Maarten Balliauw {blog}

Here’s something I would like to share with you. A few months ago, our company (RealDolmen) started a new website, RealDolmenBlogs.com. This site syndicates content from employee blogs, people with lots of experience in their range of topics. These guys have lots of knowledge to share, but sometimes their blog does not have a lot of attention from, well, you. Since we would really love to share employee knowledge, RealDolmenBlogs.com was born.

The following topics are covered:

• .NET
• Application Lifecycle Management
• Architecture
• ASP.NET
• Biztalk
• PHP
• Sharepoint
• Silverlight
• Visual Studio

Make sure to subscribe to the syndicated RSS feed and have quality content delivered to your RSS reader.

The technical side

Since I do not like to do blog posts on topic that do not have a technical touch, considered that the first few lines of text of this post are pure marketing in a sense, here’s the technical bit.

RealDolmenBlogs.com is built on Windows Azure and SQL Azure. As a company we believe there is value in cloud computing, in this case we chose for cloud computing due to the fact that the setup costs for the website were very small (pay-per-use) and that we can easily scale-up the website if needed.

The software behind the site is a customized version of BlogEngine.NET. It has been extended with a syndication feature, pulling content from employee blogs with a little help of the Argotic syndication framework. Running BlogEngine.NET on Windows Azure is not that hard, especially when you are using SQL Azure as well: the only thing to modify is the connection string to your database and you are done. Well… that is if you don’t care about images and attachments. We had to do some modifications to how BlogEngine.NET handles file uploads and made sure everything is now stored safe and sound in Windows Azure blob storage.

That being said: enjoy the content that my colleagues are sharing, posts are definitely worth a read!

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.

Everybody knows the Microsoft MIX event, right? The one in Las Vegas? The one with all the fancy web-related stuff? Rings a bell? Ok, great. In the beginning of December 2009, Microsoft did an open call for speakers, which I answered with some session proposals. Who doesn’t want to go to Vegas, right?

The open call proposals have been processed (150+ sessions submitted, wow!) and a voting has started. Yes, you hear me coming: please go ahead and vote for a session I submitted. Voting ends January 15th, 2010.

Since I could not decide which color of the voting banner matched best with my blog’s theme, I decided to put them all three online:

Thanks in advance!

Maarten

PS: There's also Elijah Manor, Justin Etheredge, K. Scott Allen, and many others who submitted good looking sessions.

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!

A few days ago, the SQL Server Team announced the availability of three major CTP’s and several new upcoming projects in the SQL related family tree: SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server StreamInsight and SQL Azure. Now that last one is interesting: Microsoft will offer a 1GB or 10GB database server “in the cloud” for a good price.

Currently, SQL Azure is in CTP and will undergo some more development. Of course, I wanted to play with this, but… connecting to the thing using SQL Server management Studio is not the most intuitive and straightforward task. It’s more of a workaround. Juliën Hanssens, a colleague of mine, was going crazy for this. Being a good colleague, I poored some coffee tea in the guy and he came up with the SQL Azure manager: a community effort to quickly enable connecting to your SQL Azure database(s) and perform basic tasks.

And it does just that. Note that it is a first conceptual release. And that it is still a bit unstable. But it does the trick. At least at a bare minimum. And for the time being that is enough. Want to play with it? Check Juliën’s ClickOnce page!

Note that this thing will become open-soucre in the future, after he finds a good WF designer to do the main UI. Want to help him? Use the submit button!