Posts by Tags

Building a scheduled task in ASP.NET Core/Standard 2.0

In this post, we’ll look at writing a simple system for scheduling tasks in ASP.NET Core 2.0. That’s quite a big claim, so I want to add a disclaimer: this s...

Replaying IIS request logs using Apache JMeter

How would you validate a new API is compatible with an old API? While upgrading frameworks in a web application we’re building, that was exactly the question...

Domain Routing and resolving current tenant with ASP.NET MVC 6 / ASP.NET 5

So you’re building a multi-tenant application. And just like many multi-tenant applications out there, the application will use a single (sub)domain per tena...

Building future .NET projects is quite pleasant

You may remember my ranty post from a couple of months back. If not, read about how building .NET projects is a world of pain and here’s how we should solve ...

Automatically strong name signing NuGet packages

Some developers prefer to strong name sign their assemblies. Signing them also means that the dependencies that are consumed must be signed. Not all third-pa...

Speeding up ASP.NET vNext package restore

TL;DR: If you have multiple NuGet feeds configured on your machine, it may be worth to do some tweaking in the NuGet.config file shipping with your project. ...

Source Control considered harmful

TL;DR: Using source control is a really bad idea. Or is it? Skip to Conclusion for the meat of this post.One of the first things I do with a new project in V...

A new year’s present: introducing Glimpse plugins for Windows Azure

Have you tried Glimpse before? It shows you server-side information like execution times, server configuration, request data and such in your browser. At the...

Visual Studio Online for Windows Azure Web Sites

Today’s official Visual Studio 2013 launch provides some interesting novelties, especially for Windows Azure Web Sites. There is now the choice of choo...

Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)

With the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) released as a preview, I thought it was a good time to write up some details about how to work with it....

Just released: MvcSiteMapProvider 4.0

After a beta version about a month ago, we are proud to release MvcSiteMapProvider 4.0 stable! (get it from NuGet, it’s fresh!) It took 6 months to complete ...

Windows Azure Traffic Manager Explained

With yesterday’s announcement on Windows Azure Traffic Manager surfacing in the management portal (as a preview), I thought it was a good moment to rec...

And there it is - MvcSiteMapProvider v4 (beta)

It has been a while since a new major update has been done to the MvcSiteMapProvider project, but today is the day! MvcSiteMapProvider is a tool that provide...

Create a list of favorite ReSharper plugins

With the latest version of the ReSharper 8 EAP, JetBrains shipped an extension manager for plugins, annotations and settings. Where it previously was a hassl...

Using Amazon Login (and LinkedIn and …) with Windows Azure Access Control

One of the services provided by the Windows Azure cloud computing platform is the Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS). It is a service that provides f...

Throttling ASP.NET Web API calls

Many API’s out there, such as GitHub’s API, have a concept called “rate limiting” or “throttling” in place. Rate limiting...

SymbolSource support for NuGet Package Source Discovery

A couple of weeks, I told you about NuGet Package Source Discovery. In short, it allows you to add some meta information to your website and use your website...

NuGet Package Source Discovery

It’s already been 2 years since NuGet was introduced. This.NET package manager features the concept of feeds, or “package sources”, on whic...

Remote profiling Windows Azure Cloud Services with dotTrace

Here’s another cross-post from our JetBrains .NET blog. It’s focused around dotTrace but there are a lot of tips and tricks around Windows Azure ...

Custom media types for ASP.NET Web API versioning

There is a raging discussion on the interwebs on whether to version API’s by using their URL or by using a custom media type. Some argue that doing it ...

Running unit tests when deploying to Windows Azure Web Sites

When deploying an application to Windows Azure Web Sites, a number of deployment steps are executed. For .NET projects, msbuild is triggered. For node.js app...

Storing user uploads in Windows Azure blob storage

On one of the mailing lists I follow, an interesting question came up: “We want to write a VSTO plugin for Outlook which copies attachments to blob sto...

Protecting your ASP.NET Web API using OAuth2 and the Windows Azure Access Control Service

An article I wrote a while ago has been posted on DeveloperFusion: The world in which we live evolves at a vast speed. Today, many applications on the Inte...

Configuring IIS methods for ASP.NET Web API on Windows Azure Websites and elsewhere

That’s a pretty long title, I agree. When working on my implementation of RFC2324, also known as the HyperText Coffee Pot Control Protocol, I’ve ...

How I push GoogleAnalyticsTracker to NuGet

If you check my blog post Tracking API usage with Google Analytics, you’ll see that a small open-source component evolved from MyGet. This component, GoogleA...

From API key to user with ASP.NET Web API

ASP.NET Web API is a great tool to build an API with. Or as my buddy Kristof Rennen (and the French) always say: “it makes you ‘api”. One o...

Hands-on Windows Azure Services for Windows

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced their Windows Azure Services for Windows Server. If you’ve ever heard about the Windows Azure Appliance (whi...

Tweaking Windows Azure Web Sites

A while ago, I was at a customer who wanted to run his own WebDAV server (using www.sabredav.org) on Windows Azure Web Sites. After some testing, it seemed t...

Fourth year as an MVP, second year for Windows Azure

Woohoo! I just received the great mail I expect yearly on the first of July: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you wit...

Setting up a webfarm using Windows Azure Virtual Machines

With the release of Microsoft’s Windows Azure Virtual Machines, a bunch of new scenarios became available on their cloud platform. If you plan to host multip...

Use NuGet Package Restore to avoid pushing assemblies to Windows Azure Websites

Windows Azure Websites allows you to publish a web site in ASP.NET, PHP, Node, … to Windows Azure by simply pushing your source code to a TFS or Git r...

GitHub for Windows Azure Websites

With the new release of Windows Azure and Windows Azure Websites, a lot of new scenarios with Windows Azure just became possible. One I like a lot, especiall...

Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network

As you know, Windows Azure is a very rich platform. Next to compute and storage, it offers a series of building blocks that simplify your life as a cloud dev...

Pro NuGet is finally there!

Short version: Install-Package ProNuget or http://amzn.to/pronuget It’s been a while since I wrote my first book. After I’ve been telling that wr...

I’m an ASP Insider

Cool! I’ve just learned that I’m invited to join the ASPInsiders. I’m really excited and honored to be part of this group of great ASP.NET experts. Very much...

TechDays Finland - Architectural Patterns for the Cloud - NuGet

As promised, here are the slide decks for the two sessions delivered at TechDays Finland last week. Architectural Patterns for the Cloud The promise of all c...

Slides for TechDays Belgium 2012: SignalR

It was the last session on the last day of TechDays 2012 so I was expecting almost nobody to show up. Still, a packed room came to have a look at how to make...

Tracking API usage with Google Analytics

So you have an API. Congratulations! You should have one. But how do you track who uses it, what client software they use and so on? You may be logging API c...

Using SignalR to broadcast a slide deck

Last week, I’ve discussed Techniques for real-time client-server communication on the web (SignalR to the rescue). We’ve seen that when building ...

Techniques for real-time client-server communication on the web (SignalR to the rescue)

When building web applications, you often face the fact that HTTP, the foundation of the web, is a request/response protocol. A client issues a request, a se...

Publishing symbol packages for a MyGet feed

Ever since NuGet 1.2, there is a great way for NuGet package authors to let their users debug into the package’s binaries. With almost no additional ef...

Rewriting WCF OData Services base URL with load balancing & reverse proxy

When scaling out an application to multiple servers, often a form of load balancing or reverse proxying is used to provide external users access to a web ser...

Setting up a NuGet repository in seconds: MyGet public feeds

A few months ago, my colleague Xavier Decoster and I introduced MyGet as a tool where you can create your own, private NuGet feeds. A couple of weeks later ...

NuGet push… to Windows Azure

When looking at how people like to deploy their applications to a cloud environment, a large faction seems to prefer being able to use their source control s...

ASP.NET MVC dynamic view sections

Earlier today, a colleague of mine asked for advice on how he could create a “dynamic” view. To elaborate, he wanted to create a change settings ...

Why MyGet uses Windows Azure

Recently one of the Tweeps following me started fooling around and hit one of my sweet spots: Windows Azure. Basically, he mocked me for using Windows Azure ...

A client side Glimpse to your PHP application

A few months ago, the .NET world was surprised with a magnificent tool called “Glimpse”. Today I’m pleased to release a first draft of a PH...

Windows Azure Accelerator for Web Roles

One of the questions I often get around Windows Azure is: “Is Windows Azure interesting for me?”. It’s a tough one, because most of the time when someone ask...

Delegate feed privileges to other users on MyGet

One of the first features we had envisioned for MyGet and which seemed increasingly popular was the ability to provide other users a means of managing packag...

Enabling conditional Basic HTTP authentication on a WCF OData service

Yes, a long title, but also something I was not able to find too easily using Google. Here’s the situation: for MyGet, we are implementing basic authenticati...

Community Day 2011 - Fun with ASP.NET MVC, MEF and NuGet

To start the blog post: AWESOME! That’s what I have to say about the latest edition of Community Day 2011. I had the privilege of doing a session on AS...

MyGet now supports pushing from the command line

One of the work items we had opened for MyGet was the ability to push packages to a private feed from the command line. Only a few hours after our initial la...

Creating your own private NuGet feed: MyGet

Ever since NuGet came out, I’ve been thinking about leveraging it in a corporate environment. I've seen two NuGet server implementations appear on...

Just released: MvcSiteMapProvider 3.1.0 RC

It looks like I’m really cr… ehm… releasing way too much over the past few days, but yes, here’s another one: I just posted MvcSiteMapProvider 3.1.0 RC both ...

Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1 KB2478063 Service Pack 5 Feature Set 3.1 R2 November Edition RTW

As you can see, a new .NET Framework version just came out. Read about it at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/endpoint/archive/2011/04/18/microsoft-net-framework-4-pl...

A Glimpse at Windows Identity Foundation claims

For a current project, I’m using Glimpse to inspect what’s going on behind the ASP.NET covers. I really hope that you have heard about the greatest ASP.NET m...

Using dynamic WCF service routes

For a demo I am working on, I’m creating an OData feed. This OData feed is in essence a WCF service which is activated using System.ServiceModel.Activation.S...

Wordpress auto sign-on with IIS7 and a plugin

For our RealDolmen blog platform, where we use Wordpress as the engine running multiple external and internal blogs (yes, that’s an internal SaaS we have the...

Geographically distributing Windows Azure applications using Traffic Manager

With the downtime of Amazon EC2 this week, it seems a lot of websites “in the cloud” are down at the moment. Most comments I read on Twitter (and...

Slides for my talk at MIX11: Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3, MEF and NuGet

As promised, here are the slides and demo code for my talk "Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3, MEF and NuGet" I presented at MIX in Las Vegas. Abstract: "So you have a ...

Official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app released

I’m proud to announce that we (RealDolmen) have released the official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app! The official Belgium TechDays 2011 gives you...

Windows Azure CDN updates

The Windows Azure team has just put out the new Windows Azure SDK 1.4 for download. Next to that, I noticed some interesting new capabilities for the CDN (Co...

Authenticate Orchard users with AppFabric Access Control Service

From the initial release of Orchard, the new .NET CMS, I have been wondering how difficult (or easy) it would be to integrate external (“federated”) authenti...

Thank you for getting me in Vegas!

I wish to thank everyone who has been voring for getting me in Vegas, speaking at MIX11. Without having expectations, I was really really surprised (and happ...

MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 released

Just a quick note to tell that MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 has been released and is available on CodePlex and NuGet. This version is targeted at ASP.NET MVC 3. ...

ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framewok on NuGet

If you search on my blog, there’s a bunch of posts where I talk about ASP.NET MVC and MEF. And what’s cool: these posts are the ones that are act...

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: ...

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 int...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

Using MvcSiteMapProvider throuh NuPack

Probably you have seen the buzz around NuPack, a package manager for .NET with thight integration in Visual Studio 2010. NuPack is a free, open source develo...

Remix 2010 slides and sample code

As promised during my session on Remix 10 yesterday in Belgium, here's the slide deck and sample code. Building for the cloud: integrating an application on ...

BlogEngine.NET comment spam filtering

It’s been a month or three since I was utterly fed up with comment spam on my blog. Sure, I did turn on comment moderation so you, as a visitor, would not no...

MvcSiteMapProvider 2.1.0 released!

The release for MvcSiteMapProvider 2.1.0 has just been posted on CodePlex. MvcSiteMapProvider is, as the name implies, an ASP.NET MVC SiteMapProvider implem...

ASP.NET MVC 3 and MEF sitting in a tree…

As I stated in a previous blog post: ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1 has been released! I talked about some of the new features and promised to do a blog post in the...

ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1 is out! Quick review…

I just noticed a very interesting download: ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1. Yes, you are reading this correctly, the first bits for v3.0 are there! Let’s have...

Renewed MVP ASP.NET for 2010!

Just got the best e-mail a Microsoft community member can receive in his mailbox: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present yo...

ASP.NET MVC - MvcSiteMapProvider 2.0 is out!

I’m very proud to announce the release of the ASP.NET MVC MvcSiteMapProvider 2.0! I’m also proud that the name of this product now exceeds the av...

Running on Windows Azure - ChronoRace - Autoscaling

At RealDolmen, we had the luck of doing the first (known) project on Windows Azure in Belgium. Together with Microsoft, we had the opportunity to make the C...

Slides of our VISUG session

As promised, here are the slides of the VISUG session me and Kris van der Mast did yesterday. Being a pimp without Silverlight! Abstract: “Don't tell us you'...

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, Window...

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...

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, ...

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 th...

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 mar...

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...

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 Micr...

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 id...

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 ...

Microsoft PDC09 keynote highlights

Finally found some time to write a short blog post on the announcements this morning at PDC 2009. Ray Ozzie started the keynote this morning, focusing on Mic...

Localize ASP.NET MVC 2 DataAnnotations validation messages

Living in a country where there are there are three languages being used, almost every application you work on requires some form of localization. In an earl...

Upcoming sessions on Azure, PHP and ASP.NET

It’s going to be a filled end of 2009… There’s Microsoft PDC which I will be attending and will probably cause me some sleepless nights (b...

Recording of my session at Remix 2009 - ASP.NET MVC

On September 29, I did a session on ASP.NET MVC at Remix 2009 Belgium. All session recordings are now online, check the Remix09 site. Slides and code fo...

Let me Bing that for you

Have you ever been bugged with stupid questions? Do you get tired of people asking stuff that is only one search engine query away? Chances are you answered ...

Leveraging ASP.NET MVC 2 futures “ViewState”

Let’s start this blog post with a confession: yes, I abused a feature in the ASP.NET MVC 2 futures assembly to fire up discussion. In my previous blog ...

Exploring the ASP.NET MVC 2 futures assemby

The latest preview of ASP.NET MVC 2, preview 2, has been released on CodePlex last week. All features of the preview 1 version are still in, as well as some...

Remix 2009 session - Slides and code

As promised during the session at Remix 2009, here’s my example code and slide deck. Abstract: "Building a Twitter clone in 60 minutes, featuring what's...

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...

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...

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 contr...

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 atte...

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 bl...

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 CodePl...

ReMIX Belgium session on ASP.NET MVC

Just learned I’ll be doing a session on ASP.NET MVC at ReMIX Belgium. ReMix brings the best of MIX09 in Las Vegas to Belgium: it bring us internationa...

Authenticating users with RPXNow (in ASP.NET MVC)

Don’t you get sick of having to register at website X, at website Y, at website Z, …? It is really not fun to maintain all these accounts, chan...

I’m an MVP ASP.NET!

Yesterday evening, I received the following e-mail: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP ...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 5: the front-end

“After having found a god-like guardian for his application, Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker found out that his application still had no functio...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 4: Authentication and membership

“Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker just returned from his quest to a barn in the clouds, when he discovered that he forgot to lock the door to his...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 3: Store data in the cloud

“After setting up his workplace, knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker thought of something else: if a farmer wants to keep a lot of hay, he needs a ...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 2: Creating an Azure project

“Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker was about to start working on his TwitterMatic application, named after the great god of social networking, Tw...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 1: Introduction

“Once upon a time, Microsoft started a Windows Azure developing contest named new CloudApp();. While it first was only available for US candidates, th...

Application-wide action filters in ASP.NET MVC

Ever had a team of developers using your ASP.NET MVC framework? Chances are you have implemented some action filters (i.e. for logging) which should be appli...

Revised: ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

A while ago, I did a blog post on combining ASP.NET MVC and MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework), making it possible to “plug” controllers and v...

ASP.NET MVC TDD using Visual Studio 2010

Phil Haack announced yesterday that the tooling support for ASP.NET MVC is available for Visual Studio 2010. Troy Goode already blogged about the designer sn...

A view from the cloud (or: locate your ASP.NET MVC views on Windows Azure Blob Storage)

Hosting and deploying ASP.NET MVC applications on Windows Azure works like a charm. However, if you have been reading my blog for a while, you might have see...

ASP.NET MVC Domain Routing

Looking for an ASP.NET MVC 6 version? Check this post. Ever since the release of ASP.NET MVC and its routing engine (System.Web.Routing), Microsoft has been...

More ASP.NET MVC Best Practices

In this post, I’ll share some of the best practices and guidelines which I have come across while developing ASP.NET MVC web applications. I will not c...

Book review: Learning Ext JS

For a project at one of our customers, we’re building a rich web application using the Coolite web controls in ASP.NET MVC. Coolite is a great product...

MSDN session on ASP.NET MVC

As promised to all people attending my online session on ASP.NET MVC this afternoon, here is the slide deck I’ve used. MSDN - ASP.NET MVC</embed>...

ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

Microsoft’s Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a .NET library (released on CodePlex) that enables greater re-use of application components. You c...

Using the ASP.NET MVC Futures AsyncController

Last week, I blogged about all stuff that is included in the ASP.NET MVC Futures assembly, which is an assembly available on CodePlex and contains possible ...

Speaking at DevDays 2009, The Hague (and more)

Some Great news (at least: I think this is great :-)): Kevin Dockx and I will be giving a session on PHP and Silverlight at the Netherlands DevDays09. This e...

