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On one of the mailing lists I follow, an interesting question came up: “We want to write a VSTO plugin for Outlook which copies attachments to blob storage. What’s the best way to do this? What about security?”. Shortly thereafter, an answer came around: “That can be done directly from the client. And storage credentials can be encrypted for use in your VSTO plugin.” While that’s certainly a solution to the problem, it’s not the best. Let’s try and answer…

An article I wrote a while ago has been posted on DeveloperFusion: The world in which we live evolves at a vast speed. Today, many applications on the Internet expose an API which can be consumed by everyone using a web browser or a mobile application on their smartphone or tablet. How would you build your API if you want these apps to be a full-fledged front-end to your service without compromising security? In this article, I’ll dive into that. We’ll be using OAuth2 and the Windows Azure Access Control Service to secure our API yet provide access to all those apps out there.

That’s a pretty long title, I agree. When working on my implementation of RFC2324, also known as the HyperText Coffee Pot Control Protocol, I’ve been struggling with something that you will struggle with as well in your ASP.NET Web API’s: supporting additional HTTP methods like HEAD, PATCH or PROPFIND. ASP.NET Web API has no issue with those, but when hosting them on IIS you’ll find yourself in Yellow-screen-of-death heaven.

If you check my blog post Tracking API usage with Google Analytics, you’ll see that a small open-source component evolved from MyGet. This component, GoogleAnalyticsTracker, lives on GitHub and NuGet and has since evolved into something that supports Windows Phone and Windows RT as well. But let’s not focus on the open-source aspect.

Note: this blog post used to be an article for the Windows Azure Roadtrip website. Since that one no longer exists, I decided to post the articles on my blog as well. Find the source code for this post here: 05 ConfirmPhoneNumberDemo.zip (1.32 mb). It has been written earlier this year, some versions of packages used (like jQuery or SignalR) may be outdated in this post. Live with it.

Note: this blog post used to be an article for the Windows Azure Roadtrip website. Since that one no longer exists, I decided to post the articles on my blog as well. Find the source code for this post here: 04 SendingEmailsFromTheCloud.zip (922.27 kb). When a user subscribes, you send him a thank-you e-mail. When his account expires, you send him a warning message containing a link to purchase a new subscription. When he places an order, you send him an order confirmation. I think you get the picture: a fairly common scenario in almost any application is sending out e-mails.

September 1st, 2005. Fresh from school, I got the opportunity to start at RealDolmen (Dolmen, back then). Not just a “welcome, here’s your customer, cya!”-start, but a start where my fresh colleagues and I got a 4 months deep dive from people in the industry. Entirely different from what school taught me, focused “on the job”. 4 months later, I started at my first customer, then the second, third, a project developed in-house, did some TFS customizations, some Windows Azure, …

ASP.NET Web API is a great tool to build an API with. Or as my buddy Kristof Rennen (and the French) always say: “it makes you ‘api”. One of the things I like a lot is the fact that you can do very powerful things that you know and love from the ASP.NET MVC stack, like, for example, using filter attributes. Action filters, result filters and… authorization filters.

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 manually? Let’s explain…

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 package it, we publish it.