Posts
All the articles I've posted.
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Viva, Las Vegas!
I have asked it last year, and I’ll ask it again. One of my session proposals made it to the “short”list for MIX11. One thing left though: votes are the only currency to get my session proposal in Vegas. Here’s the session 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 and ASP.NET MVC for creating loosely coupled, easy to use architectures that anyone can grasp. If you think this session deserves a place in Vegas, please cast your vote right here. And while you are at it, feel free to vote for both of my direct colleagues Kevin Dockx and Sandrino Di Mattia as well.
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Writing an Orchard widget: LatestTwitter
Last week, Microsoft released Orchard, a new modular CMS system built on ASP.NET MVC and a lot of other, open source libraries available. I will not dive into the CMS itself, but after fiddling around with it I found a lot of things missing: there are only 40 modules and widgets available at the moment and the only way to have a more rich ecosystem of modules is: contributing! And that’s what I did. Feel the need to add a list of recent tweets by a certain user to your Orchard website? Try my LatestTwitter widget. Here’s a screenshot of the widget in action: And here’s what the admin side looks like: It supports: In this blog post, I’ll give you some pointers on how to create your own widget for Orchard. Download the code if you want to follow step by step: LatestTwitter.zip (1.56 mb)
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ASP.NET MVC and jQuery Mobile
With the release of Windows Phone 7 last year, I’m really interested in mobile applications. Why? Well, developing for Windows Phone 7 did not require me to learn new things. I can use my current skill set and build cool apps for that platform. But what about the other platforms? If you look at all platforms from a web developer perspective, there’s one library that also allows you to use your existing skill set: jQuery Mobile. Know HTML? Know jQuery? Know *any* web development language like PHP, RoR or ASP.NET (MVC)? Go ahead and build great looking mobile web apps! I’ll give you a very short tutorial, just enough to sparkle some interest. After that, it’s up to you.
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Tools for the lazy: Templify and NuGet
In this blog post, I will cover two interesting tools that, when combined, can bring great value and speed at the beginning of any new software project that has to meet standards that are to be re-used for every project. The tools? Templify and NuGet. You know the drill. Starting off with a new project usually consists of boring, repetitive tasks, often enforced by (good!) practices defined by the company you work for (or by yourself for that company). To give you an example of a project I’ve recently done: Maybe you are planning to use jQuery UI? Oh right and what was that class you needed to work with MEF inside ASP.NET MVC? Let’s add that one as well:
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Byebye 2010, welcome 2011!
Happy New Year 2011! I wish you all the best in your career and personal life. And I know it’s a classic one: I wish you a good health! Some family members have had some serious issues on that part and really, health is the most imprtant thing you need. All the rest depends on that. If you’re healthy, you will do something, that something will earn you money, and money buys you things. An Indian taxi driver in Redmond, Seattle, WA told me this exact lesson this year. I was a bit fuzzy at that time after a long flight from Belgium, Europe, but he is right. Sandeep, happy new year to you to although you may probably not read my blog. In this kind of posts, just like in 2008 and 2009, I’ll start with looking at the top blog posts.
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The quickest way to a VPN: Windows Azure Connect
First of all: Merry Christmas in advance! But to be honest, I already have my Christmas present… I’ll give you a little story first as it’s winter, dark outside and stories are better when it’s winter and you are reading this post n front of your fireplace. Last week, I received the beta invite for Windows Azure Connect, a simple and easy-to-manage mechanism to setup IP-based network connectivity between on-premises and Windows Azure resources. Being targeted at interconnecting Windows Azure instances to your local network, it also contains a feature that allows interconnecting endpoints. Interesting!
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Windows Azure Remote Desktop Access
The latest relase of the WIndows Azure platform, portal and tools (check here) includes support for one of the features announced at PDC last month: remote desktop access to your role instances. This feature is pretty easy to use and currently allows you to deploy a preconfigured VM with IIS where you can play with the OS. No real application needed! Here’s how:
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Writing for the Windows Azure for PHP portal
I actually just noticed it has been a while since I did a blog post. I also know that writing about this is not really a good idea in the blogosphere. Unless… it’s for a good reason! The good reason for not being that active on my blog lately is the fact that I’m producing content for Microsoft’s Interoperability team. Have you ever wanted to start working with Windows Azure and PHP? No idea where to start? Meet the official portal: Developing Applications for Azure with PHP. I’ve currently posted some tutorials and scenarios out there, but there’s more to come. Here’s a list of what’s currently available:
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MvcSiteMapProvider 2.2.0 released
I’m proud to announce that MvcSiteMapProvider 2.2.0 has just been uploaded to CodePlex. It should also be available through NuPack in the coming hours. This release has taken a while, but that’s because I’ve been making some important changes... MvcSiteMapProvider is, as the name implies, an ASP.NET MVC SiteMapProvider implementation for the ASP.NET MVC framework. Targeted at ASP.NET MVC 2, it provides sitemap XML functionality and interoperability with the classic ASP.NET sitemap controls, like the SiteMapPath control for rendering breadcrumbs and the Menu control. In this post, I’ll give you a short update on what has changed as well as some examples on how to use newly introduced functionality.
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Scale-out to the cloud, scale back to your rack
That is a bad blog post title, really! If Steve and Ryan have this post in the Cloud Cover show news I bet they will make fun of the title. Anyway… Imagine you have an application running in your own datacenter. Everything works smoothly, except for some capacity spikes now and then. Someone has asked you for doing something about it with low budget. Not enough budget for new hardware, and frankly new hardware would be ridiculous to just ensure capacity for a few hours each month. A possible solution would be: migrating the application to the cloud during capacity spikes. Not all the time though: the hardware is in house and you may be a server-hugger that wants to see blinking LAN and HDD lights most of the time. I have to admit: blinking lights are cool! But I digress.