Back to the future! Exploring ASP.NET MVC Futures

For those of you who did not know yet: next to the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 version and its source code, there’s also an interesting assembly available if you ...

New CodePlex project: MvcSiteMap – ASP.NET MVC sitemap provider

If you have been using the ASP.NET MVC framework, you possibly have been searching for something like the classic ASP.NET sitemap. After you've played with i...

Sample chapter from ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

Here’s a shameless, commercial blogpost… With yesterday’s 1.0 release of the ASP.NET MVC framework, I’m sure the following sample ...

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has been released!

To keep up with a good tradition (see here and here), I have some great news on ASP.NET MVC: we are at version 1.0! This means production ready, supported, ...

CRUD with ASP.NET MVC (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! CRUD with ASP.NET MVC (screencast) Abstr...

Creating an ASP.NET MVC application with Google Gears

Offline web applications… This term really sounds like 2 different things: offline, no network, and web application, online. Maarten, you speak in ri...

Announcing my book: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

It’s been quite a job, but there it is: Packt just announced my very first book on their site. It is titled “ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly”, co...

Form validation with ASP.NET MVC release candidate

Last week, the ASP.NET MVC framework release candidate was released (check ScottGu’s post). Apart from some great new tooling support, form validation...

Updated CarTrackr to ASP.NET MVC RC

As you may have noticed, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate has been released over the night. You can read all about it in ScottGu’s blog post, coveri...

Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking

Last week, I found another book from Packt in my letterbox. This time, the title is ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking, written by Andrew Siemer. On the back...

Checking username availability with jQuery (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! Checking username availability with jQuer...

Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 Application Architecture and Design

The people at Packt asked it again: “Do you want to review this book?” Sure I do! The book I’m reviewing this time is ASP.NET 3.5 Applica...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 5 - Deploying in the cloud

This post is part 5 (and the final part) of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 4 - Membership and authentication

This post is part 4 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 3 - Data storage

This post is part 3 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 2 - Cloud-enabling CarTrackr

This post is part 2 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is...

Track your car expenses in the cloud! CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 1 - Introduction

As you may see in the title, I will be starting a series on modifying my CarTrackr sample application to a cloud-based, Windows Azure application. At this p...

ASP.NET MVC XForms released on CodePlex

Just noticed there's a new project on CodePlex related to the ASP.NET MVC framework: MVC XForms. MVC XForms is a simple UI framework for ASP.NET MVC bas...

Using the ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! Using ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder Abstract: ...

Partial page updates with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery (and action filters)

When building an ASP.NET MVC application, chances are that you are using master pages. After working on the application for a while, it's time to spice ...

Creating a generic Linq to SQL ModelBinder for the ASP.NET MVC framework

You are right! This is indeed my third post on ASP.NET MVC ModelBinders. The first one focussed on creating a ModelBinder from scratch in an older preview r...

CarTrackr - Sample ASP.NET MVC application

Some people may have already noticed the link in my VISUG session blog post, but for those who didn't... I've released my sample application CarTra...

Introduction to ASP.NET MVC for VISUG - Presentation materials

Yesterday evening, I did a presentation on the ASP.NET MVC framework for VISUG (Visual Studio User Group Belgium). I really hope everyone got a good feel o...

Using the ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder attribute - Second part

Just after the ASP.NET MVC preview 5 was released, I made a quick attempt to using the ModelBinder attribute. In short, a ModelBinder allows you to use comp...

Forms interaction with ASP.NET MVC (screencast)

Abstract: "This screencast is a short demonstration on how you can handle form interactions using the ASP.NET MVC framework." Download sample c...

ASP.NET MVC preview 5’s AntiForgeryToken helper method and attribute

The new ASP.NET MVC preview 5 featured a number of new HtmlHelper methods. One of these methods is the HtmlHelper.AntiForgeryToken. When you place <%=Htm...

Using the ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder attribute

ASP.NET MVC action methods can be developed using regular method parameters. In earlier versions of the ASP.NET MVC framework, these parameters were all sim...

Form validation with ASP.NET MVC preview 5

In earlier ASP.NET MVC previews, form validation was something that should be implemented "by hand". Since the new ASP.NET MVC preview 5, form val...

Building an ASP.NET MVC sitemap provider with security trimming

Warning!A new version of the source code provided in this post is available here. Use this blog post as reference only.  Yes, it has been a while sin...

MSDN Chopsticks on ASP.NET MVC (screencasts)

A while ago, KatrienDG asked me to do some screencasts on the ASP.NET MVC framework for the MSDN Chopsticks page. I've been working on 2 screencasts: an...

ASP.NET MVC - Upcoming preview 4 release

ScottGu just posted that there's an upcoming preview 4 release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. What I immediately noticed, is that there are actually some...

Article on ASP.NET MVC in .NET magazine #21

Yesterday, I received the new Dutch edition of .NET magazine containing my article on the ASP.NET MVC framework. Since the article was written quite a whil...

Extending ASP.NET MVC OutputCache ActionFilterAttribute - Adding substitution

In my previous blog post on ASP.NET MVC OutputCache, not all aspects of "classic" ASP.NET output caching were covered. For instance, substitution ...

Creating an ASP.NET MVC OutputCache ActionFilterAttribute

In every web application, there are situations where you want to cache the HTML output of a specific page for a certain amount of time, because underlying da...

Code based ASP.NET MVC GridView

Earlier this week a colleague of mine asked me if there was such thing as a  DataGrid or GridView or something like that in the ASP.NET MVC framework. M...

ASP.NET MVC framework preview 3 released!

Don't know how I do it, but I think this blog post is yet again the first one out there mentioning a new release of the ASP.NET framework (preview 3)&nb...

Creating a custom ViewEngine for the ASP.NET MVC framework

Have you ever seen a presentation of ScottGu about the ASP.NET MVC framework? There is one particular slide that keeps coming back, stating that every step ...

ASP.NET MVC custom ActionResult (ImageResult)

The ASP.NET MVC framework introduces the concept of returning an ActionResult in Controllers since the "preview preview" release on CodePlex. The ...

ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit alternative authentication

Last week, I blogged about the ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit and some of its features. Since then, Troy Goode and I are developing at warp-speed to pro...

ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit

Yesterday, I read a cool blog post from Troy Goode about his new CodePlex project MvcMembership. I also noticed his call for help, so I decided to dedicate...

ASP.NET MVC Framework out on CodePlex

This morning, I was browsing the new projects page on CodePlex and noticed something nice! The ASP.NET MVC team already rumoured around making the ASP.NET M...

ASP.NET MVC - Testing issues Q and A

When playing around with the ASP.NET MVC framework and automated tests using Rhino Mocks, you will probably find yourself close to throwing your computer t...

March 18 ASP.NET MVC links

Too busy this week to write large blog posts myself... Luckily other people do write interesting things on ASP.NET MVC! ASP.NET MVC Route tester Test y...

Heroes happen here - Microsoft TechDays 2008 in Belgium

Just to inform you: together with a numer of colleagues from Dolmen, I'll be attending the Microsoft TechDays 2008 in Ghent, Belgium on 12 and 13 M...

Data Driven Testing in Visual Studio 2008 - Part 2

This is the second post in my series on Data Driven Testing in Visual Studio 2008. The first post focusses on Data Driven Testing in regular Unit Tests. Thi...

Data Driven Testing in Visual Studio 2008 - Part 1

Last week, I blogged about code performance analysis in visual studio 2008. since that topic provoked lots of comments (thank you Bart for associating "...

Books I recently read…

A while ago, I was contacted by the people of Packt Publishing asking me to review two of their latest books, ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials ...

ASP.NET Session State Partitioning using State Server Load Balancing

It seems like amount of posts on ASP.NET's Session State keeps growing. Here's the list: ASP.NET Session State Partitioning ASP.NET load balancing and ASP.N...

ASP.NET Session State Partitioning

After my previous blog post on ASP.NET Session State, someone asked me if I knew anything about ASP.NET Session State Partitioning. Since this is a little kn...

Preview Word files (docx) in HTML using ASP.NET, OpenXML and LINQ to XML

Since an image (or even an example) tells more than any text will ever do, here's what I've created in the past few evening hours: Live examples: Test...

ASP.NET MVC framework - Security

Some posts ago, I started playing with the ASP.NET MVC framework. In an example I'm creating, I'm trying to add Forms-based security. "Class...

ASP.NET DataPager not paging after first PostBack?

A few posts ago, I mentioned that I am currently giving a classroom training on ASP.NET. People attending are currently working on a project I gave them, an...

ASP.NET MVC Framework - Basic sample application

You might have noticed that I'm quite enhousiast about the new ASP.NET MVC framework. What are you talking about? Basically, this new ASP.NET MVC&nbs...

ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP preview released

Just over the weekend, Microsoft has released the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP. This download includes several additions to ASP.NET 3.5: ASP.NET AJAX Impr...

ASP.NET MVC framework preview to be released next week

Half the world has been focussing on the release of the new Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 last week. That is good, as .NET 3.5 offers lots of nice new fea...

ASP.NET load balancing and ASP.NET state server (aspnet_state)

At one of our clients, we used to have only one server for ASP.NET applications (including web services). Since this machine is actually business-critical a...

Advanced ASP.NET caching events

Currently, I'm giving an ASP.NET classroom training at our company, which actually is quite good for me: I needed to refresh all ASP.NET concepts, as th...

Enabling HTTP proxy for .NET webservice client

Have you ever written code that makes external (Soap) webservice calls? Tried that same code on your company network? Most of the time, this does not work v...

Remove unnecessary HTTP modules from the ASP.NET pipeline

Trying to speed up some things in a demo ASP.NET application for a customer, I found a really simple and effective way to remove some HTTP modules from the ...

TFS Team Build and ASP.NET websites

Here's one I'd really like to share with everyone trying to build ASP.NET websites using TFS Build. First of all, a little story about the project setup... A...

Enable sitemap security trimming in ASP.NET 2.0

Want to enable security trimming for your ASP.NET sitemap? Here's how... First of all, you need a new section in your web.config system.web element: ...

ASP.NET URL rewrites using .htaccess-like syntax

Having a PHP background, I've been using .htaccess mod_rewrite in Apache for ages. ASP.NET allows rewriting too, but using a different syntax than mod_r...

MCTS for .NET framework 2.0 Web applications

Just like my colleague Kristof did last friday, I passed the Microsoft.NET Framework 2.0 - Web-based Client Development (Exam 070-528) exam yesterday, resul...

SendMailControl for ASP.NET

Have you ever used the ASP.NET PasswordRecovery control, or the CreateUserWizard? Probably, you used the mail capabilities of these controls too, and set up...

ASP.NET 2.0 Event Validation

Event Validation is a new feature in ASP.NET 2.0 which provides an additional level of checks on postback actions. It verifies whether a postback from a con...

Scalable Apps with Asynchronous Programming in ASP.NET

A while ago, I posted about the DevDays, and some interesting sessions I took. One of these sessions was "Scalable Apps with Asynchronous Programming in ASP....

Remote debugging of Node.js apps on Azure App Service from WebStorm

At Microsoft Build 2018, a number of Azure App Service on Linux enhancements were announced. One that I was interested in was this one:

Retiring as a Microsoft MVP

I have decided to retire from the Microsoft MVP program. In the first week of April, an e-mail from Microsoft landed in my mailbox. I was given the choice to...

Running Kotlin in Azure Functions

A while back, the Azure folks announced support for Java on Azure Functions. My immediate thought was: “Do they mean Java or JVM? And if they mean JVM, will ...

Application Insights telemetry processors

Two weeks ago I had a wonderful experience speaking at a small conference in Finland. The talk was titled What is going on - Application diagnostics on Azure...

Disabling session affinity in Azure App Service Web Apps (Websites)

In one of our production systems, we’re using Azure Websites to host a back-end web API. It runs on several machines and benefits from the automatic load bal...

Working with a private npm registry in Azure Web Apps

Using Azure Web Apps, we can deploy and host Node applications quite easily. But what to do with packages the site depends on? Do we have to upload them manu...

Not enough space on the disk - Azure Cloud Services

I have been using Microsoft Azure Cloud Services since PDC 2008 when it was first announced. Ever since, I’ve been a huge fan of “cloud services”, the cattle...

What happened to Code Spaces could happen to you. On Amazon, Azure and any host out there.

Earlier this week, a sad thing happened to the version control hosting service Code Spaces. A malicious person gained access to their Amazon control panel an...

Microsoft Azure cloud plugin for TeamCity (dabbling in Java code)

NOTE: While the content is this blog post will still work, JetBrains now has a plugin that is the recommended way of working with TeamCity and build agents o...

Optimizing calls to Azure storage using Fiddler

Last week, Xavier and I were really happy for achieving a milestone. After having spent quite some evenings on bringing Visual Studio Online integration to M...

Windows Azure Storage magic with Shared Access Signatures

When building cloud applications on Windows Azure, it’s always a good thing to delegate as much work to specialized services as possible. File downloads woul...

Pro NuGet second edition is out

Pfew! Around February 2013, Xavier and I started planning work on an update of our book. Eight months later, we’re proud to present you with Pro NuGet ...

A new year’s present: introducing Glimpse plugins for Windows Azure

Have you tried Glimpse before? It shows you server-side information like execution times, server configuration, request data and such in your browser. At the...

Visual Studio Online for Windows Azure Web Sites

Today’s official Visual Studio 2013 launch provides some interesting novelties, especially for Windows Azure Web Sites. There is now the choice of choo...

Developing Windows Azure Mobile Services server-side

Word of warning: This is a partial cross-post from the JetBrains WebStorm blog. The post you are currently reading adds some more information around Windows ...

Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)

With the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) released as a preview, I thought it was a good time to write up some details about how to work with it....

An autoscaling build farm using TeamCity and Windows Azure

NOTE: While the content is this blog post will still work, JetBrains now has a plugin that is the recommended way of working with TeamCity and build agents o...

Windows Azure Traffic Manager Explained

With yesterday’s announcement on Windows Azure Traffic Manager surfacing in the management portal (as a preview), I thought it was a good moment to rec...

Autoscaling Windows Azure Cloud Services (and web sites)

At the Build conference, Microsoft today announced that Windows Azure Cloud Services now support autoscaling. And they do! From the Windows Azure Management ...

Using Amazon Login (and LinkedIn and …) with Windows Azure Access Control

One of the services provided by the Windows Azure cloud computing platform is the Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS). It is a service that provides f...

Running unit tests when deploying ASP.NET to Windows Azure Web Sites

One of the well-loved features of Windows Azure Web Sites is the fact that you can simply push our ASP.NET application’s source code to the platform us...

Remote profiling Windows Azure Cloud Services with dotTrace

Here’s another cross-post from our JetBrains .NET blog. It’s focused around dotTrace but there are a lot of tips and tricks around Windows Azure ...

Taking over the @msdnbelux Twitter account

Just a quick post to let you know I’ll be taking over the @msdnbelux Twitter account for the next two weeks. This is the official Twitter account for M...

Working with Windows Azure SQL Database in PhpStorm

Disclaimer: My job at JetBrains holds a lot of “exploration of tools”. From time to time I discover things I personally find really cool and blog about those...

Global Windows Azure Bootcamp - april 27th

On April 27th, 2013, you’ll have the ability to join a Windows Azure Bootcamp on a location close to you. We’ve started this with the idea of may...

Running unit tests when deploying to Windows Azure Web Sites

When deploying an application to Windows Azure Web Sites, a number of deployment steps are executed. For .NET projects, msbuild is triggered. For node.js app...

Hosting a YouTrack instance on Windows Azure

Note: this is a cross-post from the JetBrains YouTrack blog. Since it is centered around Windows Azure, I thought it is appropriate to post a copy on my own ...

Tales from the trenches: resizing a Windows Azure virtual disk the smooth way

We’ve all been there. Running a virtual machine on Windows Azure and all of a sudden you notice that a virtual disk is running full. Having no access t...

Working with Windows Azure command line tools from within Visual Studio

Right after my last post (Working with Windows Azure command line tools from PhpStorm), the obvious question came to mind… Can I do Windows Azure thin...

Working with Windows Azure from within PhpStorm

Working with Windows Azure and my new toy (PhpStorm), I wanted to have support for doing specific actions like creating a new web site or a new database in t...

Windows Azure Websites and PhpStorm

In my new role as Technical Evangelist at JetBrains, I’ve been experimenting with one of our products a lot: PhpStorm. I was kind of curious how this t...

Storing user uploads in Windows Azure blob storage

On one of the mailing lists I follow, an interesting question came up: “We want to write a VSTO plugin for Outlook which copies attachments to blob sto...

Protecting your ASP.NET Web API using OAuth2 and the Windows Azure Access Control Service

An article I wrote a while ago has been posted on DeveloperFusion: The world in which we live evolves at a vast speed. Today, many applications on the Inte...

Configuring IIS methods for ASP.NET Web API on Windows Azure Websites and elsewhere

That’s a pretty long title, I agree. When working on my implementation of RFC2324, also known as the HyperText Coffee Pot Control Protocol, I’ve ...

A phone call from the cloud: Windows Azure, SignalR & Twilio

Note: this blog post used to be an article for the Windows Azure Roadtrip website. Since that one no longer exists, I decided to post the articles on my blog...

Sending e-mail from Windows Azure

Note: this blog post used to be an article for the Windows Azure Roadtrip website. Since that one no longer exists, I decided to post the articles on my blo...

What PartitionKey and RowKey are for in Windows Azure Table Storage

For the past few months, I’ve been coaching a “Microsoft Student Partner” (who has a great blog on Kinect for Windows by the way!) on Windo...

ASP.NET Web API OAuth2 delegation with Windows Azure Access Control Service

If you are familiar with OAuth2’s protocol flow, you know there’s a lot of things you should implement if you want to protect your ASP.NET Web API using OAut...

Hands-on Windows Azure Services for Windows

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced their Windows Azure Services for Windows Server. If you’ve ever heard about the Windows Azure Appliance (whi...

Tweaking Windows Azure Web Sites

A while ago, I was at a customer who wanted to run his own WebDAV server (using www.sabredav.org) on Windows Azure Web Sites. After some testing, it seemed t...

