Maarten Balliauw {blog}

At RealDolmen, we had the luck of doing the first (known) project on Windows Azure in Belgium. Together with Microsoft, we had the opportunity to make the ChronoRace website robust enough to withstand large sports events like the 20km through Brussels.

ChronoRace is a Belgian company based in Malmédy, specialised in electronic timing for large sports events (around 340 per year) troughout Europe in different disciplines like jogging, cycling, sailing, … Each participant is registered through the website, can consult their results and can view a high-definition video of their arrival at the finish line. Of course, these results and videos are also used to brag to co-workers and family members, resulting in about 10 result and video views per participant. Imagine 20.000 or more participants on large events… No wonder their current 1 webserver – 1 database server setup could not handle all load.

Extra investments in hardware, WAN connection upgrades and video streaming were considered, however found too expensive to have these running for 365 days a year while on average this extra capacity would only be needed for 14 days a year. Ideal for cloud computing! Especially with an expected 30.000 participants for the 20km through Brussels... (which would mean 3 TB of data transfers for the videos on 1 day!!!)

Microsoft selected RealDolmen as a partner for this project, mainly because of the knowledge we built over the past year, since the first Azure CTP. Together with ChronoRace, we gradually moved the existing SQL Server databse to SQL Azure. After that, we started moving the video streaming to blob storage, implemented extra caching and automatic scaling.

You probably have seen the following slides in various presentations on cloud computing:

All marketing gibberish, right? Nope! We actually managed to get very close to this model using our custom autoscaling mechanism. Here are some figures we collected during the peak of the 20km through Brussels:

More information on the technical challenges we encountered can be found in my slide deck I presented at KAHOSL last week:

If you want more information on scalability and automatic scaling, feel free to come to the Belgian Community Day 2010 where I will be presenting a session on this topic.

Oh and for the record: I’m not planning on writing marketing posts. I just was so impressed by our actual autoscaling graph that I had to blog this :-)

It looks like I’m only doing sessions lately :-) Here’s another slide deck for a presentation I did on the Architect Forum last week in Belgium.

Abstract: “No, this session is not about greener IT. Learn about using the RoleEnvironment and diagnostics provided by Windows Azure. Communication between roles, logging and automatic upscaling of your application are just some of the possibilities of what you can do if you know about how the Windows Azure environment works.”

Thanks for attending!

As part of my global domination plans, I this week visited Vienna, Austria for a session at Linuxwochen around PHP on Windows.

PHP on Windows

Abstract: “Ever wanted to get started with PHP development on Windows? This session covers the basics of running PHP on the Windows platform and will help getting your development environment ready.”

Thanks for being in this session! I know it is a controversial one on a Linux event :-)

As promised, here are the slides of the VISUG session me and Kris van der Mast did yesterday.

Being a pimp without Silverlight!

Abstract: “Don't tell us you're jealous of those Silverlight fanboys! We'll show you that applications with bling can be developed using ASP.NET MVC and jQuery. We're talking MVC, template helpers, AJAX, JSON, transitions, live bindings, ...”

As promised during my talk, here's the slide deck for "Put your existing application in the cloud!".

Abstract: "Leverage the highly scalable Windows Azure platform and deploy your existing ASP.NET application to a new home in the clouds. This demo filled session will guide you in how to make successful use of Windows Azure’s hosting and storage platform as well as SQL Azure, the relational database in the cloud, by moving an existing ASP.NET application to a higher level."

And here's the live recording:

Thanks for joining TechDays 2010 and my session!

Just got back from London where I did a fun talk on PHP and Windows Azure yesterday evening. It was the first time I did a presentation after three beers, but I think it went allright. As promised, here's the slide deck and sample code (ImageCloud.rar (5.00 mb)).

Abstract: "This session covers the basics of Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform. Learn how you can develop and deploy a PHP application in Windows Azure, using the tools and libraries Microsoft provides. Creating a photo upload application, the different aspects of the Windows Azure platform are leveraged for creating a performant and scalable PHP application."

Thanks for joining the conference and my session! Also, Robert Castelo, your talk on Drupal and its community was interesting. Did not know the active developer base and security teams were that big.

I just got the following invitation from Microsoft, and would like to encourage  you to participate as well if you are interested in bot PHP and the Microsoft worlds.

