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Dominic Burford - Professional Profile



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I am a professional software engineer and technical architect with over twenty years commercial development experience with a strong focus on the design and development of web and mobile applications.

I have experience of architecting scalable, distributed, high volume web applications that are accessible from multiple devices due to their responsive web design, including architecting enterprise service-oriented solutions. I have also developed enterprise mobile applications using Xamarin and Telerik Platform.

I have extensive experience using .NET, ASP.NET, Windows and Web Services, WCF, SQL Server, LINQ and other Microsoft technologies. I am also familiar with HTML, Bootstrap, Javascript (inc. JQuery and Node.js), CSS, XML, JSON, Apache Cordova, KendoUI and many other web and mobile related technologies.

I am enthusiastic about Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Application Life-cycle Management having configured such environments using CruiseControl.NET, TeamCity and Team Foundation Services. I enjoy working in Agile and Test Driven Development (TDD) environments.

Outside of work I have two beautiful daughters. I am also an avid cyclist who enjoys reading, listening to music and travelling.

 

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GeneralThe Mythical Full Stack Developer Pin
Dominic Burford14-Mar-17 3:18
professionalDominic Burford14-Mar-17 3:18 
GeneralCreating your own private NuGet server Pin
Dominic Burford2-Mar-17 0:36
professionalDominic Burford2-Mar-17 0:36 
GeneralConsuming a dependency using NuGet Pin
Dominic Burford28-Feb-17 6:05
professionalDominic Burford28-Feb-17 6:05 
GeneralCoding Standards Pin
Dominic Burford24-Feb-17 6:02
professionalDominic Burford24-Feb-17 6:02 
GeneralSoftware Architecture Challenges Pin
Dominic Burford17-Feb-17 1:31
professionalDominic Burford17-Feb-17 1:31 
GeneralGetting the Most Out of Your Unit Tests Pin
Dominic Burford9-Feb-17 9:21
professionalDominic Burford9-Feb-17 9:21 
GeneralBuilding a strong development team Pin
Dominic Burford8-Feb-17 6:31
professionalDominic Burford8-Feb-17 6:31 
GeneralLast pieces of the mobile app in the Web API puzzle Pin
Dominic Burford27-Jan-17 5:03
professionalDominic Burford27-Jan-17 5:03 
In the ASP.NET Web API services I've been developing, I ran into an issue whereby the POST data I was sending wasn't being received by the Controller. The parameter of the Controller was a string as I was sending JSON data, but this wasn't working. I kept getting the error that the POST data was null when I was expecting it to contain my JSON data.

After much head scratching and Googling I eventually found this very useful article[^] that explained my problem and the various solutions. I opted to change my Web API parameter to JToken as this was a simple fix and got me working again quickly. I need to post different shaped JSON documents to the Web API hence why I ran into the problem. The endpoint is also invoked from our mobile apps with Javascript, thus necessating the need to send data as a JSON document. So changing the parameter from string to JToken fixed the issue.

Next problem I encountered was when invoking the Web API endpoint from our mobile app. I was using an AJAX call to POST data but getting an error. It turns out the problem was because I was breaking standard browser security. Browser security prevents a web page from making AJAX requests to another domain. This restriction is called the same-origin policy, and prevents a malicious site from reading sensitive data from another site. However, sometimes you might want to let other sites call your Web API. In our case, we wanted our Web API to be invoked from mobile app clients.

In order to allow this, I needed to enable CORS on the Web API that was being invoked by the mobile apps (there was only one). Cross-Origin Resource Sharing[^] (CORS) is a W3C standard that allows a server to relax the same-origin policy. Using CORS, a server can explicitly allow some cross-origin requests while rejecting others. CORS is a safe and reliable technique for allowing cross-origin requests.

I installed the CORS Nuget package and enabled CORS on the Controller, and everything now works. We can post data from the mobile app to our legacy back-end system via Web API endpoints (which in turn use an Azure Service Bus).

Now that the last pieces of the puzzle have been solved it's good to see all the moving parts in the architecture working together.

Our mobile app user fills out a form and submits the data. The data is packaged into a JSON document and posted to our Web API which adds a message to an Azure Service Bus. An Azure Function that is bound to the Azure Service Bus listening for incoming messages, picks up the message and routes the request onto a routing engine where it is determined where the request needs to be routed to. Requests from our mobile app are routed to our back-end legacy system, where a task is created from the request so that a member of staff can process the request data from the mobile app user.

This all happens seamlessly and is incredibly responsive thanks to a carefully thought out and designed architecture by yours truly Cool | :cool:
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." - C.A.R. Hoare

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GeneralSerializing .NET types that contain DateTime Pin
Dominic Burford22-Jan-17 18:53
professionalDominic Burford22-Jan-17 18:53 
GeneralClearing the Dead Letter Queue on an Azure Service Bus Queue Pin
Dominic Burford16-Jan-17 8:57
professionalDominic Burford16-Jan-17 8:57 
GeneralMigrating ASP.NET Web API services to the Azure platform Pin
Dominic Burford10-Jan-17 2:45
professionalDominic Burford10-Jan-17 2:45 
GeneralProcessing Azure Service Bus messages using an Azure Function Pin
Dominic Burford4-Jan-17 9:10
professionalDominic Burford4-Jan-17 9:10 
GeneralThe Structure of an Azure Service Bus message Pin
Dominic Burford30-Dec-16 3:11
professionalDominic Burford30-Dec-16 3:11 
GeneralMy Introduction into Service Bus Architecture Pin
Dominic Burford21-Dec-16 6:40
professionalDominic Burford21-Dec-16 6:40 
GeneralAdding resilience to your services by implementng a retry pattern Pin
Dominic Burford19-Dec-16 1:10
professionalDominic Burford19-Dec-16 1:10 
GeneralAuthenticating Web API services with JSON Web Token Pin
Dominic Burford13-Dec-16 2:26
professionalDominic Burford13-Dec-16 2:26 
GeneralDeploying to Azure with Team Foundation Server 2015 Pin
Dominic Burford9-Dec-16 2:29
professionalDominic Burford9-Dec-16 2:29 
GeneralCatch me over on Medium for my latest blog posts Pin
Dominic Burford7-Dec-16 1:15
professionalDominic Burford7-Dec-16 1:15 
GeneralWeb application metrics with Application Insight Pin
Dominic Burford25-Nov-16 10:03
professionalDominic Burford25-Nov-16 10:03 
GeneralHow to Pick Your Battles on a Software Team Pin
Dominic Burford16-Nov-16 2:33
professionalDominic Burford16-Nov-16 2:33 
GeneralComplete 360 Testing Pin
Dominic Burford27-Oct-16 2:49
professionalDominic Burford27-Oct-16 2:49 
GeneralCompleted the ASP.NET Web API build pipeline Pin
Dominic Burford24-Oct-16 1:18
professionalDominic Burford24-Oct-16 1:18 
GeneralOne code-base for all mobile platforms is a pipe dream Pin
Dominic Burford12-Oct-16 18:42
professionalDominic Burford12-Oct-16 18:42 
GeneralRe: One code-base for all mobile platforms is a pipe dream Pin
Member 1280340119-Oct-16 9:29
Member 1280340119-Oct-16 9:29 
GeneralRe: One code-base for all mobile platforms is a pipe dream Pin
Dominic Burford19-Oct-16 21:26
professionalDominic Burford19-Oct-16 21:26 

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