Posts
All the articles I've posted.
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Vote to help me speak at the MIX 2010 conference!
Everybody knows the Microsoft MIX event, right? The one in Las Vegas? The one with all the fancy web-related stuff? Rings a bell? Ok, great. In the beginning of December 2009, Microsoft did an open call for speakers, which I answered with some session proposals. Who doesn’t want to go to Vegas, right? The open call proposals have been processed (150+ sessions submitted, wow!) and a voting has started. Yes, you hear me coming: please go ahead and vote for a session I submitted. Voting ends January 15th, 2010. Since I could not decide which color of the voting banner matched best with my blog’s theme, I decided to put them all three online: Thanks in advance! PS: There's also Elijah Manor, Justin Etheredge, K. Scott Allen, and many others who submitted good looking sessions.
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Byebye 2009, welcome 2010!
A year just ended, a new has begun. Congratulations! Happy newyear 2010! And welcome in the next decennium. It’s time for a 2009 wrap-up post. And perhaps, even the time for some things I want to do in 2010. First things first: the top 5 blog posts of 2009. 1. More ASP.NET MVC Best Practices – A blog post gathering best practices from different sources and adds some more of my own. 2. Code based ASP.NET MVC GridView (2008: 4th) – This post gives a shot at a gridview for the ASP.NET MVC framework, built using expressions. 3. Code performance analysis in Visual Studio 2008 (2008: 2nd) – Visual Studio developer, did you know you have a great performance analysis (profiling) tool at your fingertips?
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Hoping they will learn… Usability!
How about ending the year 2009 with a blog post on something annoying I see on the Internet, as well as some others? I’m talking about automatic localization… Please, go ahead and read some tweets by @KvdM and @patrickv. And then, there’s my own annoyance on Windows Mobile Marketplace. The base for al this frustrated year-end whining has to do with the fact that there are assumptions being made about the location of a user, rather than about a user itself…
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Cloud computing and the Windows Azure Services Platform (KU Leuven)
It was a fun session yesterday at KU Leuven university! I did a session on cloud computing and Windows Azure there for the IEEE Student Branch Leuven. Abstract: "This session covers the basics of the Windows Azure Services Platform and drills into some architectural challenges. Learn what components the Windows Azure Services Platform is built of and how they can be leveraged in building a scalable and reliable application." If you want more info about Windows Azure and how to develop, architect or benefit from the platform as a whole, register freely at the Azure User Group Belgium. Thank you for attending!
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Microsoft Web Development Summit 2009
Being in the US for 2 times in a month (PDC09 and Web Development Summit) is fun, tiring and rewarding. The WDS09 was an invite-only event organized by Microsoft, focusing on interaction between Microsoft and the PHP community. I must say: the event has been helpful and interesting for both parties! This was actually my first time at the WDS which has been around for 5 years already. The Interop team invited me there, and I want to thank them for doing that: it was a great trip, a great event and I got the chance to meet lots of new people.
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PHP Managed Extensibility Framework – PHPMEF
While flying sitting in the airplane to the Microsoft Web Developer Summit in Seattle, I was watching some PDC09 sessions on my laptop. During the MEF session, an idea popped up: there is no MEF for PHP! 3500 kilometers after that moment, PHP got its own MEF… MEF is a .NET library, targeting extensibility of projects. It allows you to declaratively extend your application instead of requiring you to do a lot of plumbing. All this is done with three concepts in mind: export, import and compose. (Glenn, I stole the previous sentence from your blog). “PHPMEF” uses the same concepts in order to provide this extensibility features.
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Supporting multiple submit buttons on an ASP.NET MVC view
A while ago, I was asked for advice on how to support multiple submit buttons in an ASP.NET MVC application, preferably without using any JavaScript. The idea was that a form could contain more than one submit button issuing a form post to a different controller action. The above situation can be solved in many ways, one a bit cleaner than the other. For example, one could post the form back to one action method and determine which method should be called from that action method. Good solution, however: not standardized within a project and just not that maintainable… A better solution in this case was to create an ActionNameSelectorAttribute.
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Book review: Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development
My book shelf is starting to look a lot like the warehouse of Packt Publishing: I’ve received yet another book from them. Different from all previous reviews I did: this one is a PHP book, titled “Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development” by Keith Pope. A chapter overview: Let’s also state the obvious: Zend Framework evolves much faster than publishers. The framework is now at 1.9.6, while the book covers 1.8.0. Do not let this stop you from reading this book! Let me explain why… These 2 points actually summarize the whole book. Great read, great content and a must-read for everyone who is not completely sure about his application design skills. Congratulations, Keith!
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MSDN - Converting an existing ASP.NET application to Windows Azure
Back from PDC 2009 with a lot of information on Windows Azure, I did an MSDN Live Meeting on ASP.NET and Windows Azure today. Here's the slide deck and demo code. Abstract: "Put your stuff in the cloud! Windows Azure allows you to take advantage of cloud computing infranstructure for hosting, computing, and storage of your applications. In this demo filled session we take an existing ASP.Net Application and move it to be hosted in Windows Azure, while taking advantage of Windows Azure storage." Example code can be downloaded here: MSDN - Converting an existing ASP.NET application to Windows Azure.zip (2.01 mb) If you want more info about Windows Azure and how to develop, architect or benefit from the platform as a whole, register freely at the Azure User Group Belgium.
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Microsoft PDC09 day 2 keynote highlights
Day 2 keynote at Microsoft PDC 2009 was quite exciting. To sum things up: Silverlight 4 went beta, IE9 features were previewed, and we got an external hard disk, nicely fitted in a tablet-pc format case. How thoughtful! Here’s some of the novelties: Silverlight 4 Beta