Demystifying software engineering and everything in between

A new focus on mobile development

Since last 5 years of my career, I have been mainly working on web application development in particularly using .NET technology stack and also mainly blogging on ASP.NET, client side libraries, C# and developing a small open source projects on GitHub as well. I do really enjoy working web because of web working model and it’s fast paced in terms of improvement plus web development tools have improved over the time, one way to realize fast paced web is by considering that Firefox has released more than 15 version in last few years… just joking. So yeah this leads to me Read more…

By Adil Mughal, ago

Moving WordPress Blog to Custom VM hosted on Windows Azure

Some months ago I migrated my blog from blogger to self hosted WordPress on Windows Azure. My initial experience was good, having a website hosted on azure standard instance with MySQL database somewhere in cloud. All good, I started doing some WordPress optimization. One day I got an alert from “ClearDB” that my database storage is about to reach limit and then I realized that MySQL database for my blog was actually hosted by ClearDB which by default gives you only 20 MB free space plus with the option to get 1 GB for $9.99 per month. So they expect me to pay for both website hosted Read more…

By Adil Mughal, ago

Tips to Optimize WordPress on Azure

Few months ago, I moved my blog to WordPress on Azure. I am not a WordPress expert, not even near to it but as hosting is charged or free for limited configuration, it is better to optimize and leverage the current resources first before scaling out on cloud. So I would like to share few tips based on my experience. Just a bit background, I mostly blog for technical stuff so I used a lot of images and code snippets to transfer my message. 1. Utilize free online storage for Images Content like images can take relatively large percentage of Read more…

By Adil Mughal, ago

My Experience of Migrating blog from Blogger to WordPress on Azure

You may have noticed the new look of my blog with a bit difference in URLs, as I have migrated from Blogger to WordPress that is hosted on IIS deployed on Microsoft Windows Azure. Objectives: Migrate all posts from Blogger to WordPress Don’t end up with broken links for blog posts New home page, simple and improved responsive layout Update DNS settings to set adilmughal.com to new site Migrating Earlier Blog Posts After creating a new WordPress site from Websites gallery in Windows Azure Portal, migrating earlier posts was very easy and straight forward, a tool comes out of box Read more…

By Adil Mughal, ago

New Employer, New Country, Another Change

Though 2012 proved to be a year of change for me, I am ready to take another leap of relocating to new country to avail the opportunity to be part of Nintex product development team. For those of you working on SharePoint server probably know about Nintex, their Nintex workflow is famous third party tool utilized in SharePoint to develop custom workflows easily. Nintex is the world’s leading SharePoint workflow company, with over 5000 customers in 90 countries serviced by a global network of high quality partners and service providers. Nintex delivers innovative software and cloud services that empower organizations Read more…

By Adil Mughal, ago

Thanks for the good time Telenor

This post is a short note to say THANK YOU to my colleagues, now ex-colleagues, for the good time we had in last 4 years at Telenor Pakistan, as you might already know, dear reader, that I have just left Telenor Pakistan. Overall I enjoyed working in Telenor and if I look back I see some good legacy of my contributions in Human Resource Management System, Payroll, Telcom Value Added Services, Mobile Apps etc. I learned a lot about software engineering in particularly web development and challenges of large enterprise. Beside work, I am leaving with remarkable memories of fun Read more…

By Adil Mughal, ago

Awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional 2013

Super excited to share that I have been recognized as Most Valuable Professional (MVP) by Microsoft for the consecutive fifth year. This time I have been awarded in ASP.NET/IIS space with technical interest in Client App Dev, Windows Azure and C#. Special thanks to our MVP Lead Hande, DPE Lead Tahir Masood, my wife and above all my parents for their outstanding support. Glad to be part of The Official Microsoft MVP Community. You can see my profile on MVP site .

By Adil Mughal, ago

Microsoft Community Meetup in Islamabad

Last week, I had honor to interact with community at Microsoft Community Meetup Islamabad where I got the opportunity to share my thoughts on community contribution and its significance. I talked about why community contribution matters to society and what are some of the common benefits of community meetup. I was amazed to see the willingness of people to participate in community activities and enjoyed the same discussion with them on dinner. If you would like to get involved in community as volunteer or need to discuss with me, just don’t hesitate to contact me or tweet me. Community Contribution Read more…

By Adil Mughal, ago

Restoring NuGet Packages and gitignore

Some time earlier, I posted about “Restoring NuGet Packages for External Dependencies” to restore dependencies when building solution and this way you don’t have to commit “packages” folder. Just a short note: If you are working with Git and have enabled restoring NuGet packages automatically then perhaps it would be helpful to add “packages/” to .gitignore file as you don’t want to commit the packages folder. This is also been handled in latest VisualStudio.gitignore sample available at github/gitignore. By default the “packages/” is commented so don’t forget to uncomment the line (see line# 98).  

By Adil Mughal, ago

Imagine Cup 2013 Evaluation Experience

Like last year, I was invited by Microsoft Pakistan to evaluate the software competition entries for Microsoft Imagine Cup 2013. It’s a great opportunity to see how our academia is doing in terms of the output they produce and see how new talent is doing. In Islamabad, we evaluated around 20 projects from various Universities such as FAST-NUCES, University of Karachi, NEDUET, NUST etc. I think looking back to our academic life and comparing with the projects students are doing these days I think they are doing a remarkable work. Students today are utilizing technology much more than we used Read more…

By Adil Mughal, ago