I’ve finally got round to pushing the code for BlobExplorer to CodePlex. You can find the CodePlex site here. If you want to contribute to the project, let me know at richard at nospam dotnetconsult dot co dot uk and I’ll add you to the contributors list. The releases will continue being pushed to blob storage http://dotnetconsult.blob.core.windows.net/tools/BlobExplorer.zip

A while back I did this post talking about how WCF contract definitions should model the messages being passed and not use business  objects. This inevitably  means that you have to translate from the Data Transfer Object (DTO) in the contract to business object and back again. This can feel like a lot of overhead but it really does protect you from a lot of heartache further down the line.

However Dom just pointed out the AutoMapper to me. This is in its early stages but looks like the kind of library that will really take away a lot of the grunt work associated with using DTOs – kudos!

I've just dropped a new release of Blob Explorer for managing Windows Azure Blob Storage

Two new features:

• Blob metadata can now be added and viewed
• There is a status bar to show that long running uploads and downloads are in progress

As always you can get it from blob storage here

http://dotnetconsult.blob.core.windows.net/tools/BlobExplorer.zip