Posts
All the articles I've posted.
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Pro NuGet second edition is out
Pfew! Around February 2013, Xavier and I started planning work on an update of our book. Eight months later, we’re proud to present you with Pro NuGet (second edition). It’s been a tough couple of months writing this: Xavier has become a father for the second time (congratulations!), we’ve had two massive updates to NuGet we had to work in our book, … But here it is! What’s new? Next to that there is a lot more meat in there! We would love to get your feedback! E-mail us or write a review on your blog or Amazon. Enjoy the read! PS: Thanks to our excellent reviewers (the NuGet team) and everyone at Apress! There is a lot of people involved in getting a quality book out there. Thanks!
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A new year's present: introducing Glimpse plugins for Windows Azure
Have you tried Glimpse before? It shows you server-side information like execution times, server configuration, request data and such in your browser. At the February MVP Summit this year, Anthony, Nik and I had a chat about what would be useful information to be displayed in Glimpse when working on Windows Azure. Some beers and a bit of coding later, we had a proof-of-concept showing Windows Azure runtime configuration data in a Glimpse tab. Today, we are happy to announce a first public preview of two Windows Azure tabs in Glimpse: the Glimpse.WindowsAzure package displaying runtime information, and Glimpse.WindowsAzure.Storage collecting information about traffic from and to storage.
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Visual Studio Online for Windows Azure Web Sites
Today’s official Visual Studio 2013 launch provides some interesting novelties, especially for Windows Azure Web Sites. There is now the choice of choosing which pipeline to run in (classic or integrated), we can define separate applications in subfolders of our web site, debug a web site right from within Visual Studio. But the most impressive one is this. How about… an in-browser editor for your application? Let’s take a quick tour of it. After creating a web site we can go to the web site’s configuration we can enable the Visual Studio Online preview. Once enabled, simply navigate to .scm.azurewebsites.net/dev">https://<yoursitename>.scm.azurewebsites.net/dev or click the link from the dashboard, provide your site credentials and be greeted with Visual Studio Online.
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Developing Windows Azure Mobile Services server-side
Word of warning: This is a partial cross-post from the JetBrains WebStorm blog. The post you are currently reading adds some more information around Windows Azure Mobile Services and builds on a full example and is a bit more in-depth. With Microsoft’s Windows Azure Mobile Services, we can build a back-end for iOS, Android, HTML, Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps that supports storing data, authentication, push notifications across all platforms and more. There are client libraries available for all these platforms which can be used when developing in an IDE of choice, e.g. AppCode, Google Android Studio or Visual Studio. In this post, let’s focus on what these different platforms have in common: the server-side code.
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Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)
With the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) released as a preview, I thought it was a good time to write up some details about how to work with it. The CDN can be used for offloading content to a globally distributed network of servers, ensuring faster throughput to your end users. Note: this is a modified and updated version of my article at ACloudyPlace.com roughly two years ago. I have added information on how to work with ASP.NET MVC bundling and the Windows Azure CDN, updated screenshots and so on.
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An autoscaling build farm using TeamCity and Windows Azure
Cloud computing is often referred to as a cost saver due to its billing models. If we can move workloads that are seasonal to the cloud, cost reduction is something that will come. No matter if it’s really “seasonal seasonal” (e.g. a temporary high workload around the holidays) or “daily seasonal” where workloads are different depending on the time of day, these workloads have written cloud all over them.
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Just released: MvcSiteMapProvider 4.0
After a beta version about a month ago, we are proud to release MvcSiteMapProvider 4.0 stable! (get it from NuGet, it’s fresh!) It took 6 months to complete this major version but I think our GitHub contributors have done a great job. Thank you all and especially Shad for taking the lead on this release!
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Windows Azure Traffic Manager Explained
With yesterday’s announcement on Windows Azure Traffic Manager surfacing in the management portal (as a preview), I thought it was a good moment to recap this more than 2 year old service. Windows Azure Traffic Manager allows you to control the distribution of network traffic to your Cloud Services and VMs hosted within Windows Azure. The Windows Azure Traffic Manager provides several methods of distributing internet traffic among two or more cloud services or VMs, all accessible with the same URL, in one or more Windows Azure datacenters. At its core, it is basically a distributed DNS service that knows which Windows Azure services are sitting behind the traffic manager URL and distributes requests based on three possible profiles:
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Autoscaling Windows Azure Cloud Services (and web sites)
At the Build conference, Microsoft today announced that Windows Azure Cloud Services now support autoscaling. And they do! From the Windows Azure Management Portal, we can use the newly introduced SCALE tab to configure autoscaling. That’s right: some configuration and we can select the range of instances we want to have. Windows Azure does the rest. And this is true for both Cloud Services and Standard Web Sites (formerly known as Reserved instances). We can add various rules in the autoscaler: A long awaited feature is there! I'll enable this for some services and see how it goes...
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Enabling PHP 5.5 on Windows Azure Web Sites using a remote shell and KuduExec
While probably this post will be outdated in the coming days, at the time of writing Windows Azure Web Sites has no PHP 5.5 support (again: yet). In this post, we’ll explore how to enable PHP 5.5 on Windows Azure Web Sites ourselves. Last year my friend Cory wrote a post on enabling PHP 5.4 in Windows Azure Web Sites which applies to PHP 5.5 as well. However I want to discuss a different approach. And do read on if PHP 5.5 is already officially available on WAWS: there are some tips and tricks in here.