Posts
All the articles I've posted.
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Book review: PHP 5 E-commerce Development
Once again, Packt Publishing has asked me to do a book review on one of their latest books, "PHP 5 E-commerce Development” by Michael Peacock. The book promises the following: All of this is true, but… Not all is negative of course! The writing style is good and provides an easy read. Next to that, all concepts and pitfalls that go with building an online commerce site are well explained. Still, my advise on this book would not be “buy it”.
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Taking Care of a Cloud Environment (slides)
It looks like I’m only doing sessions lately :-) Here’s another slide deck for a presentation I did on the Architect Forum last week in Belgium. Abstract: “No, this session is not about greener IT. Learn about using the RoleEnvironment and diagnostics provided by Windows Azure. Communication between roles, logging and automatic upscaling of your application are just some of the possibilities of what you can do if you know about how the Windows Azure environment works.” Thanks for attending!
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Linuxwochen Austria
As part of my global domination plans, I this week visited Vienna, Austria for a session at Linuxwochen around PHP on Windows. Abstract: “Ever wanted to get started with PHP development on Windows? This session covers the basics of running PHP on the Windows platform and will help getting your development environment ready.” Thanks for being in this session! I know it is a controversial one on a Linux event :-)
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Slides of our VISUG session
As promised, here are the slides of the VISUG session me and Kris van der Mast did yesterday. Abstract: “Don't tell us you're jealous of those Silverlight fanboys! We'll show you that applications with bling can be developed using ASP.NET MVC and jQuery. We're talking MVC, template helpers, AJAX, JSON, transitions, live bindings, ...”
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TechDays 2010 Portugal slides and demo code
First of all: thank you for attending the sessions Kevin Dockx and I gave at TechDays 2010 Portugal! A wonder we made it there with all the ash clouds and volcanic interference based in Iceland. Abstract: “While working together with Microsoft on the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, we found that we needed an popular example application hosted on Microsoft’s Windows Azure. Wordpress was an obvious choice, but not an obvious task. Learn more about Windows Azure, the PHP SDK that we developed, SQL Azure and about the problems we faced porting an existing PHP application to Windows Azure.” I can not disclose demo code at this time, sorry. Here’s a list of good resources to get you started though:
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Using Windows Azure Drive in PHP (or Ruby)
At the JumpIn Camp in Zürich this week, we are trying to get some of the more popular PHP applications running on Windows Azure. As you may know, Windows Azure has different storage options like blobs, tables, queues and drives. There’s the Windows Azure SDK for PHP for most of this, except for drives. Which is normal: drives are at the operating system level and have nothing to do with the REST calls that are used for the other storage types. By the way: I did a post on using Windows Azure Drive (or “XDrive”) a while ago if you want more info.
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Running PHP on Windows Azure
Yesterday I did some talks on PHP and Windows Azure at JumpIn Camp in Zürich together with Josh Holmes. Here are the slide decks and samples we used. Josh talked on what Windows Azure is, what components are available and how you can get started with PHP and Windows Azure. I did not do the entire deck, but showed some slides and concepts. This is mainly the same content as Josh’s session with some additions. This deck talks about the different storage concepts and how to use them in PHP. As a demo, I had ImageCloud, a web application similar to Flickr. Here’s the sample code: ImageCloud.rar (5.00 mb)
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Put your existing application in the cloud!
As promised during my talk, here's the slide deck for "Put your existing application in the cloud!". Abstract: "Leverage the highly scalable Windows Azure platform and deploy your existing ASP.NET application to a new home in the clouds. This demo filled session will guide you in how to make successful use of Windows Azure’s hosting and storage platform as well as SQL Azure, the relational database in the cloud, by moving an existing ASP.NET application to a higher level." And here's the live recording: Thanks for joining TechDays 2010 and my session!
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Using FTP to access Windows Azure Blob Storage
A while ago, I did a blog post on creating an external facing Azure Worker Role endpoint, listening for incoming TCP connections. After doing that post, I had the idea of building a Windows Azure FTP server that served as a bridge to blob storage. Lack of time, other things to do, you name it: I did not work on that idea. Until now, that is.
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MEF will not get easier, it’s cool as ICE
Over the past few weeks, several people asked me to show them how to use MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework), some of them seemed to have some difficulties with the concept of MEF. I tried explaining that it will not get easier than it is currently, hence the title of this blog post. MEF is based on 3 keywords: export, import, compose. Since these 3 words all start with a letter that can be combined to a word, and MEF is cool, here’s a hint on how to remember it: MEF is cool as ICE! Imagine the following: You want to construct a shed somewhere in your back yard. There’s tools to accomplish that, such as a hammer and a saw. There’s also material, such as nails and wooden boards. Let’s go for this! Here’s a piece of code to build the shed: [code:c#]