Recent Posts

What PartitionKey and RowKey are for in Windows Azure Table Storage

For the past few months, I’ve been coaching a “Microsoft Student Partner” (who has a great blog on Kinect for Windows by the way!) on Windows Azure. One of the questions he recently had was around PartitionKey and RowKey in Windows Azure Table Storage. What are these for? Do I have to specify them ... Read more »

MyGet Build Services - Join the private beta!

Good news! Over the past 4 weeks we’ve been sending out tweets about our secret project MyGet project “wonka”. Today is the day Wonka shows his great stuff to the world… In short: MyGet Build Services enable you to add packages to your feed by just giving us your GitHub repo. We build it, we... Read more »

Get your Windows 8 up to speed fast

With the release of Windows 8 on MSDN yesterday, I have a gut feeling that today, around the globe, people are installing this fresh operating system on their machine. I’ve done so too and I wanted to share with your two tools: one that helped me get up to speed fast, one that will help me up to speed even fas... Read more »

Hands-on Windows Azure Services for Windows

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced their Windows Azure Services for Windows Server. If you’ve ever heard about the Windows Azure Appliance (which is vaporware imho :-)), you’ll be interested to see that the Windows Azure Services for Windows Server are in fact bringing the Windows Azure Services ... Read more »

Tweaking Windows Azure Web Sites

A while ago, I was at a customer who wanted to run his own WebDAV server (using www.sabredav.org) on Windows Azure Web Sites. After some testing, it seemed that this PHP-based WebDAV server was missing some configuration at the webserver level. Some HTTP keywords required for the WebDAV protocol were not mapped to t... Read more »

Community guidelines to stay out of the busy trap

For the past few days, an interesting blog post on the NY Times has been popping up in my Twitter timeline. In your as well, probably, since almost everyone I know has retweeted it a couple of times. Which blog post? The one about the so-called “busy trap”. The idea is simple: we’re all caught in t... Read more »

Fourth year as an MVP, second year for Windows Azure

Woohoo! I just received the great mail I expect yearly on the first of July: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise ... Read more »

Domain based routing with ASP.NET Web API

Imagine you are building an API which is “multi-tenant”: the domain name defines the tenant or customer name and should be passed as a route value to your API. An example would be http://customer1.mydomain.com/api/v1/users/1. Customer 2 can use the same API, using http://customer2.mydomain.com/api/v1/use... Read more »

Setting up a webfarm using Windows Azure Virtual Machines

With the release of Microsoft’s Windows Azure Virtual Machines, a bunch of new scenarios became available on their cloud platform. If you plan to host multiple web applications, you can either go with Windows Azure Web Sites or go with a webfarm you create using the new IaaS capabilities. The first is okay for any t... Read more »