Recent Posts

Introducing RealDolmenBlogs.com

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... Read more »

Running PHP in the Cloud slides and sample code

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 Microso... Read more »

Sharpy - an ASP.NET MVC view engine based on Smarty

Are you also one of those ASP.NET MVC developers who prefer a different view engine than the default Webforms view engine available? You tried Spark, NHaml, …? If you are familiar with the PHP world as well, chances are you know Smarty, a great engine for creating views that can easily be read and understood ... Read more »

Jump in! camp - Call for participants

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 ... Read more »

Using Windows Azure Drive (aka X-Drive)

With today’s release of the Windows Azure Tools and SDK version 1.1, also the Windows Azure Drive feature has been released. Announced at last year’s PDC as X-Drive, which has nothing to do with a well-known German car manufacturer, this new feature enables a Windows Azure application to use existing NT... Read more »

Just Another Wordpress Weblog, But More Cloudy

Slides of my talk at the PHPBenelux conference last weekend are online. Bit of a pity my live demo went wrong due to my www.azure.com trial account going into read-only mode while doing the demo. Abstract: "While working together with Microsoft on the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, we found that we needed an popul... Read more »

Translating routes (ASP.NET MVC and Webforms)

For one of the first blog posts of the new year, I thought about doing something cool. And being someone working with ASP.NET MVC, I thought about a cool thing related to that: let’s do something with routes! Since System.Web.Routing is not limited to ASP.NET MVC, this post will also play nice with ASP.NET We... Read more »

PHPMEF 0.1.0 released!

A while ago, I did a conceptual blog post on PHP Managed Extensibility Framework – PHPMEF. Today, I’m proud to announce the first public release of PHPMEF! After PHPExcel, PHPLinq, PHPPowerPoint and the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, PHPMEF is the 5th open-source project I started on interoperability (or conceptual int... Read more »

Creating an external facing Azure Worker Role endpoint

When Windows Azure was first released, only Web Roles were able to have an externally facing endpoint. Since PDC 2009, Worker Roles can now also have an external facing endpoint, allowing for a custom application server to be hosted in a Worker Role. Another option would be to run your own WCF service and have it h... Read more »

Ordering fields in ASP.NET MVC 2 templated helpers

Ever worked with the templated helpers provided by ASP.NET MVC 2? Templated helpers provide a way to automatically build UI based on a data model that is marked with attributes defined in the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace. For example, a property in the model can be decorated with the attribute [Di... Read more »