Posts
All the articles I've posted.
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Joined The Lounge network
Last week, I received my invitation to the Lounge network, an exclusive advertising network for “trusted and respected publishers focused on Microsoft technologies”. First of all, it’s cool to see that at least someone considers me as trusted and respected. Next, it’s probably a better advertising solution than the Amazon ads I had earlier. The Lounge will always display ads related to .NET technology, whereas Amazon had its days of displaying lamps and home furniture enhancements. Let’s see how this works out.
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ASP.NET MVC MvcSiteMapProvider 1.0 released
Back in March, I blogged about an experimental MvcSiteMap provider I was building. Today, I am proud to announce that it is stable enough to call it version 1.0! Download MvcSiteMapProvider 1.0 over at CodePlex. Ever since the source code release I did back in March, a lot of new features have been added, such as HtmlHelper extension methods, attributes, dynamic parameters, … I’ll leave most of them up to you to discover, but there are some I want to quickly highlight.
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SQL Azure Manager
A few days ago, the SQL Server Team announced the availability of three major CTP’s and several new upcoming projects in the SQL related family tree: SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server StreamInsight and SQL Azure. Now that last one is interesting: Microsoft will offer a 1GB or 10GB database server “in the cloud” for a good price.
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Book review: Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0
It sure looks like August 2009 is the month in which I found multiple books on my doormat for review. Last week I did ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Development, this time I’ll be reviewing a competitor to my own book on ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly: Simone Chiaretta and Keyvan Nayyeri’s “Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0”. Let’s start with the “official book overview”, which I usually copy-paste from Amazon. This book will learn you:
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ASP.NET MVC Chained Controller Factory
My last post on the REST for ASP.NET MVC SDK received an interesting comment… Basically, the spirit of the comment was: “There are tons of controller factories out there, but you can only use one at a time!”. This is true. One can have an IControllerFactory for MEF, for Castle Windsor, a custom one that creates a controller based on the current weather, … Most of the time, these IControllerFactory implementations do not glue together… Unless you chain them!
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REST for ASP.NET MVC SDK
Earlier this week, Phil Haack did a post on the newly released REST for ASP.NET MVC SDK. I had the feeling though that this post did not really get the attention it deserved. I do not have the idea my blog gets more visitors than Phil’s, but I’ll try to give the SDK some more attention by blogging an example. But first things first… “REST for ASP .NET MVC is a set of capabilities that enable developers building a website using ASP .NET MVC to easily expose a Web API for the functionality of the site. “ Ok then. Now you know. It will get more clear after reading the next topic.
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Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Development
From time to time, the people at Packt Publishing send me a free book, fresh of the presses, and ask nicely if I want to read it and write a review on my blog. Last week, I received their fresh ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Development book, written by Curt Christianson and Jeff Cochran, both Microsoft MVP (ASP.NET and IIS). According to the website, the book aims at learning people how to build a CMS. Now, I know from writing my ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly book that these texts are written mostly by marketing people.
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Signed Access Signatures and PHP SDK for Windows Azure
The latest Windows Azure storage release featured a new concept: “Shared Access Signatures”. The idea of those is that you can create signatures for specific resources in blob storage and that you can provide more granular access than the default “all-or-nothing” approach that is taken by Azure blob storage. Steve Marx posted a sample on this, demonstrating how you can provide read access to a blob for a specified amount of minutes, after which the access is revoked.
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Accessing ServiceConfiguration in FastCGI (PHP) web role
While working on a sample PHP application hosted on Windows Azure, I found that it is nearly impossible to retrieve information from the Windows Azure ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file. Also, it is impossible to write log messages to the Windows Azure Web Role. Well, both are not 100% impossible: you can imagine dirty hacks where you let a ASP.NET page do something from PHP and stuff like that. But how about a clean solution? How about… A PHP extension module?
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ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1 released!
Today, Phil Haack did a blog post on the release of ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1! Get it while it’s fresh :-) An updated roadmap is also available on CodePlex. Guess now is about time to start revising my ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly book…