Fourth year as an MVP, second year for Windows Azure

Woohoo! I just received the great mail I expect yearly on the first of July: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you wit...

Setting up a webfarm using Windows Azure Virtual Machines

With the release of Microsoft’s Windows Azure Virtual Machines, a bunch of new scenarios became available on their cloud platform. If you plan to host multip...

Use NuGet Package Restore to avoid pushing assemblies to Windows Azure Websites

Windows Azure Websites allows you to publish a web site in ASP.NET, PHP, Node, … to Windows Azure by simply pushing your source code to a TFS or Git r...

GitHub for Windows Azure Websites

With the new release of Windows Azure and Windows Azure Websites, a lot of new scenarios with Windows Azure just became possible. One I like a lot, especiall...

AZUG Windows Azure Saturday overview

As one of the board members of the Windows Azure User Group in Belgium, I wanted to write a post on an event we organized last weekend. We do more events (on...

Ready for a Windows Azure roadtrip?

A while ago, Michelangelo van Dam (a hardcore PHP guy), François Hertay (a hardcore Java guru) and myself (a .NET guy) were asked if we wanted to wri...

Social meet up on Twitter for MEET Windows Azure on June 7th

Here’s a perhaps rather redundant event for you but it should be kind of fun: MEET Windows Azure on Twitter (+ Beer). The idea is to list people who have a t...

The world is changing: the future of IT

I’ve had my say on cloud and the new world of IT already in an earlier post, Predictions for the future. Today, I’m seeing signs the world is in fact startin...

Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network

As you know, Windows Azure is a very rich platform. Next to compute and storage, it offers a series of building blocks that simplify your life as a cloud dev...

Protecting Windows Azure Web and Worker roles from malware

Most IT administrators will install some sort of virus scanner on your precious servers. Since the cloud, from a technical perspective, is just a server, why...

TechDays Finland - Architectural Patterns for the Cloud - NuGet

As promised, here are the slide decks for the two sessions delivered at TechDays Finland last week. Architectural Patterns for the Cloud The promise of all c...

Slides for TechDays Belgium 2012: SignalR

It was the last session on the last day of TechDays 2012 so I was expecting almost nobody to show up. Still, a packed room came to have a look at how to make...

How do you synchronize a million to-do lists?

Not this question, but a similar one, has been asked by one of our customers. An interesting question, isn’t it? Wait. It gets more interesting. I’ll sketch ...

Publishing symbol packages for a MyGet feed

Ever since NuGet 1.2, there is a great way for NuGet package authors to let their users debug into the package’s binaries. With almost no additional ef...

Running Memcached on Windows Azure for PHP

After three conferences in two weeks with a lot of “airport time”, which typically converts into “let’s code!” time, I think I ...

NuGet push… to Windows Azure

When looking at how people like to deploy their applications to a cloud environment, a large faction seems to prefer being able to use their source control s...

Why MyGet uses Windows Azure

Recently one of the Tweeps following me started fooling around and hit one of my sweet spots: Windows Azure. Basically, he mocked me for using Windows Azure ...

Book review: Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook

Over the past few months, I’ve been doing technical reviewing for a great Windows Azure book: the Windows Azure Development Cookbook published by Packt...

Version 4 of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP released

Only a few months after the Windows Azure SDK for PHP 3.0.0, Microsoft and RealDolmen are proud to present you the next version of the most complete SDK for ...

Windows Azure Accelerator for Web Roles

One of the questions I often get around Windows Azure is: “Is Windows Azure interesting for me?”. It’s a tough one, because most of the time when someone ask...

A hidden gem in the Windows Azure SDK for PHP: command line parsing

It’s always fun to dive into frameworks: often you’ll find little hidden gems that can be of great use in your own projects. A dive into the Windows Azure SD...

A first look at Windows Azure AppFabric Applications

After the Windows Azure AppFabric team announced the availability of Windows Azure AppFabric Applications (preview), I signed up for early access immediately...

Officially a cloudhead now! (or: re-awarded MVP)

Woohoo! I just received the great mail I expect yearly on the first of July: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present ...

Delegate feed privileges to other users on MyGet

One of the first features we had envisioned for MyGet and which seemed increasingly popular was the ability to provide other users a means of managing packag...

Advanced scenarios with Windows Azure Queues

For DeveloperFusion, I wrote an article on Windows Azure queues. Interested in working with queues and want to use some advanced techniques? Head over to the...

MyGet now supports pushing from the command line

One of the work items we had opened for MyGet was the ability to push packages to a private feed from the command line. Only a few hours after our initial la...

Creating your own private NuGet feed: MyGet

Ever since NuGet came out, I’ve been thinking about leveraging it in a corporate environment. I've seen two NuGet server implementations appear on...

Scaffolding and packaging a Windows Azure project in PHP

With the fresh release of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0, it’s time to have a look at the future. One of the features we’re playing with is c...

Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0 released

Microsoft and RealDolmen are very proud to announce the availability of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0 on CodePlex! (here's the official Microsoft post) ...

Geographically distributing Windows Azure applications using Traffic Manager

With the downtime of Amazon EC2 this week, it seems a lot of websites “in the cloud” are down at the moment. Most comments I read on Twitter (and...

Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0.0 BETA released

Microsoft and RealDolmen are very proud to announce the availability of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0.0 BETA on CodePlex. This releases is somethin...

Official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app released

I’m proud to announce that we (RealDolmen) have released the official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app! The official Belgium TechDays 2011 gives you...

Lightweight PHP application deployment to Windows Azure

Those of you who are deploying PHP applications to Windows Azure, are probably using the Windows Azure tooling for Eclipse or the fantastic command-line tool...

Windows Azure and scaling: how? (PHP)

One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fa...

Windows Azure and scaling: how? (.NET)

One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fa...

Windows Azure CDN updates

The Windows Azure team has just put out the new Windows Azure SDK 1.4 for download. Next to that, I noticed some interesting new capabilities for the CDN (Co...

Put your cloud on a diet (or: Windows Azure and scaling: why?)

One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fa...

Introducing the PHP on Azure Contest

It’s not every day that I get to be in the jury for a contest. It’s not every day that I deliver a training about PHP on Azure. Since this is abo...

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’...

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 d...

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. Unles...

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… Im...

Cost Architecting for Windows Azure

Just wanted to do a quick plug to an article I’ve written for TechNet Magazine: Windows Azure: Cost Architecting for Windows Azure. Designing application...

PHP on Windows and on Azure slide deck

As promised during my session on PHP Summer Camp in Lisbon, Portugal, here's the slide deck. PHP on Windows and on Azure PHP on Windows and on Azure</emb...

Remix 2010 slides and sample code

As promised during my session on Remix 10 yesterday in Belgium, here's the slide deck and sample code. Building for the cloud: integrating an application on ...

Windows Azure Diagnostics in PHP

When working with PHP on Windows Azure, chances are you may want to have a look at what’s going on: log files, crash dumps, performance counters, &hell...

Introducing Windows Azure Companion – Cloud for the masses?

At OSIDays in India, the Interoperability team at Microsoft has made an interesting series of announcements related to PHP and Windows Azure.  To summar...

Announcing the Windows Azure Online Conference

Steve Plank from Microsoft UK has just announced the UK Windows Azure Online Conference on his blog. This will be a whole day, online Windows Azure conferenc...

Hybrid Azure applications using OData

In the whole Windows Azure story, Microsoft has always been telling you could build hybrid applications: an on-premise application with a service on Azure or...

Simplified access control using Windows Azure AppFabric Labs

Earlier this week, Zane Adam announced the availability of the New AppFabric Access Control service in LABS. The highlights for this release (and I quote): ...

Manage your SQL Azure database from your browser

Yesterday, I noticed on Twitter that the SQL Azure - Project “Houston” CTP 1 has been released online. For those who do not know Houston, this is...

Running on Windows Azure - ChronoRace - Autoscaling

At RealDolmen, we had the luck of doing the first (known) project on Windows Azure in Belgium. Together with Microsoft, we had the opportunity to make the C...

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: “N...

Linuxwochen Austria

As part of my global domination plans, I this week visited Vienna, Austria for a session at Linuxwochen around PHP on Windows. PHP on Windows Abstract: &ldqu...

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 vo...

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, Window...

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. Sc...

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 pl...

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 ha...

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...

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, bu...

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&rs...

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 in...

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 ext...

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...

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. Abstra...

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 ...

Microsoft PDC09 keynote highlights

Finally found some time to write a short blog post on the announcements this morning at PDC 2009. Ray Ozzie started the keynote this morning, focusing on Mic...

Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse for PHP developers

Pfew! Finally I can spread the word on this! While working on the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, I had the opportunity to test-drive the development builds of th...

Upcoming sessions on Azure, PHP and ASP.NET

It’s going to be a filled end of 2009… There’s Microsoft PDC which I will be attending and will probably cause me some sleepless nights (b...

Simple API for Cloud Application Services

Zend, in co-operation with IBM, Microsoft, Rackspace, GoGrid and other cloud leaders, today have released their Simple API for Cloud Application Services pro...

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: ...

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...

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 Servic...

Query the cloud with PHP (PHPLinq and Windows Azure)

I’m pleased to announce PHPLinq currently supports basic querying of Windows Azure Table Storage. PHPLinq is a class library for PHP, based on the ide...

PHP SDK for Windows Azure - Milestone 2 release

I’m proud to announce our second milestone for the PHP SDK for Windows Azure project that Microsoft and RealDolmen started back in May. Next to our re...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 5: the front-end

“After having found a god-like guardian for his application, Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker found out that his application still had no functio...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 4: Authentication and membership

“Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker just returned from his quest to a barn in the clouds, when he discovered that he forgot to lock the door to his...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 3: Store data in the cloud

“After setting up his workplace, knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker thought of something else: if a farmer wants to keep a lot of hay, he needs a ...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 2: Creating an Azure project

“Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker was about to start working on his TwitterMatic application, named after the great god of social networking, Tw...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 1: Introduction

“Once upon a time, Microsoft started a Windows Azure developing contest named new CloudApp();. While it first was only available for US candidates, th...

Announcing: Azure User Group Belgium

After the summer, I'll be joining Kurt Claeys and Yves Goeleven and for the start of the Azure User Group Belgium (or AZUG.BE).  AZUG.BE is a Belgian us...

A view from the cloud (or: locate your ASP.NET MVC views on Windows Azure Blob Storage)

Hosting and deploying ASP.NET MVC applications on Windows Azure works like a charm. However, if you have been reading my blog for a while, you might have see...

ConnectedShow Podcast - PHP SDK for Windows Azure

The fifth episode of the ConnectedShow podcast is up. This podcast is all about cloud computing, Windows Azure, … Recently, they have asked me if I wanted to...

Announcing PHP SDK for Windows Azure

As part of Microsoft’s commitment to Interoperability, a new open source project has just been released on CodePlex: PHP SDK for Windows Azure, bridgi...

Accessing Windows Azure Blob Storage from PHP

Pfew! A week of Microsoft TechDays here in Belgium with lots of talks on new Microsoft stuff, Azure included. You may know I already experimented with Window...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 5 - Deploying in the cloud

This post is part 5 (and the final part) of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 4 - Membership and authentication

This post is part 4 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 3 - Data storage

This post is part 3 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 2 - Cloud-enabling CarTrackr

This post is part 2 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is...

Track your car expenses in the cloud! CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 1 - Introduction

As you may see in the title, I will be starting a series on modifying my CarTrackr sample application to a cloud-based, Windows Azure application. At this p...

A new year’s present: introducing Glimpse plugins for Windows Azure

Have you tried Glimpse before? It shows you server-side information like execution times, server configuration, request data and such in your browser. At the...

Working with Windows Azure SQL Database in PhpStorm

Disclaimer: My job at JetBrains holds a lot of “exploration of tools”. From time to time I discover things I personally find really cool and blog about those...

Global Windows Azure Bootcamp - april 27th

On April 27th, 2013, you’ll have the ability to join a Windows Azure Bootcamp on a location close to you. We’ve started this with the idea of may...

Working with Windows Azure command line tools from within Visual Studio

Right after my last post (Working with Windows Azure command line tools from PhpStorm), the obvious question came to mind… Can I do Windows Azure thin...

Working with Windows Azure from within PhpStorm

Working with Windows Azure and my new toy (PhpStorm), I wanted to have support for doing specific actions like creating a new web site or a new database in t...

Hands-on Windows Azure Services for Windows

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced their Windows Azure Services for Windows Server. If you’ve ever heard about the Windows Azure Appliance (whi...

Fourth year as an MVP, second year for Windows Azure

Woohoo! I just received the great mail I expect yearly on the first of July: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you wit...

The world is changing: the future of IT

I’ve had my say on cloud and the new world of IT already in an earlier post, Predictions for the future. Today, I’m seeing signs the world is in fact startin...

Book review: Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook

Over the past few months, I’ve been doing technical reviewing for a great Windows Azure book: the Windows Azure Development Cookbook published by Packt...

A first look at Windows Azure AppFabric Applications

After the Windows Azure AppFabric team announced the availability of Windows Azure AppFabric Applications (preview), I signed up for early access immediately...

Cost Architecting for Windows Azure

Just wanted to do a quick plug to an article I’ve written for TechNet Magazine: Windows Azure: Cost Architecting for Windows Azure. Designing application...

PHP on Windows and on Azure slide deck

As promised during my session on PHP Summer Camp in Lisbon, Portugal, here's the slide deck. PHP on Windows and on Azure PHP on Windows and on Azure</emb...

Introducing Windows Azure Companion – Cloud for the masses?

At OSIDays in India, the Interoperability team at Microsoft has made an interesting series of announcements related to PHP and Windows Azure.  To summar...

Announcing the Windows Azure Online Conference

Steve Plank from Microsoft UK has just announced the UK Windows Azure Online Conference on his blog. This will be a whole day, online Windows Azure conferenc...

Manage your SQL Azure database from your browser

Yesterday, I noticed on Twitter that the SQL Azure - Project “Houston” CTP 1 has been released online. For those who do not know Houston, this is...

Running on Windows Azure - ChronoRace - Autoscaling

At RealDolmen, we had the luck of doing the first (known) project on Windows Azure in Belgium. Together with Microsoft, we had the opportunity to make the C...

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: “N...

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 vo...

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. Sc...

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...

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, bu...

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...

Microsoft PDC09 keynote highlights

Finally found some time to write a short blog post on the announcements this morning at PDC 2009. Ray Ozzie started the keynote this morning, focusing on Mic...

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: ...

Book review: Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook

Over the past few months, I’ve been doing technical reviewing for a great Windows Azure book: the Windows Azure Development Cookbook published by Packt...

Book review: Refactoring with Visual Studio 2010

Yet again, Packt Publishing has sent me a book for review. For once, one without the typical orange/black cover but instead a classy white/black cover: Refac...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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 bl...

Book review: Learning Ext JS

For a project at one of our customers, we’re building a rich web application using the Coolite web controls in ASP.NET MVC. Coolite is a great product...

Announcing my book: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

It’s been quite a job, but there it is: Packt just announced my very first book on their site. It is titled “ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly”, co...

Book review: Software Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2008

Another book review, this time for Packt’s “Software Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2008”. The book introduces you to the main ty...

Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking

Last week, I found another book from Packt in my letterbox. This time, the title is ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking, written by Andrew Siemer. On the back...

Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 Application Architecture and Design

The people at Packt asked it again: “Do you want to review this book?” Sure I do! The book I’m reviewing this time is ASP.NET 3.5 Applica...

Books I recently read…

A while ago, I was contacted by the people of Packt Publishing asking me to review two of their latest books, ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials ...

Source Control considered harmful

TL;DR: Using source control is a really bad idea. Or is it? Skip to Conclusion for the meat of this post.One of the first things I do with a new project in V...

Pro NuGet second edition is out

Pfew! Around February 2013, Xavier and I started planning work on an update of our book. Eight months later, we’re proud to present you with Pro NuGet ...

Pro NuGet is finally there!

Short version: Install-Package ProNuget or http://amzn.to/pronuget It’s been a while since I wrote my first book. After I’ve been telling that wr...

Book review: Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook

Over the past few months, I’ve been doing technical reviewing for a great Windows Azure book: the Windows Azure Development Cookbook published by Packt...

Book review: Refactoring with Visual Studio 2010

Yet again, Packt Publishing has sent me a book for review. For once, one without the typical orange/black cover but instead a classy white/black cover: Refac...

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 ...

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...

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 bl...

Book review: Learning Ext JS

For a project at one of our customers, we’re building a rich web application using the Coolite web controls in ASP.NET MVC. Coolite is a great product...

Sample chapter from ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

Here’s a shameless, commercial blogpost… With yesterday’s 1.0 release of the ASP.NET MVC framework, I’m sure the following sample ...

Announcing my book: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

It’s been quite a job, but there it is: Packt just announced my very first book on their site. It is titled “ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly”, co...

Book review: Software Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2008

Another book review, this time for Packt’s “Software Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2008”. The book introduces you to the main ty...

Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking

Last week, I found another book from Packt in my letterbox. This time, the title is ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking, written by Andrew Siemer. On the back...

Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 Application Architecture and Design

The people at Packt asked it again: “Do you want to review this book?” Sure I do! The book I’m reviewing this time is ASP.NET 3.5 Applica...

Books I recently read…

A while ago, I was contacted by the people of Packt Publishing asking me to review two of their latest books, ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials ...

Using operator overloads for concatenating file system paths in CSharp

The past few days, I’ve been working on some cross-platform C# code. In this code, I needed to build a path to a file, by concatenating folder names. As you ...

Building a scheduled task in ASP.NET Core/Standard 2.0

In this post, we’ll look at writing a simple system for scheduling tasks in ASP.NET Core 2.0. That’s quite a big claim, so I want to add a disclaimer: this s...

Making string validation faster by not using a regular expression. A story.

A while back, we were performance profiling an application and noticed a big performance bottleneck while mapping objects using AutoMapper. Mapping is of cou...

