Posts
All the articles I've posted.
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A first look at Windows Azure AppFabric Applications
After the Windows Azure AppFabric team announced the availability of Windows Azure AppFabric Applications (preview), I signed up for early access immediately and got in. After installing the tools and creating a namespace through the portal, I decided to give it a try to see what it’s all about. Note that Neil Mackenzie also has an extensive post on “WAAFapps” which I recommend you to read as well. Before answering that question, let’s have a brief look at what Windows Azure is today. According to Microsoft, Windows Azure is a “PaaS” (Platform-as-a-Service) offering. What that means is that Windows Azure offers a series of platform components like compute, storage, caching, authentication, a service bus, a database, a CDN, … to your applications.
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Officially a cloudhead now! (or: re-awarded MVP)
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 2011 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Windows Azure technical communities during the past year. The Microsoft MVP Award provides us the unique opportunity to celebrate and honor your significant contributions and say "Thank you for your technical leadership." Toby Richards General Manager Community & Online Support
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Delegate feed privileges to other users on MyGet
One of the first features we had envisioned for MyGet and which seemed increasingly popular was the ability to provide other users a means of managing packages on another user’s feed. As of today, we’re proud to announce the following new features: Now when is Microsoft going to buy us out :-) MyGet now allows you to make another MyGet user “co-admin” or “contributor” to a feed. This eases management of a private feed as that work can be spread across multiple people. If combined with the “private feeds” option, it’s also possible to give some users read access to the feed while unauthenticated users can not access the feed created.
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Enabling conditional Basic HTTP authentication on a WCF OData service
Yes, a long title, but also something I was not able to find too easily using Google. Here’s the situation: for MyGet, we are implementing basic authentication to the OData feed serving available NuGet packages. If you recall my post Using dynamic WCF service routes, you may have deducted that MyGet uses that technique to have one WCF OData service serving the feeds of all our users. It’s just convenient! Unless you want basic HTTP authentication for some feeds and not for others… After doing some research, I thought the easiest way to resolve this was to use WCF intercepting. Convenient, but how would you go about this? And moreover: how to make it extensible so we can use this for other WCF OData (or WebAPi) services in the future?
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Community Day 2011 - Fun with ASP.NET MVC, MEF and NuGet
To start the blog post: AWESOME! That’s what I have to say about the latest edition of Community Day 2011. I had the privilege of doing a session on ASP.NET MVC 3, MEF and NuGet, and as promised to the audience: here are the slides. For those who want to see the session, the recording can be found on Channel 9 from a previous event. “Fun with ASP.NET MVC3, MEF and NuGet” Community Day 2011, Mechelen, Belgium, 23/06/2011 Abstract: “So you have a team of developers… And a nice architecture to build on… How about making that architecture easy for everyone and getting developers up to speed quickly? Learn all about integrating the managed extensibility framework (MEF) and ASP.NET MVC with some NuGet sauce for creating loosely coupled, easy to use architectures that anyone can grasp.”
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Advanced scenarios with Windows Azure Queues
For DeveloperFusion, I wrote an article on Windows Azure queues. Interested in working with queues and want to use some advanced techniques? Head over to the article: Last week, in Brian Prince’s article, Using the Queuing Service in Windows Azure, you saw how to create, add messages into, retrieve and consume those messages from Windows Azure Queues. While being a simple, easy-to-use mechanism, a lot of scenarios are possible using this near-FIFO queuing mechanism. In this article we are going to focus on three scenarios which show how queues can be an important and extremely scalable component in any application architecture: The techniques used in every scenario can be re-used in many applications and often be combined into an approach that is both scalable and reliable.
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MyGet now supports pushing from the command line
One of the work items we had opened for MyGet was the ability to push packages to a private feed from the command line. Only a few hours after our initial launch, David Fowler provided us with example code on how to implement NuGet command line pushes on the server side. An evening of coding later, I quickly hacked this into MyGet, which means that we now support pushing packages from the command line!
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Slides for NDC2011 - Oslo
It was great speaking at NDC2011! As promised during the sessions I gave, here are the slide decks: Going for noodles now. Cheers!
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Creating your own private NuGet feed: MyGet
Ever since NuGet came out, I’ve been thinking about leveraging it in a corporate environment. I've seen two NuGet server implementations appear on the Internet: the official NuGet gallery server and Phil Haack’s NuGet.Server package. As these both are good, there’s one thing wrong with them: you can't be lazy! You have to do some stuff you don’t always want to do, namely: configure and deploy. After discussing some ideas with my colleague Xavier Decoster, we decided it’s time to turn our heads into the cloud: we’re providing you NuGet-as-a-Service (NaaS)! Say hello to MyGet.
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Scaffolding and packaging a Windows Azure project in PHP
With the fresh release of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0, it’s time to have a look at the future. One of the features we’re playing with is creating a full-fledged replacement for the current Windows Azure Command-Line tools available. These tools sometimes are a life saver and sometimes a big PITA due to baked-in defaults and lack of customization options. And to overcome that last one, here’s what we’re thinking of: scaffolders. Basically what we’ll be doing is splitting the packaging process into two steps: To get a feeling about all this, I strongly suggest you to download the current preview version of this new concept and play along. By the way: feedback is very welcome! Just comment on this post and I’ll get in touch.