Having used the Beekeeping App at the hives today I realised two things.

Firstly, it was incredibly useful to be able to look at the previous hive inspections, just to know what state the hive was in on the last visit, because it is difficult to remember the details, even with only four hives

 And, secondly, there is a lot more detail that I would like to be able to record, on diseases and treatments, configuration of the hive and more.

With more information collected it would be possible to automatically analyse the data and come up with suggestions as to what might need doing. It would also be possible, with the data being in the cloud to analyse information from multiple beekeepers, and provide insight into the health of bees nationally.

I think this has a lot of potential and I'm going to redesign the app and get it to a state where others can use it.

A Microsoft book on Developing Multi-tenant Applications for the Cloud. 246 pages, free to download. This is so much better than having to buy those paper things.

Dino Esposito has an article on Social Authentication in ASP.NET MVC 4 in this month's MSDN Magazine.

This was the article on OAuth that shows how to authenticate with facebook / twitter...

It is almost too easy to add OAuth authentication and authorization with Facebook, or Twitter to an MVC 4 Internet application. Include the commented out lines in the AuthConfig.cs file and add your facebook appId and appSecret and the job is done.

The only difficulty I had with this was down to a NuGet package that was not up to date. Click the update button and NuGet solves it for you. Microsoft are really making this easy.

Having fun with Windows Azure and ASP.NET MVC 4...

My Bee Hive Inspection app is coming along nicely. It is remarkably easy to create a web based data driven app, put it in the cloud and access it from your mobile phone...