Extending .NET CLI with custom tools - dotnet init initializes your NuGet package

A few weeks back, .NET Core 1.1 was released (and a boatload of related tools such as Visual Studio 2017. For .NET Core projects, a big breaking change was i...

Using dotPeek to figure out why IIS crashed

Here’s a story on how I once used dotPeek to provide debugger symbols and (decompiled) source code for a crashed application for which we had nothing but the...

Application Insights telemetry processors

Two weeks ago I had a wonderful experience speaking at a small conference in Finland. The talk was titled What is going on - Application diagnostics on Azure...

Exploring .NET managed heap with ClrMD

Since my posts on making code allocate less memory and memory allocation for strings were quite well received, I decided to add another post to the series: E...

Exploring memory allocation and strings

A while back, I wrote about making code allocate less memory (go read it now if you haven’t). In that post, we saw how the Garbage Collector works and how it...

Making .NET code less allocatey - Allocations and the Garbage Collector

The .NET Garbage Collector (GC) is quite cool. In combination with the runtime’s virtual memory, it helps providing our applications with virtually unlimited...

Building NuGet (.NET Core) using Atlassian Bitbucket Pipelines

A while back, I signed up for the beta of Bitbucket Pipelines, a new continuous integration service from Atlassian, built into Bitbucket. The build system pr...

Someone broke the Internet! Or why you may want to mirror your dependencies…

Twitter celebrated its 10th birthday this week, and those who have been on that social network long enough know that at least once a week there’s a massive o...

Disabling session affinity in Azure App Service Web Apps (Websites)

In one of our production systems, we’re using Azure Websites to host a back-end web API. It runs on several machines and benefits from the automatic load bal...

Not enough space on the disk - Azure Cloud Services

I have been using Microsoft Azure Cloud Services since PDC 2008 when it was first announced. Ever since, I’ve been a huge fan of “cloud services”, the cattle...

Replaying IIS request logs using Apache JMeter

How would you validate a new API is compatible with an old API? While upgrading frameworks in a web application we’re building, that was exactly the question...

Writing and distributing Roslyn analyzers with MyGet

Pretty sweet: MyGet just announced Vsix support has been enabled for all MyGet customers! I wanted to work on a fun example for this new feature and came up ...

Domain Routing and resolving current tenant with ASP.NET MVC 6 / ASP.NET 5

So you’re building a multi-tenant application. And just like many multi-tenant applications out there, the application will use a single (sub)domain per tena...

Building future .NET projects is quite pleasant

You may remember my ranty post from a couple of months back. If not, read about how building .NET projects is a world of pain and here’s how we should solve ...

Could not load file or assembly… NuGet Assembly Redirects

When working in larger projects, you will sometimes encounter errors similar to this one: “Could not load file or assembly 'Newtonsoft.Json, Version=4.5.0.0,...

Automatically strong name signing NuGet packages

Some developers prefer to strong name sign their assemblies. Signing them also means that the dependencies that are consumed must be signed. Not all third-pa...

Optimizing calls to Azure storage using Fiddler

Last week, Xavier and I were really happy for achieving a milestone. After having spent quite some evenings on bringing Visual Studio Online integration to M...

Speeding up ASP.NET vNext package restore

TL;DR: If you have multiple NuGet feeds configured on your machine, it may be worth to do some tweaking in the NuGet.config file shipping with your project. ...

Building .NET projects is a world of pain and here’s how we should solve it

During the past few weeks, I’ve been working on and off on setting up a build agent that can build as many open-source .NET projects as possible in an effort...

NuGet Configuration File inheritance is awesome

One way to remove friction from using NuGet in multiple projects is by making use of NuGet Configuration File inheritance, probably the awesomest unknown fea...

Source Control considered harmful

TL;DR: Using source control is a really bad idea. Or is it? Skip to Conclusion for the meat of this post.One of the first things I do with a new project in V...

Pro NuGet second edition is out

Pfew! Around February 2013, Xavier and I started planning work on an update of our book. Eight months later, we’re proud to present you with Pro NuGet ...

A new year’s present: introducing Glimpse plugins for Windows Azure

Have you tried Glimpse before? It shows you server-side information like execution times, server configuration, request data and such in your browser. At the...

Visual Studio Online for Windows Azure Web Sites

Today’s official Visual Studio 2013 launch provides some interesting novelties, especially for Windows Azure Web Sites. There is now the choice of choo...

Developing Windows Azure Mobile Services server-side

Word of warning: This is a partial cross-post from the JetBrains WebStorm blog. The post you are currently reading adds some more information around Windows ...

Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)

With the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) released as a preview, I thought it was a good time to write up some details about how to work with it....

Just released: MvcSiteMapProvider 4.0

After a beta version about a month ago, we are proud to release MvcSiteMapProvider 4.0 stable! (get it from NuGet, it’s fresh!) It took 6 months to complete ...

And there it is - MvcSiteMapProvider v4 (beta)

It has been a while since a new major update has been done to the MvcSiteMapProvider project, but today is the day! MvcSiteMapProvider is a tool that provide...

Create a list of favorite ReSharper plugins

With the latest version of the ReSharper 8 EAP, JetBrains shipped an extension manager for plugins, annotations and settings. Where it previously was a hassl...

Using Amazon Login (and LinkedIn and …) with Windows Azure Access Control

One of the services provided by the Windows Azure cloud computing platform is the Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS). It is a service that provides f...

Throttling ASP.NET Web API calls

Many API’s out there, such as GitHub’s API, have a concept called “rate limiting” or “throttling” in place. Rate limiting...

SymbolSource support for NuGet Package Source Discovery

A couple of weeks, I told you about NuGet Package Source Discovery. In short, it allows you to add some meta information to your website and use your website...

Running unit tests when deploying ASP.NET to Windows Azure Web Sites

One of the well-loved features of Windows Azure Web Sites is the fact that you can simply push our ASP.NET application’s source code to the platform us...

NuGet Package Source Discovery

It’s already been 2 years since NuGet was introduced. This.NET package manager features the concept of feeds, or “package sources”, on whic...

Remote profiling Windows Azure Cloud Services with dotTrace

Here’s another cross-post from our JetBrains .NET blog. It’s focused around dotTrace but there are a lot of tips and tricks around Windows Azure ...

Custom media types for ASP.NET Web API versioning

There is a raging discussion on the interwebs on whether to version API’s by using their URL or by using a custom media type. Some argue that doing it ...

Global Windows Azure Bootcamp - april 27th

On April 27th, 2013, you’ll have the ability to join a Windows Azure Bootcamp on a location close to you. We’ve started this with the idea of may...

Running unit tests when deploying to Windows Azure Web Sites

When deploying an application to Windows Azure Web Sites, a number of deployment steps are executed. For .NET projects, msbuild is triggered. For node.js app...

Tales from the trenches: resizing a Windows Azure virtual disk the smooth way

We’ve all been there. Running a virtual machine on Windows Azure and all of a sudden you notice that a virtual disk is running full. Having no access t...

Storing user uploads in Windows Azure blob storage

On one of the mailing lists I follow, an interesting question came up: “We want to write a VSTO plugin for Outlook which copies attachments to blob sto...

Protecting your ASP.NET Web API using OAuth2 and the Windows Azure Access Control Service

An article I wrote a while ago has been posted on DeveloperFusion: The world in which we live evolves at a vast speed. Today, many applications on the Inte...

Configuring IIS methods for ASP.NET Web API on Windows Azure Websites and elsewhere

That’s a pretty long title, I agree. When working on my implementation of RFC2324, also known as the HyperText Coffee Pot Control Protocol, I’ve ...

How I push GoogleAnalyticsTracker to NuGet

If you check my blog post Tracking API usage with Google Analytics, you’ll see that a small open-source component evolved from MyGet. This component, GoogleA...

A phone call from the cloud: Windows Azure, SignalR & Twilio

Note: this blog post used to be an article for the Windows Azure Roadtrip website. Since that one no longer exists, I decided to post the articles on my blog...

Sending e-mail from Windows Azure

Note: this blog post used to be an article for the Windows Azure Roadtrip website. Since that one no longer exists, I decided to post the articles on my blo...

From API key to user with ASP.NET Web API

ASP.NET Web API is a great tool to build an API with. Or as my buddy Kristof Rennen (and the French) always say: “it makes you ‘api”. One o...

What PartitionKey and RowKey are for in Windows Azure Table Storage

For the past few months, I’ve been coaching a “Microsoft Student Partner” (who has a great blog on Kinect for Windows by the way!) on Windo...

MyGet Build Services - Join the private beta!

Good news! Over the past 4 weeks we’ve been sending out tweets about our secret project MyGet project “wonka”. Today is the day Wonka shows...

ASP.NET Web API OAuth2 delegation with Windows Azure Access Control Service

If you are familiar with OAuth2’s protocol flow, you know there’s a lot of things you should implement if you want to protect your ASP.NET Web API using OAut...

Hands-on Windows Azure Services for Windows

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced their Windows Azure Services for Windows Server. If you’ve ever heard about the Windows Azure Appliance (whi...

Tweaking Windows Azure Web Sites

A while ago, I was at a customer who wanted to run his own WebDAV server (using www.sabredav.org) on Windows Azure Web Sites. After some testing, it seemed t...

Fourth year as an MVP, second year for Windows Azure

Woohoo! I just received the great mail I expect yearly on the first of July: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you wit...

Domain based routing with ASP.NET Web API

Imagine you are building an API which is “multi-tenant”: the domain name defines the tenant or customer name and should be passed as a route valu...

Setting up a webfarm using Windows Azure Virtual Machines

With the release of Microsoft’s Windows Azure Virtual Machines, a bunch of new scenarios became available on their cloud platform. If you plan to host multip...

Use NuGet Package Restore to avoid pushing assemblies to Windows Azure Websites

Windows Azure Websites allows you to publish a web site in ASP.NET, PHP, Node, … to Windows Azure by simply pushing your source code to a TFS or Git r...

GitHub for Windows Azure Websites

With the new release of Windows Azure and Windows Azure Websites, a lot of new scenarios with Windows Azure just became possible. One I like a lot, especiall...

Ready for a Windows Azure roadtrip?

A while ago, Michelangelo van Dam (a hardcore PHP guy), François Hertay (a hardcore Java guru) and myself (a .NET guy) were asked if we wanted to wri...

Social meet up on Twitter for MEET Windows Azure on June 7th

Here’s a perhaps rather redundant event for you but it should be kind of fun: MEET Windows Azure on Twitter (+ Beer). The idea is to list people who have a t...

Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network

As you know, Windows Azure is a very rich platform. Next to compute and storage, it offers a series of building blocks that simplify your life as a cloud dev...

Protecting Windows Azure Web and Worker roles from malware

Most IT administrators will install some sort of virus scanner on your precious servers. Since the cloud, from a technical perspective, is just a server, why...

Pro NuGet is finally there!

Short version: Install-Package ProNuget or http://amzn.to/pronuget It’s been a while since I wrote my first book. After I’ve been telling that wr...

I’m an ASP Insider

Cool! I’ve just learned that I’m invited to join the ASPInsiders. I’m really excited and honored to be part of this group of great ASP.NET experts. Very much...

TechDays Finland - Architectural Patterns for the Cloud - NuGet

As promised, here are the slide decks for the two sessions delivered at TechDays Finland last week. Architectural Patterns for the Cloud The promise of all c...

Introducing MyGet package source proxy (beta)

My blog already has quite the number of blog posts around MyGet, our NuGet-as-a-Service solution which my colleague Xavier and I are running. There are a lot...

Slides for TechDays Belgium 2012: SignalR

It was the last session on the last day of TechDays 2012 so I was expecting almost nobody to show up. Still, a packed room came to have a look at how to make...

Tracking API usage with Google Analytics

So you have an API. Congratulations! You should have one. But how do you track who uses it, what client software they use and so on? You may be logging API c...

Don’t brag about your Visual Studio achievements! (yet?)

The Channel 9 folks seem to have released the first beta of their Visual Studio Achievements project. The idea of Visual Studio Achievements is pretty awesom...

How do you synchronize a million to-do lists?

Not this question, but a similar one, has been asked by one of our customers. An interesting question, isn’t it? Wait. It gets more interesting. I’ll sketch ...

Using SignalR to broadcast a slide deck

Last week, I’ve discussed Techniques for real-time client-server communication on the web (SignalR to the rescue). We’ve seen that when building ...

Techniques for real-time client-server communication on the web (SignalR to the rescue)

When building web applications, you often face the fact that HTTP, the foundation of the web, is a request/response protocol. A client issues a request, a se...

Publishing symbol packages for a MyGet feed

Ever since NuGet 1.2, there is a great way for NuGet package authors to let their users debug into the package’s binaries. With almost no additional ef...

Rewriting WCF OData Services base URL with load balancing & reverse proxy

When scaling out an application to multiple servers, often a form of load balancing or reverse proxying is used to provide external users access to a web ser...

Setting up a NuGet repository in seconds: MyGet public feeds

A few months ago, my colleague Xavier Decoster and I introduced MyGet as a tool where you can create your own, private NuGet feeds. A couple of weeks later ...

NuGet push… to Windows Azure

When looking at how people like to deploy their applications to a cloud environment, a large faction seems to prefer being able to use their source control s...

ASP.NET MVC dynamic view sections

Earlier today, a colleague of mine asked for advice on how he could create a “dynamic” view. To elaborate, he wanted to create a change settings ...

Why MyGet uses Windows Azure

Recently one of the Tweeps following me started fooling around and hit one of my sweet spots: Windows Azure. Basically, he mocked me for using Windows Azure ...

Book review: Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook

Over the past few months, I’ve been doing technical reviewing for a great Windows Azure book: the Windows Azure Development Cookbook published by Packt...

A client side Glimpse to your PHP application

A few months ago, the .NET world was surprised with a magnificent tool called “Glimpse”. Today I’m pleased to release a first draft of a PH...

Copy packages from one NuGet feed to another

Yesterday, a funny discussion was going on at the NuGet Discussion Forum on CodePlex. Funny, you say? Well yes. Funny because it was about a feature we envi...

Windows Azure Accelerator for Web Roles

One of the questions I often get around Windows Azure is: “Is Windows Azure interesting for me?”. It’s a tough one, because most of the time when someone ask...

A first look at Windows Azure AppFabric Applications

After the Windows Azure AppFabric team announced the availability of Windows Azure AppFabric Applications (preview), I signed up for early access immediately...

Delegate feed privileges to other users on MyGet

One of the first features we had envisioned for MyGet and which seemed increasingly popular was the ability to provide other users a means of managing packag...

Enabling conditional Basic HTTP authentication on a WCF OData service

Yes, a long title, but also something I was not able to find too easily using Google. Here’s the situation: for MyGet, we are implementing basic authenticati...

Community Day 2011 - Fun with ASP.NET MVC, MEF and NuGet

To start the blog post: AWESOME! That’s what I have to say about the latest edition of Community Day 2011. I had the privilege of doing a session on AS...

Advanced scenarios with Windows Azure Queues

For DeveloperFusion, I wrote an article on Windows Azure queues. Interested in working with queues and want to use some advanced techniques? Head over to the...

MyGet now supports pushing from the command line

One of the work items we had opened for MyGet was the ability to push packages to a private feed from the command line. Only a few hours after our initial la...

Creating your own private NuGet feed: MyGet

Ever since NuGet came out, I’ve been thinking about leveraging it in a corporate environment. I've seen two NuGet server implementations appear on...

Just released: MvcSiteMapProvider 3.1.0 RC

It looks like I’m really cr… ehm… releasing way too much over the past few days, but yes, here’s another one: I just posted MvcSiteMapProvider 3.1.0 RC both ...

Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1 KB2478063 Service Pack 5 Feature Set 3.1 R2 November Edition RTW

As you can see, a new .NET Framework version just came out. Read about it at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/endpoint/archive/2011/04/18/microsoft-net-framework-4-pl...

A Glimpse at Windows Identity Foundation claims

For a current project, I’m using Glimpse to inspect what’s going on behind the ASP.NET covers. I really hope that you have heard about the greatest ASP.NET m...

Using dynamic WCF service routes

For a demo I am working on, I’m creating an OData feed. This OData feed is in essence a WCF service which is activated using System.ServiceModel.Activation.S...

Slides for my talk at MIX11: Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3, MEF and NuGet

As promised, here are the slides and demo code for my talk "Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3, MEF and NuGet" I presented at MIX in Las Vegas. Abstract: "So you have a ...

Official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app released

I’m proud to announce that we (RealDolmen) have released the official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app! The official Belgium TechDays 2011 gives you...

Lightweight PHP application deployment to Windows Azure

Those of you who are deploying PHP applications to Windows Azure, are probably using the Windows Azure tooling for Eclipse or the fantastic command-line tool...

Windows Azure and scaling: how? (PHP)

One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fa...

Windows Azure and scaling: how? (.NET)

One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fa...

Windows Azure CDN updates

The Windows Azure team has just put out the new Windows Azure SDK 1.4 for download. Next to that, I noticed some interesting new capabilities for the CDN (Co...

Put your cloud on a diet (or: Windows Azure and scaling: why?)

One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fa...

Authenticate Orchard users with AppFabric Access Control Service

From the initial release of Orchard, the new .NET CMS, I have been wondering how difficult (or easy) it would be to integrate external (“federated”) authenti...

Thank you for getting me in Vegas!

I wish to thank everyone who has been voring for getting me in Vegas, speaking at MIX11. Without having expectations, I was really really surprised (and happ...

MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 released

Just a quick note to tell that MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 has been released and is available on CodePlex and NuGet. This version is targeted at ASP.NET MVC 3. ...

ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framewok on NuGet

If you search on my blog, there’s a bunch of posts where I talk about ASP.NET MVC and MEF. And what’s cool: these posts are the ones that are act...

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: ...

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 int...

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 ...

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 ...

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’...

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...

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… Im...

Using MvcSiteMapProvider throuh NuPack

Probably you have seen the buzz around NuPack, a package manager for .NET with thight integration in Visual Studio 2010. NuPack is a free, open source develo...

