Maarten Balliauw {blog}

It was great speaking at NDC2011! As promised during the sessions I gave, here are the slide decks:

• Cost architecting for Windows Azure - NDC 2011.pptx (714.40 kb)
• Windows Azure - Under the hood - NDC 2011.pptx (2.37 mb)

Going for noodles now. Cheers!

As promised, here are the slides and demo code for my talk "Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3, MEF and NuGet" I presented at MIX in Las Vegas.

Abstract: "So you have a team of developers… And a nice architecture to build on… How about making that architecture easy for everyone and getting developers up to speed quickly? Learn all about integrating the managed extensibility framework (MEF) and ASP.NET MVC with some NuGet sauce for creating loosely coupled, easy to use architectures that anyone can grasp."

The recorded session: (on Channel 9)

The slide deck:

The demo code: 2011-04-14 Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3 MEF.zip (6.76 mb)

Enjoy! And thanks for joining!

I’m proud to announce that we (RealDolmen) have released the official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app! The official Belgium TechDays 2011 gives you the ability to browse current & upcoming sessions, as well as provide LIVE feedback to the event organizers. Is the current session awesome? Let us know! Is the food too spicy? Let us know!

Why am I blogging this? Well: one of the first sessions at the event will be Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, Windows Azure, jQuery, OData and RIA Services. Shaken, not stirred, deliverd by Kevin Dockx and myself. It will feature this WIndows Phone 7 application as well as the backoffice for it (Silverlight), the mobile web front-end (jQuery mobile), the web front-end (MVC), the integration points with the event organizers and the deployment on Windows Azure. Not to mention the twitterwall that integrates with this. ANd the top sessions ranking that will be displayed based on input from all the channels I mentioned before. In short: I’m blogging this to plug our session :-)

Interested in what we’ve built? Or just a consumer of WP7 apps? Download the app at http://techdays.realdolmen.com or directly by clicking the picture below:

See you at TechDays!

I have asked it last year, and I’ll ask it again. One of my session proposals made it to the “short”list for MIX11. One thing left though: votes are the only currency to get my session proposal in Vegas.

Here’s the session abstract:

Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3 and MEF

So you have a team of developers? And a nice architecture to build on? How about making that architecture easy for everyone and getting developers up to speed quickly? Learn all about integrating the managed extensibility framework and ASP.NET MVC for creating loosely coupled, easy to use architectures that anyone can grasp.

If you think this session deserves a place in Vegas, please cast your vote right here. And while you are at it, feel free to vote for both of my direct colleagues Kevin Dockx and Sandrino Di Mattia as well.

PS: No, I will not steal Mike Tyson’s tiger.

As promised during my session on Remix 10 yesterday in Belgium, here's the slide deck and sample code.

Building for the cloud: integrating an application on Windows Azure

Abstract: “It’s time to take advantage of the cloud! In this session Maarten builds further on the application created during Gill Cleeren’s Silverlight session. The campaign website that was developed in Silverlight 4 still needs a home. Because the campaign will only run for a short period of time, the company chose for cloud computing on the Windows Azure platform. Learn how to leverage flexible hosting with automated scaling on Windows Azure, combined with the power of a cloud hosted SQL Azure database to create a cost-effective and responsive web application.”

Thanks for joining and bearing with me during this tough session with very sparse bandwidth!

Source code used in the session: TDD.ChristmasCreator.zip (686.86 kb)

Steve Plank from Microsoft UK has just announced the UK Windows Azure Online Conference on his blog. This will be a whole day, online Windows Azure conference consisting of three different tracks: Cirrus – the high level stuff, Altocumulus – the mid level stuff (cast studies) and Stratocumulus – the low level stuff (deep tech). I’ll be doing a session in the Stratocumulus track.

Since this is an online conference, feel free to subscribe for the event! All details can be found on the UK Windows Azure Online Conference announcement. I feel this is going to be very interesting, covering a broad range of Windows Azure topics! Here’s the list of sessions I’ll try to attend:

• Case studies in the Altocumulus track, these should be very interesting real-life examples
• Of course my own session, “Taking care of a cloud environment”, since otherwise there would be no speaker in that slot…
• Windows Azure Guidance Project
• Azure Table Service – getting creative with Microsoft’s NoSQL datastore
• The Q&A panel sessions

The only thing I’m wondering about: how are they going to provide lunch through Live Meeting…

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, ...”