Jump In! and be a part of it!

Open source programming and Microsoft: two incompatible worlds? Microsoft is partnering with renowned actors of the open-source community to organise the Jump In! Developers' Camp in an effort to combat this misperception. Twenty-five knowledge-hungry open source application developers from all over Europe will be invited to spend four unforgettable days of dialogue, networking and workshops at the beautiful Panorama Resort & Spa Feusisberg in Switzerland.

The Jump In! Developers' Camp is designed primarily for open-source application developers who are interested in increasing their skills in a range of specific areas. Here they will be able to experiment with ways of combining open-source technologies with Microsoft products to optimize applications. But don’t worry: no one is out to ‘convert’ anybody! The aim instead is to promote interoperability, problem-solving and enhance programming skills. Software experts will be on hand to provide tips and advice, and a range of workshops will be held on topics including Azure, IIS, Silverlight and more in combination with open-source applications. Plenty of time for actual coding will be available.

Potential participants are invited to file an application at www.jumpincamp.com, outlining their profile. The 25 developers who are creating the most “buzz” for themselves and their programming abilities will then be selected. Attendees of the JumpIn! Developers' Camp will then record their impressions and experiences in a live blog for their community of ‘followers’. The Camp will be held between 6 - 9 April 2010.

Register now and apply for taking part on www.jumpincamp.com.

Day 2 keynote at Microsoft PDC 2009 was quite exciting. To sum things up: Silverlight 4 went beta, IE9 features were previewed, and we got an external hard disk, nicely fitted in a tablet-pc format case. How thoughtful!

Here’s some of the novelties:

Silverlight 4 Beta

This was a good starter… It’s really incredibly feature packed! In my opinion, I think WCF can now be called obsolete as well, but no announcements on that :-) Anyway, here’s a list of new features: webcam access, multicast streaming, offline DRM and output protection, printing, clipboard support, out-of-browser and out-of-sandbox support, drag and drop, implicit styling, a HTML control, rich-text editing, breathe, ability to share assemblies with .NET 4, data binding improvements, udp multicast, REST enhancements, TCP channel support, …

Also check Tim Heuer’s blog post over at http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-complete-guide-new-features.aspx.

IE9

Yes, IE9 was announced. Running JavaScript lots faster, passing more of the ACID3 test (still not all), and the coolest part: Direct3D rendering of all graphic content. This was demoed and approved by the audience: everything is so muh faster and smoother!

WCF RIA Services

Check out Brad Abrams’ blog for this: http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/11/18/welcome-to-wcf-ria-services-beta.aspx

Basically a rename of RIA services, and converted to run on top of WCF rather than an own transport layer implementation in previous versions.

Overall: a great PDC09 day two!

Finally found some time to write a short blog post on the announcements this morning at PDC 2009. Ray Ozzie started the keynote this morning, focusing on Microsoft’s “three-screen” vision for the future. There will be three screens connected to the cloud: TV, (handheld) devices and of course good old PC. This vision is driven by some key players: Windows 7, Internet Explorer, Silverlight and Windows Azure. Make sure to have a look at these four if you want to play in this future.

Some announcements were made as well:

• Microsoft Codename “Dallas”, a new approach to consuming data that is publicly available
• Microsoft Pinpoint, a marketplace for applications on Windows Azure
• Windows Server AppFabric, the on-premise extension to the Azure platform
• Windows Identity Foundation, formerly known as Geneva, has gone RTW today
• Download ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta, released today
• Download SQL Server Modeling CTP, the repository part from Oslo
• Download Microsoft Sync Framework Power Pack for SQL Azure November CTP, a cool synchronization means between local, on-premise data and data in SQL Azure. Yummy!

Had a great day yesterday, driving trough the city of Los Angeles and looking at various places in town. Conference day one was also very interesting, lots of good sessions. Currently missing a session slot though, waiting for a Channel9 interview on the Windows Azure SDK for PHP. Stay tuned!

It’s going to be a filled end of 2009… There’s Microsoft PDC which I will be attending and will probably cause me some sleepless nights (both due to jetlag and due to all the new stuff that will be released). Next to that, I’ll also be doing some sessions in the next few weeks. Here’s a list…

Looking forward to see you at one of these events!