Cost Architecting for Windows Azure

Just wanted to do a quick plug to an article I’ve written for TechNet Magazine: Windows Azure: Cost Architecting for Windows Azure. Designing application...

Remix 2010 slides and sample code

As promised during my session on Remix 10 yesterday in Belgium, here's the slide deck and sample code. Building for the cloud: integrating an application on ...

Introducing Windows Azure Companion – Cloud for the masses?

At OSIDays in India, the Interoperability team at Microsoft has made an interesting series of announcements related to PHP and Windows Azure.  To summar...

Announcing the Windows Azure Online Conference

Steve Plank from Microsoft UK has just announced the UK Windows Azure Online Conference on his blog. This will be a whole day, online Windows Azure conferenc...

Hybrid Azure applications using OData

In the whole Windows Azure story, Microsoft has always been telling you could build hybrid applications: an on-premise application with a service on Azure or...

Simplified access control using Windows Azure AppFabric Labs

Earlier this week, Zane Adam announced the availability of the New AppFabric Access Control service in LABS. The highlights for this release (and I quote): ...

MvcSiteMapProvider 2.1.0 released!

The release for MvcSiteMapProvider 2.1.0 has just been posted on CodePlex. MvcSiteMapProvider is, as the name implies, an ASP.NET MVC SiteMapProvider implem...

ASP.NET MVC 3 and MEF sitting in a tree…

As I stated in a previous blog post: ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1 has been released! I talked about some of the new features and promised to do a blog post in the...

ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1 is out! Quick review…

I just noticed a very interesting download: ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1. Yes, you are reading this correctly, the first bits for v3.0 are there! Let’s have...

Renewed MVP ASP.NET for 2010!

Just got the best e-mail a Microsoft community member can receive in his mailbox: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present yo...

ASP.NET MVC - MvcSiteMapProvider 2.0 is out!

I’m very proud to announce the release of the ASP.NET MVC MvcSiteMapProvider 2.0! I’m also proud that the name of this product now exceeds the av...

Running on Windows Azure - ChronoRace - Autoscaling

At RealDolmen, we had the luck of doing the first (known) project on Windows Azure in Belgium. Together with Microsoft, we had the opportunity to make the C...

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: “N...

Slides of our VISUG session

As promised, here are the slides of the VISUG session me and Kris van der Mast did yesterday. Being a pimp without Silverlight! Abstract: “Don't tell us you'...

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 vo...

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, Window...

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 pl...

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 ha...

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...

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...

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, ...

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&rs...

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 th...

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! ...

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 ext...

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 mar...

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...

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 Micr...

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 id...

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 ...

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 ...

Microsoft PDC09 keynote highlights

Finally found some time to write a short blog post on the announcements this morning at PDC 2009. Ray Ozzie started the keynote this morning, focusing on Mic...

Localize ASP.NET MVC 2 DataAnnotations validation messages

Living in a country where there are there are three languages being used, almost every application you work on requires some form of localization. In an earl...

Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse for PHP developers

Pfew! Finally I can spread the word on this! While working on the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, I had the opportunity to test-drive the development builds of th...

Upcoming sessions on Azure, PHP and ASP.NET

It’s going to be a filled end of 2009… There’s Microsoft PDC which I will be attending and will probably cause me some sleepless nights (b...

Recording of my session at Remix 2009 - ASP.NET MVC

On September 29, I did a session on ASP.NET MVC at Remix 2009 Belgium. All session recordings are now online, check the Remix09 site. Slides and code fo...

Let me Bing that for you

Have you ever been bugged with stupid questions? Do you get tired of people asking stuff that is only one search engine query away? Chances are you answered ...

Leveraging ASP.NET MVC 2 futures “ViewState”

Let’s start this blog post with a confession: yes, I abused a feature in the ASP.NET MVC 2 futures assembly to fire up discussion. In my previous blog ...

Exploring the ASP.NET MVC 2 futures assemby

The latest preview of ASP.NET MVC 2, preview 2, has been released on CodePlex last week. All features of the preview 1 version are still in, as well as some...

Remix 2009 session - Slides and code

As promised during the session at Remix 2009, here’s my example code and slide deck. Abstract: "Building a Twitter clone in 60 minutes, featuring what's...

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...

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: ...

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...

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 contr...

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 atte...

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 bl...

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 CodePl...

ReMIX Belgium session on ASP.NET MVC

Just learned I’ll be doing a session on ASP.NET MVC at ReMIX Belgium. ReMix brings the best of MIX09 in Las Vegas to Belgium: it bring us internationa...

Authenticating users with RPXNow (in ASP.NET MVC)

Don’t you get sick of having to register at website X, at website Y, at website Z, …? It is really not fun to maintain all these accounts, chan...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 5: the front-end

“After having found a god-like guardian for his application, Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker found out that his application still had no functio...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 4: Authentication and membership

“Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker just returned from his quest to a barn in the clouds, when he discovered that he forgot to lock the door to his...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 3: Store data in the cloud

“After setting up his workplace, knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker thought of something else: if a farmer wants to keep a lot of hay, he needs a ...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 2: Creating an Azure project

“Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker was about to start working on his TwitterMatic application, named after the great god of social networking, Tw...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 1: Introduction

“Once upon a time, Microsoft started a Windows Azure developing contest named new CloudApp();. While it first was only available for US candidates, th...

Announcing: Azure User Group Belgium

After the summer, I'll be joining Kurt Claeys and Yves Goeleven and for the start of the Azure User Group Belgium (or AZUG.BE).  AZUG.BE is a Belgian us...

Application-wide action filters in ASP.NET MVC

Ever had a team of developers using your ASP.NET MVC framework? Chances are you have implemented some action filters (i.e. for logging) which should be appli...

Revised: ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

A while ago, I did a blog post on combining ASP.NET MVC and MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework), making it possible to “plug” controllers and v...

ASP.NET MVC TDD using Visual Studio 2010

Phil Haack announced yesterday that the tooling support for ASP.NET MVC is available for Visual Studio 2010. Troy Goode already blogged about the designer sn...

A view from the cloud (or: locate your ASP.NET MVC views on Windows Azure Blob Storage)

Hosting and deploying ASP.NET MVC applications on Windows Azure works like a charm. However, if you have been reading my blog for a while, you might have see...

ASP.NET MVC Domain Routing

Looking for an ASP.NET MVC 6 version? Check this post. Ever since the release of ASP.NET MVC and its routing engine (System.Web.Routing), Microsoft has been...

Mocking - VISUG session (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! Mocking - VISUG session (screencast) Abstract: "...

Mocking - VISUG session

Thursday evening, I did a session on Mocking for the VISUG (Visual Studio User Group Belgium). As promised, here is the slide deck I’ve used. The sessi...

More ASP.NET MVC Best Practices

In this post, I’ll share some of the best practices and guidelines which I have come across while developing ASP.NET MVC web applications. I will not c...

MSDN session on ASP.NET MVC

As promised to all people attending my online session on ASP.NET MVC this afternoon, here is the slide deck I’ve used. MSDN - ASP.NET MVC</embed>...

ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

Microsoft’s Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a .NET library (released on CodePlex) that enables greater re-use of application components. You c...

Using the ASP.NET MVC Futures AsyncController

Last week, I blogged about all stuff that is included in the ASP.NET MVC Futures assembly, which is an assembly available on CodePlex and contains possible ...

Speaking at DevDays 2009, The Hague (and more)

Some Great news (at least: I think this is great :-)): Kevin Dockx and I will be giving a session on PHP and Silverlight at the Netherlands DevDays09. This e...

Back to the future! Exploring ASP.NET MVC Futures

For those of you who did not know yet: next to the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 version and its source code, there’s also an interesting assembly available if you ...

New CodePlex project: MvcSiteMap – ASP.NET MVC sitemap provider

If you have been using the ASP.NET MVC framework, you possibly have been searching for something like the classic ASP.NET sitemap. After you've played with i...

Sample chapter from ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

Here’s a shameless, commercial blogpost… With yesterday’s 1.0 release of the ASP.NET MVC framework, I’m sure the following sample ...

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has been released!

To keep up with a good tradition (see here and here), I have some great news on ASP.NET MVC: we are at version 1.0! This means production ready, supported, ...

CRUD with ASP.NET MVC (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! CRUD with ASP.NET MVC (screencast) Abstr...

Creating an ASP.NET MVC application with Google Gears

Offline web applications… This term really sounds like 2 different things: offline, no network, and web application, online. Maarten, you speak in ri...

Announcing my book: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

It’s been quite a job, but there it is: Packt just announced my very first book on their site. It is titled “ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly”, co...

Form validation with ASP.NET MVC release candidate

Last week, the ASP.NET MVC framework release candidate was released (check ScottGu’s post). Apart from some great new tooling support, form validation...

Updated CarTrackr to ASP.NET MVC RC

As you may have noticed, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate has been released over the night. You can read all about it in ScottGu’s blog post, coveri...

Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking

Last week, I found another book from Packt in my letterbox. This time, the title is ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking, written by Andrew Siemer. On the back...

Checking username availability with jQuery (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! Checking username availability with jQuer...

Verifying code and testing with Pex

Earlier this week, Katrien posted an update on the list of Belgian TechDays 2009 speakers. This post featured a summary on all sessions, of which one wa...

Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 Application Architecture and Design

The people at Packt asked it again: “Do you want to review this book?” Sure I do! The book I’m reviewing this time is ASP.NET 3.5 Applica...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 5 - Deploying in the cloud

This post is part 5 (and the final part) of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 4 - Membership and authentication

This post is part 4 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 3 - Data storage

This post is part 3 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 2 - Cloud-enabling CarTrackr

This post is part 2 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is...

Track your car expenses in the cloud! CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 1 - Introduction

As you may see in the title, I will be starting a series on modifying my CarTrackr sample application to a cloud-based, Windows Azure application. At this p...

New Entity Framework / LINQ blog!

Just a quick recommendation note: One of my colleagues, Julien Hanssens, has started blogging on his experiences with the Entity Framework and LINQ. Here ar...

ASP.NET MVC XForms released on CodePlex

Just noticed there's a new project on CodePlex related to the ASP.NET MVC framework: MVC XForms. MVC XForms is a simple UI framework for ASP.NET MVC bas...

Using the ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! Using ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder Abstract: ...

Partial page updates with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery (and action filters)

When building an ASP.NET MVC application, chances are that you are using master pages. After working on the application for a while, it's time to spice ...

Integrating NUnit test results in Team Build 2008

When using Team Foundation Server 2008 and Team Build, chances are you are developing unit tests in Microsoft’s test framework which is integrated wit...

Creating a generic Linq to SQL ModelBinder for the ASP.NET MVC framework

You are right! This is indeed my third post on ASP.NET MVC ModelBinders. The first one focussed on creating a ModelBinder from scratch in an older preview r...

CarTrackr - Sample ASP.NET MVC application

Some people may have already noticed the link in my VISUG session blog post, but for those who didn't... I've released my sample application CarTra...

Introduction to ASP.NET MVC for VISUG - Presentation materials

Yesterday evening, I did a presentation on the ASP.NET MVC framework for VISUG (Visual Studio User Group Belgium). I really hope everyone got a good feel o...

Using the ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder attribute - Second part

Just after the ASP.NET MVC preview 5 was released, I made a quick attempt to using the ModelBinder attribute. In short, a ModelBinder allows you to use comp...

Forms interaction with ASP.NET MVC (screencast)

Abstract: "This screencast is a short demonstration on how you can handle form interactions using the ASP.NET MVC framework." Download sample c...

ASP.NET MVC preview 5’s AntiForgeryToken helper method and attribute

The new ASP.NET MVC preview 5 featured a number of new HtmlHelper methods. One of these methods is the HtmlHelper.AntiForgeryToken. When you place <%=Htm...

Using the ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder attribute

ASP.NET MVC action methods can be developed using regular method parameters. In earlier versions of the ASP.NET MVC framework, these parameters were all sim...

Form validation with ASP.NET MVC preview 5

In earlier ASP.NET MVC previews, form validation was something that should be implemented "by hand". Since the new ASP.NET MVC preview 5, form val...

Building an ASP.NET MVC sitemap provider with security trimming

Warning!A new version of the source code provided in this post is available here. Use this blog post as reference only.  Yes, it has been a while sin...

MSDN Chopsticks on ASP.NET MVC (screencasts)

A while ago, KatrienDG asked me to do some screencasts on the ASP.NET MVC framework for the MSDN Chopsticks page. I've been working on 2 screencasts: an...

ASP.NET MVC - Upcoming preview 4 release

ScottGu just posted that there's an upcoming preview 4 release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. What I immediately noticed, is that there are actually some...

Article on ASP.NET MVC in .NET magazine #21

Yesterday, I received the new Dutch edition of .NET magazine containing my article on the ASP.NET MVC framework. Since the article was written quite a whil...

Extending ASP.NET MVC OutputCache ActionFilterAttribute - Adding substitution

In my previous blog post on ASP.NET MVC OutputCache, not all aspects of "classic" ASP.NET output caching were covered. For instance, substitution ...

Creating an ASP.NET MVC OutputCache ActionFilterAttribute

In every web application, there are situations where you want to cache the HTML output of a specific page for a certain amount of time, because underlying da...

The devil is in the details (Visual Studio Team System test policy)

Have you ever been in a difficult situation where a software product is overall very good, but a small detail is going wrong? At least I've been, for th...

Code based ASP.NET MVC GridView

Earlier this week a colleague of mine asked me if there was such thing as a  DataGrid or GridView or something like that in the ASP.NET MVC framework. M...

Detailed code metrics with NDepend

A while ago, I blogged about code performance analysis in Visual Studio 2008. Using profiling and hot path tracking, I measured code performance and was abl...

ASP.NET MVC framework preview 3 released!

Don't know how I do it, but I think this blog post is yet again the first one out there mentioning a new release of the ASP.NET framework (preview 3)&nb...

Creating a custom ViewEngine for the ASP.NET MVC framework

Have you ever seen a presentation of ScottGu about the ASP.NET MVC framework? There is one particular slide that keeps coming back, stating that every step ...

ASP.NET MVC custom ActionResult (ImageResult)

The ASP.NET MVC framework introduces the concept of returning an ActionResult in Controllers since the "preview preview" release on CodePlex. The ...

New Team Foundation Server projects on CodePlex!

Busy times... Lots of work, some holidays here in Belgium, ... But there's always time to browse CodePlex! It is actually a good thing to do that from t...

ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit alternative authentication

Last week, I blogged about the ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit and some of its features. Since then, Troy Goode and I are developing at warp-speed to pro...

ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit

Yesterday, I read a cool blog post from Troy Goode about his new CodePlex project MvcMembership. I also noticed his call for help, so I decided to dedicate...

ASP.NET MVC Framework out on CodePlex

This morning, I was browsing the new projects page on CodePlex and noticed something nice! The ASP.NET MVC team already rumoured around making the ASP.NET M...

ASP.NET MVC - Testing issues Q and A

When playing around with the ASP.NET MVC framework and automated tests using Rhino Mocks, you will probably find yourself close to throwing your computer t...

March 18 ASP.NET MVC links

Too busy this week to write large blog posts myself... Luckily other people do write interesting things on ASP.NET MVC! ASP.NET MVC Route tester Test y...

Heroes happen here - Microsoft TechDays 2008 in Belgium

Just to inform you: together with a numer of colleagues from Dolmen, I'll be attending the Microsoft TechDays 2008 in Ghent, Belgium on 12 and 13 M...

OpenXML + Silverlight 2.0 = cool!

Mix '08 announced some nice things, among them the release of Silverlight 2.0 (beta), ASP.NET MVC framework (CTP 2). This morning, I saw one very cool t...

Data Driven Testing in Visual Studio 2008 - Part 2

This is the second post in my series on Data Driven Testing in Visual Studio 2008. The first post focusses on Data Driven Testing in regular Unit Tests. Thi...

Data Driven Testing in Visual Studio 2008 - Part 1

Last week, I blogged about code performance analysis in visual studio 2008. since that topic provoked lots of comments (thank you Bart for associating "...

Code performance analysis in Visual Studio 2008

Visual Studio developer, did you know you have a great performance analysis (profiling) tool at your fingertips? In Visual Studio 2008 this profiling tool h...

Books I recently read…

A while ago, I was contacted by the people of Packt Publishing asking me to review two of their latest books, ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials ...

ASP.NET Session State Partitioning using State Server Load Balancing

It seems like amount of posts on ASP.NET's Session State keeps growing. Here's the list: ASP.NET Session State Partitioning ASP.NET load balancing and ASP.N...

ASP.NET Session State Partitioning

After my previous blog post on ASP.NET Session State, someone asked me if I knew anything about ASP.NET Session State Partitioning. Since this is a little kn...

Preview Word files (docx) in HTML using ASP.NET, OpenXML and LINQ to XML

Since an image (or even an example) tells more than any text will ever do, here's what I've created in the past few evening hours: Live examples: Test...

ASP.NET MVC framework - Security

Some posts ago, I started playing with the ASP.NET MVC framework. In an example I'm creating, I'm trying to add Forms-based security. "Class...

ASP.NET DataPager not paging after first PostBack?

A few posts ago, I mentioned that I am currently giving a classroom training on ASP.NET. People attending are currently working on a project I gave them, an...

ASP.NET MVC Framework - Basic sample application

You might have noticed that I'm quite enhousiast about the new ASP.NET MVC framework. What are you talking about? Basically, this new ASP.NET MVC&nbs...

ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP preview released

Just over the weekend, Microsoft has released the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP. This download includes several additions to ASP.NET 3.5: ASP.NET AJAX Impr...

LINQ to filesystem

The past few hours, I've been experimenting with LINQ. As a sample application, I'm trying to create a small photo album website, which shows me all...

ASP.NET MVC framework preview to be released next week

Half the world has been focussing on the release of the new Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 last week. That is good, as .NET 3.5 offers lots of nice new fea...

ASP.NET load balancing and ASP.NET state server (aspnet_state)

At one of our clients, we used to have only one server for ASP.NET applications (including web services). Since this machine is actually business-critical a...

