Posts
All the articles I've posted.
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Social meet up on Twitter for MEET Windows Azure on June 7th
Here’s a perhaps rather redundant event for you but it should be kind of fun: MEET Windows Azure on Twitter (+ Beer). The idea is to list people who have a twitter account and intend to follow the MEET Windows Azure event via live streaming on June 7th (1pm PDT). So see you online for the event on the 7th! My Twitter handle is @maartenballiauw MEET Windows Azure Blog Relay: + Beer? Since you are watching the event from your coucnh (or the totilet, or your bed, or actually, from wherever you want), feel free to open up a beer. Call to action: Link to this blog post on your blog and I will update this post to link to you!
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The world is changing: the future of IT
I’ve had my say on cloud and the new world of IT already in an earlier post, Predictions for the future. Today, I’m seeing signs the world is in fact starting to change. Sites like Instagram started small and grew big in no time. Were the founders IT wonders? No. And you don’t have to be. Not so long ago, it would have taken you a lot of time and resources to get your idea up and running on the Internet. Especially if it required multiple datacenters and scalability. You would have to deploy a bunch of servers and make sure you had an agile IT environment in place in order to get things running and keep things flexible, a key requirement for many startups but also for large organizations.
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Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network
As you know, Windows Azure is a very rich platform. Next to compute and storage, it offers a series of building blocks that simplify your life as a cloud developer. One of these building blocks is the content delivery network (CDN), which can be used for offloading content to a globally distributed network of servers, ensuring faster throughput to your end users. I’ve been asked to write an article on this matter, which I did, and which is live at ACloudyPlace.com since today. As a small teaser, here’s the first section of it:
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Protecting Windows Azure Web and Worker roles from malware
Most IT administrators will install some sort of virus scanner on your precious servers. Since the cloud, from a technical perspective, is just a server, why not follow that security best practice on Windows Azure too? It has gone by almost unnoticed, but last week Microsoft released the Microsoft Endpoint Protection for Windows Azure Customer Technology Preview. For the sake of bandwidth, I’ll be referring to it as EP. EP offers real-time protection, scheduled scanning, malware remediation (a fancy word for quarantining), active protection and automatic signature updates. Sounds a lot like Microsoft Endpoint Protection or Windows Security Essentials? That’s no coincidence: EP is a Windows Azurified version of it.
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Pro NuGet is finally there!
Short version: Install-Package ProNuget or http://amzn.to/pronuget It’s been a while since I wrote my first book. After I’ve been telling that writing a book is horrendous (try writing a chapter per week after your office hours…) and that I would never write on again, my partner-in-crime Xavier Decoster and I had the same idea at the same time: what about a book on NuGet? So here it is: Pro NuGet is fresh off the presses (or on Kindle). Special thanks go out to Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack for writing our foreword. Also big kudos to all who’ve helped us out now and then and did some small reviews. Yes Rob, Paul, David, Phil, Hadi: that’s you guys.
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I’m an ASP Insider
Cool! I’ve just learned that I’m invited to join the ASPInsiders. I’m really excited and honored to be part of this group of great ASP.NET experts. Very much looking forward to learning the secret handshake and being able to provide feedback that helps the ASP.NET team forward. If don’t know who the ASP Insiders are, here’s their elevator pitch: “The ASPInsiders is a select group of international professionals who have demonstrated expertise in ASP.NET technologies and who provide valuable, early feedback on related developing technologies and publications to their peers, the Microsoft ASP.NET team and others.” Some more info is available in the Who are the ASPInsiders? post by one of the insiders.
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TechDays Finland - Architectural Patterns for the Cloud - NuGet
As promised, here are the slide decks for the two sessions delivered at TechDays Finland last week. The promise of all cloud vendors out there is they can run your applications without changes. While that claim is true, it’s better to optimize existing software or design specifically for the cloud when moving or building an application. Architectural optimization will speed up your application, make it more scalable and even will make it cheaper to run on Windows Azure. This session will take you along some common patterns that are easy to implement and will make your cloud more sunny.
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Introducing MyGet package source proxy (beta)
My blog already has quite the number of blog posts around MyGet, our NuGet-as-a-Service solution which my colleague Xavier and I are running. There are a lot of reasons to host your own personal NuGet feed (such as protecting your intellectual property or only adding approved packages to the feed, but there’s many more as you can <plug>read in our book</plug>). We’ve added support for another scenario: MyGet now supports proxying remote feeds.
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Slides for TechDays Belgium 2012: SignalR
It was the last session on the last day of TechDays 2012 so I was expecting almost nobody to show up. Still, a packed room came to have a look at how to make the web realtime using SignalR. Thanks for joining and for being very cooperative during the demos! As promised, here are the slides. You can also find the demo code here: SignalR. Code, not toothpaste - TechDays Belgium 2012.zip (2.74 mb) A recording on Channel9 is available as well. PS: The book on NuGet (Pro NuGet) which I mentioned can be (pre)ordered on Amazon.
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Slides for UGIALT.NET - SignalR
Except for having a bad, bad experience using EasyJet on the way towards Milan, UGIALT.NET was a blast! Here's the slide deck and sample code for my session on SignalR.