forms and MVC) and the Microsoft Web Server stack.

Head over to the blogpost for a ton of detail and download links.

Tour the extensive set of features of the new MSN

New Tabbed interface

New header look and feel

Enjoy!

The preview site is a culmination of tremendous efforts by the engineering team (developers, testers and program managers), the design team and the business team who have spent countless hours the past few months in making sure we drive the best features out for our users. A lot of other richer features are underway and will be announced in due course – checkout the MSN blog – msnblog.msn.com periodically to be updated.

Making a grand entry on the new MSN Homepage is the integration with social networking sites, Facebook, Twitter and our own Windows Live. If you are signed into your Hotmail account then you will automatically see the most recent posts from your Windows Live contacts on the Windows Live tab. Similarly, once you switch to the Facebook (or Twitter) tab you will be able to login to your Facebook (or Twitter) account and then authorize MSN Homepage to access your News Feed (or tweets). This authorization is a one time activity that a user has to perform. 

Once the authorization process is completed the seamless integration of your ‘social network activity streams’ with the new MSN homepage will provide a quick snapshot of activities posted to your three accounts (Windows Live, Facebook, and Twitter) – on the go right there on the MSN homepage – saving you the time and hassle of signing into 3 separate services for checking whatsup in your social circle. Also coupled with the fact that, you can quickly check your Windows Live Hotmail Inbox on the homepage, and search for a topic of your interest on the Bing search bar is reason sufficient enough to make MSN your homepage.  

Click here to join and become a fan of MSN on Facebook and send your feedback and comments to us. Leave a comment on this blog if you have any feedback that will help the us (the Homepage engineering team).

Here is a quick rundown of the new features in pictures -  Go ahead and as the Xbox team would say – Jump in - https://preview.msn.com 

I finished my first video of Dr. Richard Feynman in a messenger series discussing the Law of Gravitation – An example of Physical Law and it was a very refreshing learning experience.

While the star highlight of Project Tuva is absolutely the lectures and video content, the project is also a very nice showcase of Microsoft Silverlight and how Silverlight can add rich interactivity to web applications and make it a significant differentiator.

Head over to Project Tuva and add a new joy to learning physical sciences. Big thanks to Microsoft Research for coming up with Project Tuva.