Advanced ASP.NET caching events

Currently, I'm giving an ASP.NET classroom training at our company, which actually is quite good for me: I needed to refresh all ASP.NET concepts, as th...

Enabling HTTP proxy for .NET webservice client

Have you ever written code that makes external (Soap) webservice calls? Tried that same code on your company network? Most of the time, this does not work v...

Remove unnecessary HTTP modules from the ASP.NET pipeline

Trying to speed up some things in a demo ASP.NET application for a customer, I found a really simple and effective way to remove some HTTP modules from the ...

Creating Office2007 documents in C#

I've been too busy implementing <A class="" href="http://www.phpexcel.net/" target=_blank mce_href="http://www.phpexcel.net">SpreadsheetML</A> in...

Automatically generate SandCastle documentation using CruiseControl.NET or VSTS Team Build

Earlier this week, I was playing around with SandCastle, and found that the SandCastle Help File Builder (SHFB) was a great tool to quickly create SandCastl...

PackageExplorer, not only great for OpenXML…

The last few days, I've been working with <A class="" href="http://blogs.infosupport.com/wouterv" target=_blank mce_href="http://blogs.infosupport.com/wou...

TFS Team Build and ASP.NET websites

Here's one I'd really like to share with everyone trying to build ASP.NET websites using TFS Build. First of all, a little story about the project setup... A...

Open XML Developer workshop content

Over the last few months, Doug, Wouter, Brian and lots of other people delivered a series of OpenXML workshops around the globe. Those who were there, and th...

NHibernate 1.2.0 - Unexpected row count: 0; expected: 1

Great... I've been working with NHibernate and MySQL for a while now, without having any strange problems. For a project I'm working on, I'm usi...

Enable sitemap security trimming in ASP.NET 2.0

Want to enable security trimming for your ASP.NET sitemap? Here's how... First of all, you need a new section in your web.config system.web element: ...

ASP.NET URL rewrites using .htaccess-like syntax

Having a PHP background, I've been using .htaccess mod_rewrite in Apache for ages. ASP.NET allows rewriting too, but using a different syntax than mod_r...

Enlisting an ADO.NET command in an NHibernate transaction

For everyone who has read my article on NHibernate, here's a story for you... When building an application, everyone comes to a point where one needs ...

Commandline FTP folder download

A quick annoyed post... I just spent two hours searching the Internet for a means on how to recursively download a complete FTP folder, command-line, a...

OpenXML news overview

A lot of news around OpenXML these days, so I decided to bundle some things into one big blog post. 1. Microsoft released a Microsoft SDK for Open XML Forma...

MCTS for .NET framework 2.0 Web applications

Just like my colleague Kristof did last friday, I passed the Microsoft.NET Framework 2.0 - Web-based Client Development (Exam 070-528) exam yesterday, resul...

SendMailControl for ASP.NET

Have you ever used the ASP.NET PasswordRecovery control, or the CreateUserWizard? Probably, you used the mail capabilities of these controls too, and set up...

ASP.NET 2.0 Event Validation

Event Validation is a new feature in ASP.NET 2.0 which provides an additional level of checks on postback actions. It verifies whether a postback from a con...

Team Foundation Server tools linkdump

Currently, I'm playing around with TFS (Team Foundation Server), and here's just a quick linkdump of some TFS tools, mainly on CodePlex.  http://...

Scalable Apps with Asynchronous Programming in ASP.NET

A while ago, I posted about the DevDays, and some interesting sessions I took. One of these sessions was "Scalable Apps with Asynchronous Programming in ASP....

DataBindable Business Objects in .NET

Checkout Emmanuel Nuyttens' article on DataBindable Business Objects. It's an interesting article, focussing on the other side of data binding that I wrote a...

Article in .NET magazine

The new .NET magazine Belgium/Netherlands has been distributed to all subscribers. For the latest edition, #15, I've written an article on the basic princip...

CruiseControl.NET configurator

For those looking for a CruiseControl.NET configuration tool: I just stumbled on this one at CodePlex This is an imported post. It was imported from my...

Microsoft AJAX Library and ASP.NET AJAX Extensions

Scott Guthrie, one of the Microsoft "Atlas" guys, announced the "Atlas" 1.0 Naming and Roadmap stating that: Atlas will be renamed: the client-side JavaSc...

Remote debugging of Node.js apps on Azure App Service from WebStorm

At Microsoft Build 2018, a number of Azure App Service on Linux enhancements were announced. One that I was interested in was this one:

Retiring as a Microsoft MVP

I have decided to retire from the Microsoft MVP program. In the first week of April, an e-mail from Microsoft landed in my mailbox. I was given the choice to...

Running Kotlin in Azure Functions

A while back, the Azure folks announced support for Java on Azure Functions. My immediate thought was: “Do they mean Java or JVM? And if they mean JVM, will ...

NuGet and NPM news from the community

You may know (or not, shame on you!) Xavier Decoster and myself are operating MyGet, a hosted service providing teams with hosting and management of NuGet, n...

Using dotPeek to figure out why IIS crashed

Here’s a story on how I once used dotPeek to provide debugger symbols and (decompiled) source code for a crashed application for which we had nothing but the...

Remote profiling Windows Azure Cloud Services with dotTrace

Here’s another cross-post from our JetBrains .NET blog. It’s focused around dotTrace but there are a lot of tips and tricks around Windows Azure ...

Protecting Windows Azure Web and Worker roles from malware

Most IT administrators will install some sort of virus scanner on your precious servers. Since the cloud, from a technical perspective, is just a server, why...

A Glimpse at Windows Identity Foundation claims

For a current project, I’m using Glimpse to inspect what’s going on behind the ASP.NET covers. I really hope that you have heard about the greatest ASP.NET m...

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: “N...

Revised: ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

A while ago, I did a blog post on combining ASP.NET MVC and MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework), making it possible to “plug” controllers and v...

Verifying code and testing with Pex

Earlier this week, Katrien posted an update on the list of Belgian TechDays 2009 speakers. This post featured a summary on all sessions, of which one wa...

ASP.NET MVC - Testing issues Q and A

When playing around with the ASP.NET MVC framework and automated tests using Rhino Mocks, you will probably find yourself close to throwing your computer t...

Data Driven Testing in Visual Studio 2008 - Part 2

This is the second post in my series on Data Driven Testing in Visual Studio 2008. The first post focusses on Data Driven Testing in regular Unit Tests. Thi...

Data Driven Testing in Visual Studio 2008 - Part 1

Last week, I blogged about code performance analysis in visual studio 2008. since that topic provoked lots of comments (thank you Bart for associating "...

Code performance analysis in Visual Studio 2008

Visual Studio developer, did you know you have a great performance analysis (profiling) tool at your fingertips? In Visual Studio 2008 this profiling tool h...

How HTTP Chunked Encoding was killing a request

Recently, someone asked me to look at their ASP.NET MVC application and help figure out why a certain request was taking 16 seconds to complete. It’s always ...

Remote debugging of Node.js apps on Azure App Service from WebStorm

At Microsoft Build 2018, a number of Azure App Service on Linux enhancements were announced. One that I was interested in was this one:

Retiring as a Microsoft MVP

I have decided to retire from the Microsoft MVP program. In the first week of April, an e-mail from Microsoft landed in my mailbox. I was given the choice to...

Running Kotlin in Azure Functions

A while back, the Azure folks announced support for Java on Azure Functions. My immediate thought was: “Do they mean Java or JVM? And if they mean JVM, will ...

Using operator overloads for concatenating file system paths in CSharp

The past few days, I’ve been working on some cross-platform C# code. In this code, I needed to build a path to a file, by concatenating folder names. As you ...

On speaker life…

Last week, I did a tweet while at the Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, working on blog posts (part of my job) and drinking bad coffee.

Building a scheduled task in ASP.NET Core/Standard 2.0

In this post, we’ll look at writing a simple system for scheduling tasks in ASP.NET Core 2.0. That’s quite a big claim, so I want to add a disclaimer: this s...

Making string validation faster by not using a regular expression. A story.

A while back, we were performance profiling an application and noticed a big performance bottleneck while mapping objects using AutoMapper. Mapping is of cou...

Extending .NET CLI with custom tools - dotnet init initializes your NuGet package

A few weeks back, .NET Core 1.1 was released (and a boatload of related tools such as Visual Studio 2017. For .NET Core projects, a big breaking change was i...

Using dotPeek to figure out why IIS crashed

Here’s a story on how I once used dotPeek to provide debugger symbols and (decompiled) source code for a crashed application for which we had nothing but the...

Application Insights telemetry processors

Two weeks ago I had a wonderful experience speaking at a small conference in Finland. The talk was titled What is going on - Application diagnostics on Azure...

Exploring .NET managed heap with ClrMD

Since my posts on making code allocate less memory and memory allocation for strings were quite well received, I decided to add another post to the series: E...

Exploring memory allocation and strings

A while back, I wrote about making code allocate less memory (go read it now if you haven’t). In that post, we saw how the Garbage Collector works and how it...

Making .NET code less allocatey - Allocations and the Garbage Collector

The .NET Garbage Collector (GC) is quite cool. In combination with the runtime’s virtual memory, it helps providing our applications with virtually unlimited...

Global Windows Azure Bootcamp - april 27th

On April 27th, 2013, you’ll have the ability to join a Windows Azure Bootcamp on a location close to you. We’ve started this with the idea of may...

AZUG Windows Azure Saturday overview

As one of the board members of the Windows Azure User Group in Belgium, I wanted to write a post on an event we organized last weekend. We do more events (on...

Social meet up on Twitter for MEET Windows Azure on June 7th

Here’s a perhaps rather redundant event for you but it should be kind of fun: MEET Windows Azure on Twitter (+ Beer). The idea is to list people who have a t...

TechDays Finland - Architectural Patterns for the Cloud - NuGet

As promised, here are the slide decks for the two sessions delivered at TechDays Finland last week. Architectural Patterns for the Cloud The promise of all c...

Slides for NDC2011 - Oslo

It was great speaking at NDC2011! As promised during the sessions I gave, here are the slide decks: Cost architecting for Windows Azure - NDC 2011.pptx...

Slides for my talk at MIX11: Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3, MEF and NuGet

As promised, here are the slides and demo code for my talk "Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3, MEF and NuGet" I presented at MIX in Las Vegas. Abstract: "So you have a ...

Official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app released

I’m proud to announce that we (RealDolmen) have released the official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app! The official Belgium TechDays 2011 gives you...

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: ...

Remix 2010 slides and sample code

As promised during my session on Remix 10 yesterday in Belgium, here's the slide deck and sample code. Building for the cloud: integrating an application on ...

Announcing the Windows Azure Online Conference

Steve Plank from Microsoft UK has just announced the UK Windows Azure Online Conference on his blog. This will be a whole day, online Windows Azure conferenc...

Running on Windows Azure - ChronoRace - Autoscaling

At RealDolmen, we had the luck of doing the first (known) project on Windows Azure in Belgium. Together with Microsoft, we had the opportunity to make the C...

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: “N...

Linuxwochen Austria

As part of my global domination plans, I this week visited Vienna, Austria for a session at Linuxwochen around PHP on Windows. PHP on Windows Abstract: &ldqu...

Slides of our VISUG session

As promised, here are the slides of the VISUG session me and Kris van der Mast did yesterday. Being a pimp without Silverlight! Abstract: “Don't tell us you'...

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 pl...

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, bu...

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 Mi...

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 ...

Microsoft PDC09 keynote highlights

Finally found some time to write a short blog post on the announcements this morning at PDC 2009. Ray Ozzie started the keynote this morning, focusing on Mic...

Upcoming sessions on Azure, PHP and ASP.NET

It’s going to be a filled end of 2009… There’s Microsoft PDC which I will be attending and will probably cause me some sleepless nights (b...

Recording of my session at Remix 2009 - ASP.NET MVC

On September 29, I did a session on ASP.NET MVC at Remix 2009 Belgium. All session recordings are now online, check the Remix09 site. Slides and code fo...

Remix 2009 session - Slides and code

As promised during the session at Remix 2009, here’s my example code and slide deck. Abstract: "Building a Twitter clone in 60 minutes, featuring what's...

ReMIX Belgium session on ASP.NET MVC

Just learned I’ll be doing a session on ASP.NET MVC at ReMIX Belgium. ReMix brings the best of MIX09 in Las Vegas to Belgium: it bring us internationa...

PHP and Silverlight - DevDays session

I just returned from The Hague where Kevin and I delivered a session on PHP and Silverlight. As promised, we are putting our slides and demos online. Downlo...

Document Interoperability Workshop, London, May 18 2009

After a pleasant flight with VLM airlines (Antwerp – London City), traveling under half of the city of London, I arrived at the Microsoft offices in V...

Speaking at DevDays 2009, The Hague (and more)

Some Great news (at least: I think this is great :-)): Kevin Dockx and I will be giving a session on PHP and Silverlight at the Netherlands DevDays09. This e...

New VISUG website online

Last week, the new VISUG website has been released. VISUG stands for Visual Studio User Group Belgium and is one of the largest .NET related user groups in ...

TechDays 2009 agenda has been posted!

Just a quick note: the Belgian TechDays 2009 agenda has been published. You can find it on the TechDays website. Also, Katrien has posted some more details ...

OpenXML DII workshop Brussels - Quick summary

A few days ago, I wrote I was doing a presentation on the DII workshop in Brussels together with Julien Chable. Apart from heavy traffic from Antwerp to Bru...

Heroes happen here - Microsoft TechDays 2008 in Belgium

Just to inform you: together with a numer of colleagues from Dolmen, I'll be attending the Microsoft TechDays 2008 in Ghent, Belgium on 12 and 13 M...

How HTTP Chunked Encoding was killing a request

Recently, someone asked me to look at their ASP.NET MVC application and help figure out why a certain request was taking 16 seconds to complete. It’s always ...

Remote debugging of Node.js apps on Azure App Service from WebStorm

At Microsoft Build 2018, a number of Azure App Service on Linux enhancements were announced. One that I was interested in was this one:

Retiring as a Microsoft MVP

I have decided to retire from the Microsoft MVP program. In the first week of April, an e-mail from Microsoft landed in my mailbox. I was given the choice to...

Running Kotlin in Azure Functions

A while back, the Azure folks announced support for Java on Azure Functions. My immediate thought was: “Do they mean Java or JVM? And if they mean JVM, will ...

Using operator overloads for concatenating file system paths in CSharp

The past few days, I’ve been working on some cross-platform C# code. In this code, I needed to build a path to a file, by concatenating folder names. As you ...

On speaker life…

Last week, I did a tweet while at the Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, working on blog posts (part of my job) and drinking bad coffee.

Building a scheduled task in ASP.NET Core/Standard 2.0

In this post, we’ll look at writing a simple system for scheduling tasks in ASP.NET Core 2.0. That’s quite a big claim, so I want to add a disclaimer: this s...

Making string validation faster by not using a regular expression. A story.

A while back, we were performance profiling an application and noticed a big performance bottleneck while mapping objects using AutoMapper. Mapping is of cou...

Extending .NET CLI with custom tools - dotnet init initializes your NuGet package

A few weeks back, .NET Core 1.1 was released (and a boatload of related tools such as Visual Studio 2017. For .NET Core projects, a big breaking change was i...

Using dotPeek to figure out why IIS crashed

Here’s a story on how I once used dotPeek to provide debugger symbols and (decompiled) source code for a crashed application for which we had nothing but the...

Application Insights telemetry processors

Two weeks ago I had a wonderful experience speaking at a small conference in Finland. The talk was titled What is going on - Application diagnostics on Azure...

Exploring .NET managed heap with ClrMD

Since my posts on making code allocate less memory and memory allocation for strings were quite well received, I decided to add another post to the series: E...

Exploring memory allocation and strings

A while back, I wrote about making code allocate less memory (go read it now if you haven’t). In that post, we saw how the Garbage Collector works and how it...

Making .NET code less allocatey - Allocations and the Garbage Collector

The .NET Garbage Collector (GC) is quite cool. In combination with the runtime’s virtual memory, it helps providing our applications with virtually unlimited...

Hotel California

At the start of 2015, I checked out from JetBrains to join Microsoft. Today, after almost two years in the NuGet team, it’s time for change. Microsoft and Nu...

NuGet and NPM news from the community

You may know (or not, shame on you!) Xavier Decoster and myself are operating MyGet, a hosted service providing teams with hosting and management of NuGet, n...

Building NuGet (.NET Core) using Atlassian Bitbucket Pipelines

A while back, I signed up for the beta of Bitbucket Pipelines, a new continuous integration service from Atlassian, built into Bitbucket. The build system pr...

Someone broke the Internet! Or why you may want to mirror your dependencies…

Twitter celebrated its 10th birthday this week, and those who have been on that social network long enough know that at least once a week there’s a massive o...

Disabling session affinity in Azure App Service Web Apps (Websites)

In one of our production systems, we’re using Azure Websites to host a back-end web API. It runs on several machines and benefits from the automatic load bal...

Working with a private npm registry in Azure Web Apps

Using Azure Web Apps, we can deploy and host Node applications quite easily. But what to do with packages the site depends on? Do we have to upload them manu...

Writing and distributing Roslyn analyzers with MyGet

Pretty sweet: MyGet just announced Vsix support has been enabled for all MyGet customers! I wanted to work on a fun example for this new feature and came up ...

Domain Routing and resolving current tenant with ASP.NET MVC 6 / ASP.NET 5

So you’re building a multi-tenant application. And just like many multi-tenant applications out there, the application will use a single (sub)domain per tena...

There is no good mobile operating system

I’m back on Windows Phone. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have read in the past weeks that I switched from being a Windows Phone user to being an Andro...

Could not load file or assembly… NuGet Assembly Redirects

When working in larger projects, you will sometimes encounter errors similar to this one: “Could not load file or assembly 'Newtonsoft.Json, Version=4.5.0.0,...

Automatically strong name signing NuGet packages

Some developers prefer to strong name sign their assemblies. Signing them also means that the dependencies that are consumed must be signed. Not all third-pa...

Developing for the Tessel with WebStorm

In a previous post, I mentioned that (finally) my Tessel arrived, “an internet-connected microcontroller programmable in JavaScript”. I like WebStorm a lot a...

