Performance test of C# HTML XPath parsers (HtmlAgilityPack, XmlDocument, XElement, XPathDocument, Xml-Vtd)

Recently I'm working a lot with HTML parsers. At our scale, performance is a key, because it directly influences cloud costs. So I have tested five most popular ways of querying HTML using XPath that are possible to use in .NET 4.5.

New Relic on Azure - role instances are taking longer than expected to start

I was installing New Relic in my Azure Cloud Service role. I followed instructions from New Relic's page and... it didn't worked. On my local machine I no longer could start the instance. I saw the message "role instances are taking longer than expected to start".

SQL Server 2012 Azure Blob automated recovery test script

After I wrote Azure Blob backup script I had to make regular checks if backups are uploaded successfully and can be restored. So I've written a script that does it automatically and sends me an email with the result.

SQL Server 2012 backup to Azure Blob script

After SQL Server 2012 Cummulative Update 2 added support for Azure Blob backup, I've decided to make use of this. Our SQL Server is running on Azure VM, so it's cheaper solution than using mapped VHD drive for backups, and it's not limited to 1TB size.

Azure VM - You are running out of disk space on C:

Our Azure VM instance run out of disk space. It has only 30GB C: disk and after few months it's barely sufficient to hold Windows 2012 with basic applications.