Posts
All the articles I've posted.
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Introducing RealDolmenBlogs.com
Here’s something I would like to share with you. A few months ago, our company (RealDolmen) started a new website, RealDolmenBlogs.com. This site syndicates content from employee blogs, people with lots of experience in their range of topics. These guys have lots of knowledge to share, but sometimes their blog does not have a lot of attention from, well, you. Since we would really love to share employee knowledge, RealDolmenBlogs.com was born. The following topics are covered: Make sure to subscribe to the syndicated RSS feed and have quality content delivered to your RSS reader. Since I do not like to do blog posts on topic that do not have a technical touch, considered that the first few lines of text of this post are pure marketing in a sense, here’s the technical bit.
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Running PHP in the Cloud slides and sample code
Just got back from London where I did a fun talk on PHP and Windows Azure yesterday evening. It was the first time I did a presentation after three beers, but I think it went allright. As promised, here's the slide deck and sample code (ImageCloud.rar (5.00 mb)). Abstract: "This session covers the basics of Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform. Learn how you can develop and deploy a PHP application in Windows Azure, using the tools and libraries Microsoft provides. Creating a photo upload application, the different aspects of the Windows Azure platform are leveraged for creating a performant and scalable PHP application."
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Sharpy - an ASP.NET MVC view engine based on Smarty
Are you also one of those ASP.NET MVC developers who prefer a different view engine than the default Webforms view engine available? You tried Spark, NHaml, …? If you are familiar with the PHP world as well, chances are you know Smarty, a great engine for creating views that can easily be read and understood by both developers and designers. And here’s the good news: Sharpy provides the same syntax for ASP.NET MVC! If you want more details on Sharpy, visit Jaco Pretorius’ blog: Here’s a simple example: [code:c#] {master file='~/Views/Shared/Master.sharpy' title='Hello World sample'} <h1>Blog entries</h1>
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Jump in! camp - Call for participants
I just got the following invitation from Microsoft, and would like to encourage you to participate as well if you are interested in bot PHP and the Microsoft worlds. Jump In! and be a part of it! Open source programming and Microsoft: two incompatible worlds? Microsoft is partnering with renowned actors of the open-source community to organise the Jump In! Developers' Camp in an effort to combat this misperception. Twenty-five knowledge-hungry open source application developers from all over Europe will be invited to spend four unforgettable days of dialogue, networking and workshops at the beautiful Panorama Resort & Spa Feusisberg in Switzerland.
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Using Windows Azure Drive (aka X-Drive)
With today’s release of the Windows Azure Tools and SDK version 1.1, also the Windows Azure Drive feature has been released. Announced at last year’s PDC as X-Drive, which has nothing to do with a well-known German car manufacturer, this new feature enables a Windows Azure application to use existing NTFS APIs to access a durable drive. This allows the Windows Azure application to mount a page blob as a drive letter, such as X:, and enables easily migration of existing NTFS applications to the cloud. This blog post will describe the necessary steps to create and/or mount a virtual hard disk on a Windows Azure role instance.
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Just Another Wordpress Weblog, But More Cloudy
Slides of my talk at the PHPBenelux conference last weekend are online. Bit of a pity my live demo went wrong due to my www.azure.com trial account going into read-only mode while doing the demo. 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." Thanks for joining the conference and my session! And thanks to the PHPBenelux crew for organizing their first conference ever, it rocked!
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Translating routes (ASP.NET MVC and Webforms)
For one of the first blog posts of the new year, I thought about doing something cool. And being someone working with ASP.NET MVC, I thought about a cool thing related to that: let’s do something with routes! Since System.Web.Routing is not limited to ASP.NET MVC, this post will also play nice with ASP.NET Webforms. But what’s the cool thing? How about… translating route values?
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PHPMEF 0.1.0 released!
A while ago, I did a conceptual blog post on PHP Managed Extensibility Framework – PHPMEF. Today, I’m proud to announce the first public release of PHPMEF! After PHPExcel, PHPLinq, PHPPowerPoint and the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, PHPMEF is the 5th open-source project I started on interoperability (or conceptual interoperability) between the Microsoft world and the PHP world. Noble price for peace upcoming :-) PHPMEF is a PHP port of the .NET Managed Extensibility Framework, allowing easy composition and extensibility in an application using the Inversion of Control principle and 2 easy keywords: @export and @import.
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Creating an external facing Azure Worker Role endpoint
When Windows Azure was first released, only Web Roles were able to have an externally facing endpoint. Since PDC 2009, Worker Roles can now also have an external facing endpoint, allowing for a custom application server to be hosted in a Worker Role. Another option would be to run your own WCF service and have it hosted in a Worker Role. Features like load balancing, multiple instances of the Worker are all available. Let’s see how you can create a simple TCP service that can display the current date and time. Here’s what I want to see when I connect to my Azure Worker Role using telnet (“telnet efwr.cloudapp.net 1234”): Let’s go ahead and build this thing. Example code can be downloaded here: EchoCloud.zip (9.92 kb)
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Ordering fields in ASP.NET MVC 2 templated helpers
Ever worked with the templated helpers provided by ASP.NET MVC 2? Templated helpers provide a way to automatically build UI based on a data model that is marked with attributes defined in the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace. For example, a property in the model can be decorated with the attribute [DisplayFormat(DataFormatString = "{0:c}")], and the templated helpers will always render this field formatted as currency. If you have worked with templated helpers, you must agree: they can be useful! There’s one thing which is impossible in the current version: ordering fields. Take the following class and the rendered form using templated helpers: [code:c#]