Getting Started with the Tessel

Somewhere last year (I honestly no longer remember when), I saw a few tweets that piqued my interest: a crowdfunding project for the Tessel, “an internet-con...

Microsoft Azure cloud plugin for TeamCity (dabbling in Java code)

NOTE: While the content is this blog post will still work, JetBrains now has a plugin that is the recommended way of working with TeamCity and build agents o...

Optimizing calls to Azure storage using Fiddler

Last week, Xavier and I were really happy for achieving a milestone. After having spent quite some evenings on bringing Visual Studio Online integration to M...

Speeding up ASP.NET vNext package restore

TL;DR: If you have multiple NuGet feeds configured on your machine, it may be worth to do some tweaking in the NuGet.config file shipping with your project. ...

Building .NET projects is a world of pain and here’s how we should solve it

During the past few weeks, I’ve been working on and off on setting up a build agent that can build as many open-source .NET projects as possible in an effort...

NuGet Configuration File inheritance is awesome

One way to remove friction from using NuGet in multiple projects is by making use of NuGet Configuration File inheritance, probably the awesomest unknown fea...

Windows Azure Storage magic with Shared Access Signatures

When building cloud applications on Windows Azure, it’s always a good thing to delegate as much work to specialized services as possible. File downloads woul...

Source Control considered harmful

TL;DR: Using source control is a really bad idea. Or is it? Skip to Conclusion for the meat of this post.One of the first things I do with a new project in V...

Pro NuGet second edition is out

Pfew! Around February 2013, Xavier and I started planning work on an update of our book. Eight months later, we’re proud to present you with Pro NuGet ...

A new year’s present: introducing Glimpse plugins for Windows Azure

Have you tried Glimpse before? It shows you server-side information like execution times, server configuration, request data and such in your browser. At the...

Visual Studio Online for Windows Azure Web Sites

Today’s official Visual Studio 2013 launch provides some interesting novelties, especially for Windows Azure Web Sites. There is now the choice of choo...

Developing Windows Azure Mobile Services server-side

Word of warning: This is a partial cross-post from the JetBrains WebStorm blog. The post you are currently reading adds some more information around Windows ...

Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)

With the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) released as a preview, I thought it was a good time to write up some details about how to work with it....

An autoscaling build farm using TeamCity and Windows Azure

NOTE: While the content is this blog post will still work, JetBrains now has a plugin that is the recommended way of working with TeamCity and build agents o...

Just released: MvcSiteMapProvider 4.0

After a beta version about a month ago, we are proud to release MvcSiteMapProvider 4.0 stable! (get it from NuGet, it’s fresh!) It took 6 months to complete ...

Windows Azure Traffic Manager Explained

With yesterday’s announcement on Windows Azure Traffic Manager surfacing in the management portal (as a preview), I thought it was a good moment to rec...

Autoscaling Windows Azure Cloud Services (and web sites)

At the Build conference, Microsoft today announced that Windows Azure Cloud Services now support autoscaling. And they do! From the Windows Azure Management ...

And there it is - MvcSiteMapProvider v4 (beta)

It has been a while since a new major update has been done to the MvcSiteMapProvider project, but today is the day! MvcSiteMapProvider is a tool that provide...

Create a list of favorite ReSharper plugins

With the latest version of the ReSharper 8 EAP, JetBrains shipped an extension manager for plugins, annotations and settings. Where it previously was a hassl...

Using Amazon Login (and LinkedIn and …) with Windows Azure Access Control

One of the services provided by the Windows Azure cloud computing platform is the Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS). It is a service that provides f...

Throttling ASP.NET Web API calls

Many API’s out there, such as GitHub’s API, have a concept called “rate limiting” or “throttling” in place. Rate limiting...

SymbolSource support for NuGet Package Source Discovery

A couple of weeks, I told you about NuGet Package Source Discovery. In short, it allows you to add some meta information to your website and use your website...

Running unit tests when deploying ASP.NET to Windows Azure Web Sites

One of the well-loved features of Windows Azure Web Sites is the fact that you can simply push our ASP.NET application’s source code to the platform us...

NuGet Package Source Discovery

It’s already been 2 years since NuGet was introduced. This.NET package manager features the concept of feeds, or “package sources”, on whic...

Remote profiling Windows Azure Cloud Services with dotTrace

Here’s another cross-post from our JetBrains .NET blog. It’s focused around dotTrace but there are a lot of tips and tricks around Windows Azure ...

Custom media types for ASP.NET Web API versioning

There is a raging discussion on the interwebs on whether to version API’s by using their URL or by using a custom media type. Some argue that doing it ...

Taking over the @msdnbelux Twitter account

Just a quick post to let you know I’ll be taking over the @msdnbelux Twitter account for the next two weeks. This is the official Twitter account for M...

Working with Windows Azure SQL Database in PhpStorm

Disclaimer: My job at JetBrains holds a lot of “exploration of tools”. From time to time I discover things I personally find really cool and blog about those...

Global Windows Azure Bootcamp - april 27th

On April 27th, 2013, you’ll have the ability to join a Windows Azure Bootcamp on a location close to you. We’ve started this with the idea of may...

Running unit tests when deploying to Windows Azure Web Sites

When deploying an application to Windows Azure Web Sites, a number of deployment steps are executed. For .NET projects, msbuild is triggered. For node.js app...

Hosting a YouTrack instance on Windows Azure

Note: this is a cross-post from the JetBrains YouTrack blog. Since it is centered around Windows Azure, I thought it is appropriate to post a copy on my own ...

Tales from the trenches: resizing a Windows Azure virtual disk the smooth way

We’ve all been there. Running a virtual machine on Windows Azure and all of a sudden you notice that a virtual disk is running full. Having no access t...

Working with Windows Azure command line tools from within Visual Studio

Right after my last post (Working with Windows Azure command line tools from PhpStorm), the obvious question came to mind… Can I do Windows Azure thin...

Working with Windows Azure from within PhpStorm

Working with Windows Azure and my new toy (PhpStorm), I wanted to have support for doing specific actions like creating a new web site or a new database in t...

Windows Azure Websites and PhpStorm

In my new role as Technical Evangelist at JetBrains, I’ve been experimenting with one of our products a lot: PhpStorm. I was kind of curious how this t...

Storing user uploads in Windows Azure blob storage

On one of the mailing lists I follow, an interesting question came up: “We want to write a VSTO plugin for Outlook which copies attachments to blob sto...

Protecting your ASP.NET Web API using OAuth2 and the Windows Azure Access Control Service

An article I wrote a while ago has been posted on DeveloperFusion: The world in which we live evolves at a vast speed. Today, many applications on the Inte...

Configuring IIS methods for ASP.NET Web API on Windows Azure Websites and elsewhere

That’s a pretty long title, I agree. When working on my implementation of RFC2324, also known as the HyperText Coffee Pot Control Protocol, I’ve ...

How I push GoogleAnalyticsTracker to NuGet

If you check my blog post Tracking API usage with Google Analytics, you’ll see that a small open-source component evolved from MyGet. This component, GoogleA...

A phone call from the cloud: Windows Azure, SignalR & Twilio

Note: this blog post used to be an article for the Windows Azure Roadtrip website. Since that one no longer exists, I decided to post the articles on my blog...

Sending e-mail from Windows Azure

Note: this blog post used to be an article for the Windows Azure Roadtrip website. Since that one no longer exists, I decided to post the articles on my blo...

(Almost) time for something new…

September 1st, 2005. Fresh from school, I got the opportunity to start at RealDolmen (Dolmen, back then). Not just a “welcome, here’s your customer, cya!”-st...

From API key to user with ASP.NET Web API

ASP.NET Web API is a great tool to build an API with. Or as my buddy Kristof Rennen (and the French) always say: “it makes you ‘api”. One o...

What PartitionKey and RowKey are for in Windows Azure Table Storage

For the past few months, I’ve been coaching a “Microsoft Student Partner” (who has a great blog on Kinect for Windows by the way!) on Windo...

MyGet Build Services - Join the private beta!

Good news! Over the past 4 weeks we’ve been sending out tweets about our secret project MyGet project “wonka”. Today is the day Wonka shows...

Get your Windows 8 up to speed fast

With the release of Windows 8 on MSDN yesterday, I have a gut feeling that today, around the globe, people are installing this fresh operating system on thei...

ASP.NET Web API OAuth2 delegation with Windows Azure Access Control Service

If you are familiar with OAuth2’s protocol flow, you know there’s a lot of things you should implement if you want to protect your ASP.NET Web API using OAut...

Hands-on Windows Azure Services for Windows

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced their Windows Azure Services for Windows Server. If you’ve ever heard about the Windows Azure Appliance (whi...

Tweaking Windows Azure Web Sites

A while ago, I was at a customer who wanted to run his own WebDAV server (using www.sabredav.org) on Windows Azure Web Sites. After some testing, it seemed t...

Fourth year as an MVP, second year for Windows Azure

Woohoo! I just received the great mail I expect yearly on the first of July: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you wit...

Domain based routing with ASP.NET Web API

Imagine you are building an API which is “multi-tenant”: the domain name defines the tenant or customer name and should be passed as a route valu...

Setting up a webfarm using Windows Azure Virtual Machines

With the release of Microsoft’s Windows Azure Virtual Machines, a bunch of new scenarios became available on their cloud platform. If you plan to host multip...

Use NuGet Package Restore to avoid pushing assemblies to Windows Azure Websites

Windows Azure Websites allows you to publish a web site in ASP.NET, PHP, Node, … to Windows Azure by simply pushing your source code to a TFS or Git r...

GitHub for Windows Azure Websites

With the new release of Windows Azure and Windows Azure Websites, a lot of new scenarios with Windows Azure just became possible. One I like a lot, especiall...

AZUG Windows Azure Saturday overview

As one of the board members of the Windows Azure User Group in Belgium, I wanted to write a post on an event we organized last weekend. We do more events (on...

Ready for a Windows Azure roadtrip?

A while ago, Michelangelo van Dam (a hardcore PHP guy), François Hertay (a hardcore Java guru) and myself (a .NET guy) were asked if we wanted to wri...

Social meet up on Twitter for MEET Windows Azure on June 7th

Here’s a perhaps rather redundant event for you but it should be kind of fun: MEET Windows Azure on Twitter (+ Beer). The idea is to list people who have a t...

The world is changing: the future of IT

I’ve had my say on cloud and the new world of IT already in an earlier post, Predictions for the future. Today, I’m seeing signs the world is in fact startin...

Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network

As you know, Windows Azure is a very rich platform. Next to compute and storage, it offers a series of building blocks that simplify your life as a cloud dev...

Protecting Windows Azure Web and Worker roles from malware

Most IT administrators will install some sort of virus scanner on your precious servers. Since the cloud, from a technical perspective, is just a server, why...

Pro NuGet is finally there!

Short version: Install-Package ProNuget or http://amzn.to/pronuget It’s been a while since I wrote my first book. After I’ve been telling that wr...

I’m an ASP Insider

Cool! I’ve just learned that I’m invited to join the ASPInsiders. I’m really excited and honored to be part of this group of great ASP.NET experts. Very much...

TechDays Finland - Architectural Patterns for the Cloud - NuGet

As promised, here are the slide decks for the two sessions delivered at TechDays Finland last week. Architectural Patterns for the Cloud The promise of all c...

Introducing MyGet package source proxy (beta)

My blog already has quite the number of blog posts around MyGet, our NuGet-as-a-Service solution which my colleague Xavier and I are running. There are a lot...

Slides for TechDays Belgium 2012: SignalR

It was the last session on the last day of TechDays 2012 so I was expecting almost nobody to show up. Still, a packed room came to have a look at how to make...

Tracking API usage with Google Analytics

So you have an API. Congratulations! You should have one. But how do you track who uses it, what client software they use and so on? You may be logging API c...

Don’t brag about your Visual Studio achievements! (yet?)

The Channel 9 folks seem to have released the first beta of their Visual Studio Achievements project. The idea of Visual Studio Achievements is pretty awesom...

How do you synchronize a million to-do lists?

Not this question, but a similar one, has been asked by one of our customers. An interesting question, isn’t it? Wait. It gets more interesting. I’ll sketch ...

Predictions for the future

It’s almost the end of 2011. Typically a time where bloggers start to write about their past year and what they’ll do in the next. A time where t...

Using SignalR to broadcast a slide deck

Last week, I’ve discussed Techniques for real-time client-server communication on the web (SignalR to the rescue). We’ve seen that when building ...

Techniques for real-time client-server communication on the web (SignalR to the rescue)

When building web applications, you often face the fact that HTTP, the foundation of the web, is a request/response protocol. A client issues a request, a se...

Repaving your PC: the easier way

It"’s been a while since I had to repave my laptop. I have a Windows Home Server (WHS) at home which images my PC almost daily and allows restoring it ...

Publishing symbol packages for a MyGet feed

Ever since NuGet 1.2, there is a great way for NuGet package authors to let their users debug into the package’s binaries. With almost no additional ef...

Rewriting WCF OData Services base URL with load balancing & reverse proxy

When scaling out an application to multiple servers, often a form of load balancing or reverse proxying is used to provide external users access to a web ser...

Running Memcached on Windows Azure for PHP

After three conferences in two weeks with a lot of “airport time”, which typically converts into “let’s code!” time, I think I ...

Setting up a NuGet repository in seconds: MyGet public feeds

A few months ago, my colleague Xavier Decoster and I introduced MyGet as a tool where you can create your own, private NuGet feeds. A couple of weeks later ...

NuGet push… to Windows Azure

When looking at how people like to deploy their applications to a cloud environment, a large faction seems to prefer being able to use their source control s...

ASP.NET MVC dynamic view sections

Earlier today, a colleague of mine asked for advice on how he could create a “dynamic” view. To elaborate, he wanted to create a change settings ...

Why MyGet uses Windows Azure

Recently one of the Tweeps following me started fooling around and hit one of my sweet spots: Windows Azure. Basically, he mocked me for using Windows Azure ...

Book review: Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook

Over the past few months, I’ve been doing technical reviewing for a great Windows Azure book: the Windows Azure Development Cookbook published by Packt...

A client side Glimpse to your PHP application

A few months ago, the .NET world was surprised with a magnificent tool called “Glimpse”. Today I’m pleased to release a first draft of a PH...

Version 4 of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP released

Only a few months after the Windows Azure SDK for PHP 3.0.0, Microsoft and RealDolmen are proud to present you the next version of the most complete SDK for ...

Copy packages from one NuGet feed to another

Yesterday, a funny discussion was going on at the NuGet Discussion Forum on CodePlex. Funny, you say? Well yes. Funny because it was about a feature we envi...

Windows Azure Accelerator for Web Roles

One of the questions I often get around Windows Azure is: “Is Windows Azure interesting for me?”. It’s a tough one, because most of the time when someone ask...

A hidden gem in the Windows Azure SDK for PHP: command line parsing

It’s always fun to dive into frameworks: often you’ll find little hidden gems that can be of great use in your own projects. A dive into the Windows Azure SD...

A first look at Windows Azure AppFabric Applications

After the Windows Azure AppFabric team announced the availability of Windows Azure AppFabric Applications (preview), I signed up for early access immediately...

Officially a cloudhead now! (or: re-awarded MVP)

Woohoo! I just received the great mail I expect yearly on the first of July: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present ...

Delegate feed privileges to other users on MyGet

One of the first features we had envisioned for MyGet and which seemed increasingly popular was the ability to provide other users a means of managing packag...

Enabling conditional Basic HTTP authentication on a WCF OData service

Yes, a long title, but also something I was not able to find too easily using Google. Here’s the situation: for MyGet, we are implementing basic authenticati...

Community Day 2011 - Fun with ASP.NET MVC, MEF and NuGet

To start the blog post: AWESOME! That’s what I have to say about the latest edition of Community Day 2011. I had the privilege of doing a session on AS...

Advanced scenarios with Windows Azure Queues

For DeveloperFusion, I wrote an article on Windows Azure queues. Interested in working with queues and want to use some advanced techniques? Head over to the...

MyGet now supports pushing from the command line

One of the work items we had opened for MyGet was the ability to push packages to a private feed from the command line. Only a few hours after our initial la...

Creating your own private NuGet feed: MyGet

Ever since NuGet came out, I’ve been thinking about leveraging it in a corporate environment. I've seen two NuGet server implementations appear on...

Scaffolding and packaging a Windows Azure project in PHP

With the fresh release of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0, it’s time to have a look at the future. One of the features we’re playing with is c...

Just released: MvcSiteMapProvider 3.1.0 RC

It looks like I’m really cr… ehm… releasing way too much over the past few days, but yes, here’s another one: I just posted MvcSiteMapProvider 3.1.0 RC both ...

Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0 released

Microsoft and RealDolmen are very proud to announce the availability of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0 on CodePlex! (here's the official Microsoft post) ...

Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1 KB2478063 Service Pack 5 Feature Set 3.1 R2 November Edition RTW

As you can see, a new .NET Framework version just came out. Read about it at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/endpoint/archive/2011/04/18/microsoft-net-framework-4-pl...

A Glimpse at Windows Identity Foundation claims

For a current project, I’m using Glimpse to inspect what’s going on behind the ASP.NET covers. I really hope that you have heard about the greatest ASP.NET m...

Using dynamic WCF service routes

For a demo I am working on, I’m creating an OData feed. This OData feed is in essence a WCF service which is activated using System.ServiceModel.Activation.S...

Wordpress auto sign-on with IIS7 and a plugin

For our RealDolmen blog platform, where we use Wordpress as the engine running multiple external and internal blogs (yes, that’s an internal SaaS we have the...

Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0.0 BETA released

Microsoft and RealDolmen are very proud to announce the availability of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0.0 BETA on CodePlex. This releases is somethin...

Slides for my talk at MIX11: Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3, MEF and NuGet

As promised, here are the slides and demo code for my talk "Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3, MEF and NuGet" I presented at MIX in Las Vegas. Abstract: "So you have a ...

