Posts
All the articles I've posted.
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Lightweight PHP application deployment to Windows Azure
Those of you who are deploying PHP applications to Windows Azure, are probably using the Windows Azure tooling for Eclipse or the fantastic command-line tools available. I will give you a third option that allows for a 100% customized setup and is much more lightweight than the above options. Of course, if you want to have the out-of-the box functionality of those tools, stick with them. Note: while this post is targeted at PHP developers, it also shows you how to build your own .cspkg from scratch for any other language out there. That includes you, .NET and Ruby! Oh, my syntax highlighter is broken so you won't see any fancy colours down this post :-)
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Windows Azure and scaling: how? (PHP)
One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fact that there is great opportunity in scaling, even for small applications. In this blog post series, I will talk about the following: In order to keep things DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself), I’ll just link you to the previous post (Windows Azure and scaling: how? (.NET)) for this one. For PHP however, you’ll be needing a .pem certificate. Again, for the lazy, here’s mine (management.pfx (4.05 kb), management.cer (1.18 kb) and management.pem (5.11 kb)). If you want to create one yourself, check this site where you can convert and generate certificates.
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Windows Azure and scaling: how? (.NET)
One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fact that there is great opportunity in scaling, even for small applications. In this blog post series, I will talk about the following: In order to be able to programmatically (and thus possibly automated) scale your Windows Azure service, one prerequisite exists: a management certificate should be created and uploaded to Windows Azure through the management portal at http://windows.azure.com. Creating a certificate is easy: follow the instructions listed on MSDN. It’s as easy as opening a Visual Studio command prompt and issuing the following command:
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Windows Azure CDN updates
The Windows Azure team has just put out the new Windows Azure SDK 1.4 for download. Next to that, I noticed some interesting new capabilities for the CDN (Content Delivery Network): That first one looks very interesting: before today, if you wanted to use the CDN feature, you’d have to upload all static content that should be served by the CDN to your bob storage account. Today, you can just use any hosted service as your CDN “source data” provider. This means you can deploy your application on Windows Azure and have its static content (or cachable dynamic content) cached in the CDN and delivered from edge locations all over the world.
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Put your cloud on a diet (or: Windows Azure and scaling: why?)
One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fact that there is great opportunity in scaling, even for small applications. In this blog post series, I will talk about the following: Both for small and large project, scaling your application’s capacity to meet the actual demand can be valuable. Imagine a local web application that is being used mostly during office hours, with peak demand from 6 PM to 8 PM. It consists of 4 web role instances running all day, which is enough to cope with peaks. Also, the number can be increased over time to meet actual demand of the web application.
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Authenticate Orchard users with AppFabric Access Control Service
From the initial release of Orchard, the new .NET CMS, I have been wondering how difficult (or easy) it would be to integrate external (“federated”) authentication like Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service with it. After a few attempts, I managed to wrap-up a module for Orchard which does that: Authentication.Federated. After installing, configuring and enabling this module, Orchard’s logon page is replaced with any SAML 2.0 STS that you configure. To give you a quick idea of what this looks like, here are a few screenshots: As you can see from the sequence above, Authentication.Federated does the following: Just as a reference, I’ll show you how to configure the module.
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Thank you for getting me in Vegas!
I wish to thank everyone who has been voring for getting me in Vegas, speaking at MIX11. Without having expectations, I was really really surprised (and happy!) my session got selected. Thanks a bunch! Oh and thanks, RealDolmen, for supporting me in doing things like this!
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MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 released
Just a quick note to tell that MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 has been released and is available on CodePlex and NuGet. This version is targeted at ASP.NET MVC 3. If you are still using ASP.NET MVC 2, no worries: version 2.3.1 contains the exact same functionality but is targeted at ASP.NET MVC 2. The changelog: Enjoy!
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ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framewok on NuGet
If you search on my blog, there’s a bunch of posts where I talk about ASP.NET MVC and MEF. And what’s cool: these posts are the ones that are actually being read quite often. I’m not sure about which bloggers actually update their posts like if it was software, but I don’t. Old posts are outdated, that’s the convention when coming to my blog. However I recently received a on of questions if I could do something with ASP.NET MVC 3 and MEF. I did, and I took things seriously.
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Introducing the PHP on Azure Contest
It’s not every day that I get to be in the jury for a contest. It’s not every day that I deliver a training about PHP on Azure. Since this is about a contest where I’m doing both, I thought this is definitely worth telling you: The PHP on Azure Contest is a coding competition run by the PHP Benelux User Group supported by Microsoft. Windows Azure is Microsoft’s Cloud platform with tools and support for PHP. Participate to win a ticket, airfare and hotel to visit MIX2012 in Las Vegas, a Windows Phone 7 or other great prizes!