Official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app released

I’m proud to announce that we (RealDolmen) have released the official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app! The official Belgium TechDays 2011 gives you...

Lightweight PHP application deployment to Windows Azure

Those of you who are deploying PHP applications to Windows Azure, are probably using the Windows Azure tooling for Eclipse or the fantastic command-line tool...

Windows Azure and scaling: how? (PHP)

One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fa...

Windows Azure and scaling: how? (.NET)

One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fa...

Windows Azure CDN updates

The Windows Azure team has just put out the new Windows Azure SDK 1.4 for download. Next to that, I noticed some interesting new capabilities for the CDN (Co...

Put your cloud on a diet (or: Windows Azure and scaling: why?)

One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fa...

Authenticate Orchard users with AppFabric Access Control Service

From the initial release of Orchard, the new .NET CMS, I have been wondering how difficult (or easy) it would be to integrate external (“federated”) authenti...

Thank you for getting me in Vegas!

I wish to thank everyone who has been voring for getting me in Vegas, speaking at MIX11. Without having expectations, I was really really surprised (and happ...

MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 released

Just a quick note to tell that MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 has been released and is available on CodePlex and NuGet. This version is targeted at ASP.NET MVC 3. ...

ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framewok on NuGet

If you search on my blog, there’s a bunch of posts where I talk about ASP.NET MVC and MEF. And what’s cool: these posts are the ones that are act...

Introducing the PHP on Azure Contest

It’s not every day that I get to be in the jury for a contest. It’s not every day that I deliver a training about PHP on Azure. Since this is abo...

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: ...

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 int...

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 ...

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 ...

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 me...

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’...

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 d...

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. Unles...

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...

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… Im...

Windows Phone 7 First Impressions

Back in june of this year, I received a very surprising e-mail stating that I would receive a Windows Phone 7 developer device. The reason for this? No, not ...

Using MvcSiteMapProvider throuh NuPack

Probably you have seen the buzz around NuPack, a package manager for .NET with thight integration in Visual Studio 2010. NuPack is a free, open source develo...

Cost Architecting for Windows Azure

Just wanted to do a quick plug to an article I’ve written for TechNet Magazine: Windows Azure: Cost Architecting for Windows Azure. Designing application...

PHP on Windows and on Azure slide deck

As promised during my session on PHP Summer Camp in Lisbon, Portugal, here's the slide deck. PHP on Windows and on Azure PHP on Windows and on Azure</emb...

Remix 2010 slides and sample code

As promised during my session on Remix 10 yesterday in Belgium, here's the slide deck and sample code. Building for the cloud: integrating an application on ...

Windows Azure Diagnostics in PHP

When working with PHP on Windows Azure, chances are you may want to have a look at what’s going on: log files, crash dumps, performance counters, &hell...

Introducing Windows Azure Companion – Cloud for the masses?

At OSIDays in India, the Interoperability team at Microsoft has made an interesting series of announcements related to PHP and Windows Azure.  To summar...

Announcing the Windows Azure Online Conference

Steve Plank from Microsoft UK has just announced the UK Windows Azure Online Conference on his blog. This will be a whole day, online Windows Azure conferenc...

BlogEngine.NET comment spam filtering

It’s been a month or three since I was utterly fed up with comment spam on my blog. Sure, I did turn on comment moderation so you, as a visitor, would not no...

Book review: Refactoring with Visual Studio 2010

Yet again, Packt Publishing has sent me a book for review. For once, one without the typical orange/black cover but instead a classy white/black cover: Refac...

Hybrid Azure applications using OData

In the whole Windows Azure story, Microsoft has always been telling you could build hybrid applications: an on-premise application with a service on Azure or...

Simplified access control using Windows Azure AppFabric Labs

Earlier this week, Zane Adam announced the availability of the New AppFabric Access Control service in LABS. The highlights for this release (and I quote): ...

MvcSiteMapProvider 2.1.0 released!

The release for MvcSiteMapProvider 2.1.0 has just been posted on CodePlex. MvcSiteMapProvider is, as the name implies, an ASP.NET MVC SiteMapProvider implem...

ASP.NET MVC 3 and MEF sitting in a tree…

As I stated in a previous blog post: ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1 has been released! I talked about some of the new features and promised to do a blog post in the...

ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1 is out! Quick review…

I just noticed a very interesting download: ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1. Yes, you are reading this correctly, the first bits for v3.0 are there! Let’s have...

Manage your SQL Azure database from your browser

Yesterday, I noticed on Twitter that the SQL Azure - Project “Houston” CTP 1 has been released online. For those who do not know Houston, this is...

Renewed MVP ASP.NET for 2010!

Just got the best e-mail a Microsoft community member can receive in his mailbox: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present yo...

ASP.NET MVC - MvcSiteMapProvider 2.0 is out!

I’m very proud to announce the release of the ASP.NET MVC MvcSiteMapProvider 2.0! I’m also proud that the name of this product now exceeds the av...

Running on Windows Azure - ChronoRace - Autoscaling

At RealDolmen, we had the luck of doing the first (known) project on Windows Azure in Belgium. Together with Microsoft, we had the opportunity to make the C...

Extension methods for PHP

The concept of “extension” methods will be nothing new to this blog’s .NET-related audience. For the PHP-related audience, this is probably something new. L...

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 ...

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: “N...

Linuxwochen Austria

As part of my global domination plans, I this week visited Vienna, Austria for a session at Linuxwochen around PHP on Windows. PHP on Windows Abstract: &ldqu...

Slides of our VISUG session

As promised, here are the slides of the VISUG session me and Kris van der Mast did yesterday. Being a pimp without Silverlight! Abstract: “Don't tell us you'...

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 vo...

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, Window...

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. Sc...

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 pl...

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 ha...

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...

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...

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, bu...

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, ...

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 Mi...

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&rs...

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 in...

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 th...

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! ...

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 ext...

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 mar...

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...

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 per...

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...

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. Abstra...

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 Micr...

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 sessi...

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 id...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Microsoft PDC09 keynote highlights

Finally found some time to write a short blog post on the announcements this morning at PDC 2009. Ray Ozzie started the keynote this morning, focusing on Mic...

Localize ASP.NET MVC 2 DataAnnotations validation messages

Living in a country where there are there are three languages being used, almost every application you work on requires some form of localization. In an earl...

Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse for PHP developers

Pfew! Finally I can spread the word on this! While working on the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, I had the opportunity to test-drive the development builds of th...

Upcoming sessions on Azure, PHP and ASP.NET

It’s going to be a filled end of 2009… There’s Microsoft PDC which I will be attending and will probably cause me some sleepless nights (b...

Recording of my session at Remix 2009 - ASP.NET MVC

On September 29, I did a session on ASP.NET MVC at Remix 2009 Belgium. All session recordings are now online, check the Remix09 site. Slides and code fo...

Let me Bing that for you

Have you ever been bugged with stupid questions? Do you get tired of people asking stuff that is only one search engine query away? Chances are you answered ...

Leveraging ASP.NET MVC 2 futures “ViewState”

Let’s start this blog post with a confession: yes, I abused a feature in the ASP.NET MVC 2 futures assembly to fire up discussion. In my previous blog ...

Exploring the ASP.NET MVC 2 futures assemby

The latest preview of ASP.NET MVC 2, preview 2, has been released on CodePlex last week. All features of the preview 1 version are still in, as well as some...

Remix 2009 session - Slides and code

As promised during the session at Remix 2009, here’s my example code and slide deck. Abstract: "Building a Twitter clone in 60 minutes, featuring what's...

Simple API for Cloud Application Services

Zend, in co-operation with IBM, Microsoft, Rackspace, GoGrid and other cloud leaders, today have released their Simple API for Cloud Application Services pro...

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...

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...

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: ...

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...

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 contr...

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 atte...

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 bl...

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...

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 Servic...

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 CodePl...

ReMIX Belgium session on ASP.NET MVC

Just learned I’ll be doing a session on ASP.NET MVC at ReMIX Belgium. ReMix brings the best of MIX09 in Las Vegas to Belgium: it bring us internationa...

Query the cloud with PHP (PHPLinq and Windows Azure)

I’m pleased to announce PHPLinq currently supports basic querying of Windows Azure Table Storage. PHPLinq is a class library for PHP, based on the ide...

Authenticating users with RPXNow (in ASP.NET MVC)

Don’t you get sick of having to register at website X, at website Y, at website Z, …? It is really not fun to maintain all these accounts, chan...

PHP SDK for Windows Azure - Milestone 2 release

I’m proud to announce our second milestone for the PHP SDK for Windows Azure project that Microsoft and RealDolmen started back in May. Next to our re...

I’m an MVP ASP.NET!

Yesterday evening, I received the following e-mail: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP ...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 5: the front-end

“After having found a god-like guardian for his application, Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker found out that his application still had no functio...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 4: Authentication and membership

“Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker just returned from his quest to a barn in the clouds, when he discovered that he forgot to lock the door to his...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 3: Store data in the cloud

“After setting up his workplace, knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker thought of something else: if a farmer wants to keep a lot of hay, he needs a ...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 2: Creating an Azure project

“Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker was about to start working on his TwitterMatic application, named after the great god of social networking, Tw...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 1: Introduction

“Once upon a time, Microsoft started a Windows Azure developing contest named new CloudApp();. While it first was only available for US candidates, th...

Announcing: Azure User Group Belgium

After the summer, I'll be joining Kurt Claeys and Yves Goeleven and for the start of the Azure User Group Belgium (or AZUG.BE).  AZUG.BE is a Belgian us...

Application-wide action filters in ASP.NET MVC

Ever had a team of developers using your ASP.NET MVC framework? Chances are you have implemented some action filters (i.e. for logging) which should be appli...

Revised: ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

A while ago, I did a blog post on combining ASP.NET MVC and MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework), making it possible to “plug” controllers and v...

ASP.NET MVC TDD using Visual Studio 2010

Phil Haack announced yesterday that the tooling support for ASP.NET MVC is available for Visual Studio 2010. Troy Goode already blogged about the designer sn...

A view from the cloud (or: locate your ASP.NET MVC views on Windows Azure Blob Storage)

Hosting and deploying ASP.NET MVC applications on Windows Azure works like a charm. However, if you have been reading my blog for a while, you might have see...

PHP and Silverlight - DevDays session

I just returned from The Hague where Kevin and I delivered a session on PHP and Silverlight. As promised, we are putting our slides and demos online. Downlo...

ConnectedShow Podcast - PHP SDK for Windows Azure

The fifth episode of the ConnectedShow podcast is up. This podcast is all about cloud computing, Windows Azure, … Recently, they have asked me if I wanted to...

ASP.NET MVC Domain Routing

Looking for an ASP.NET MVC 6 version? Check this post. Ever since the release of ASP.NET MVC and its routing engine (System.Web.Routing), Microsoft has been...

Document Interoperability Workshop, London, May 18 2009

After a pleasant flight with VLM airlines (Antwerp – London City), traveling under half of the city of London, I arrived at the Microsoft offices in V...

Mocking - VISUG session (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! Mocking - VISUG session (screencast) Abstract: "...

Announcing PHP SDK for Windows Azure

As part of Microsoft’s commitment to Interoperability, a new open source project has just been released on CodePlex: PHP SDK for Windows Azure, bridgi...

Mocking - VISUG session

Thursday evening, I did a session on Mocking for the VISUG (Visual Studio User Group Belgium). As promised, here is the slide deck I’ve used. The sessi...

More ASP.NET MVC Best Practices

In this post, I’ll share some of the best practices and guidelines which I have come across while developing ASP.NET MVC web applications. I will not c...

Book review: Learning Ext JS

For a project at one of our customers, we’re building a rich web application using the Coolite web controls in ASP.NET MVC. Coolite is a great product...

PHPPowerPoint 0.1.0 (CTP1) released!

People following me on Twitter could have already guessed, but here’s something I probably should not have done for my agenda: next to the well known ...

MSDN session on ASP.NET MVC

As promised to all people attending my online session on ASP.NET MVC this afternoon, here is the slide deck I’ve used. MSDN - ASP.NET MVC</embed>...

ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

Microsoft’s Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a .NET library (released on CodePlex) that enables greater re-use of application components. You c...

Using the ASP.NET MVC Futures AsyncController

Last week, I blogged about all stuff that is included in the ASP.NET MVC Futures assembly, which is an assembly available on CodePlex and contains possible ...

Speaking at DevDays 2009, The Hague (and more)

Some Great news (at least: I think this is great :-)): Kevin Dockx and I will be giving a session on PHP and Silverlight at the Netherlands DevDays09. This e...

Back to the future! Exploring ASP.NET MVC Futures

For those of you who did not know yet: next to the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 version and its source code, there’s also an interesting assembly available if you ...

New CodePlex project: MvcSiteMap – ASP.NET MVC sitemap provider

If you have been using the ASP.NET MVC framework, you possibly have been searching for something like the classic ASP.NET sitemap. After you've played with i...

Sample chapter from ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

Here’s a shameless, commercial blogpost… With yesterday’s 1.0 release of the ASP.NET MVC framework, I’m sure the following sample ...

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has been released!

To keep up with a good tradition (see here and here), I have some great news on ASP.NET MVC: we are at version 1.0! This means production ready, supported, ...

Accessing Windows Azure Blob Storage from PHP

Pfew! A week of Microsoft TechDays here in Belgium with lots of talks on new Microsoft stuff, Azure included. You may know I already experimented with Window...

CRUD with ASP.NET MVC (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! CRUD with ASP.NET MVC (screencast) Abstr...

Creating an ASP.NET MVC application with Google Gears

Offline web applications… This term really sounds like 2 different things: offline, no network, and web application, online. Maarten, you speak in ri...

Announcing my book: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

It’s been quite a job, but there it is: Packt just announced my very first book on their site. It is titled “ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly”, co...

Replacement during my vacation: Wilson

This morning, I arrived at work after a great week of skiing in Pitztal, Austria. Unfortunately, I found my chair occupied by a new colleague looking a bit ...

Book review: Software Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2008

Another book review, this time for Packt’s “Software Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2008”. The book introduces you to the main ty...

Saving a PHPExcel spreadsheet to Google Documents

As you may know, PHPExcel is built using an extensible model, supporting different input and output formats. The PHPExcel core class library features a sprea...

New VISUG website online

Last week, the new VISUG website has been released. VISUG stands for Visual Studio User Group Belgium and is one of the largest .NET related user groups in ...

Form validation with ASP.NET MVC release candidate

Last week, the ASP.NET MVC framework release candidate was released (check ScottGu’s post). Apart from some great new tooling support, form validation...

PHPLinq 0.4.0 released on CodePlex!

I’m pleased to announce that PHPLinq 0.4.0 has been released on CodePlex. PHPLinq is currently one year old, and I decided to add a huge step in funct...

TechDays 2009 agenda has been posted!

Just a quick note: the Belgian TechDays 2009 agenda has been published. You can find it on the TechDays website. Also, Katrien has posted some more details ...

Updated CarTrackr to ASP.NET MVC RC

As you may have noticed, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate has been released over the night. You can read all about it in ScottGu’s blog post, coveri...

ECMA-376 implementation notes are out

Last month, Microsoft released the implementation notes for their ODF implementation in Office 2007. These implementation notes are actually the documentat...

Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking

Last week, I found another book from Packt in my letterbox. This time, the title is ASP.NET 3.5 Social Networking, written by Andrew Siemer. On the back...

Checking username availability with jQuery (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! Checking username availability with jQuer...

Verifying code and testing with Pex

Earlier this week, Katrien posted an update on the list of Belgian TechDays 2009 speakers. This post featured a summary on all sessions, of which one wa...

Seven things you didn’t know about me

Seems 2009 is starting off with yet another round of tagging people. Back in 2007, I already had to write five things about myself. Since we are now two yea...

Top blog posts in 2008

Since everyone (that is Simone Chiaretta and Phil Haack) seems to be blogging about 2008 and their top posts, here’s my list. Top 5 blog posts in 20...

Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 Application Architecture and Design

The people at Packt asked it again: “Do you want to review this book?” Sure I do! The book I’m reviewing this time is ASP.NET 3.5 Applica...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 5 - Deploying in the cloud

This post is part 5 (and the final part) of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 4 - Membership and authentication

This post is part 4 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 3 - Data storage

This post is part 3 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is...

Microsoft launches Implementation Notes (for ODF)

Just a quick post: at the Document Operability workshop in Brussels on December 2, Microsoft already announced they were going to do something with impleme...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 2 - Cloud-enabling CarTrackr

This post is part 2 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is...

Track your car expenses in the cloud! CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 1 - Introduction

As you may see in the title, I will be starting a series on modifying my CarTrackr sample application to a cloud-based, Windows Azure application. At this p...

New Entity Framework / LINQ blog!

Just a quick recommendation note: One of my colleagues, Julien Hanssens, has started blogging on his experiences with the Entity Framework and LINQ. Here ar...

ASP.NET MVC XForms released on CodePlex

Just noticed there's a new project on CodePlex related to the ASP.NET MVC framework: MVC XForms. MVC XForms is a simple UI framework for ASP.NET MVC bas...

OpenXML DII workshop Brussels - Quick summary

A few days ago, I wrote I was doing a presentation on the DII workshop in Brussels together with Julien Chable. Apart from heavy traffic from Antwerp to Bru...

PHPExcel featured in php

architect / November 2008

Nice to see that there's a lot of activity going on related to PHPExcel! This weekend, I receievd my electronic copy of php|architect / November 2008 f...

Presenting at the OpenXML DII workshop Brussels

First things first: WTF is DII??? It's the "Document Interoperability Initiative" that Microsoft launched. The workshop will be a day filled w...

Partial page updates with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery (and action filters)

When building an ASP.NET MVC application, chances are that you are using master pages. After working on the application for a while, it's time to spice ...

OpenXML support in Zend Framework 1.7 Lucene indexer

It has indeed been a long time since I blogged about OpenXML. However, this does not mean I'm completely doing nothing with it! PHPExcel still keeps ea...

Integrating NUnit test results in Team Build 2008

When using Team Foundation Server 2008 and Team Build, chances are you are developing unit tests in Microsoft’s test framework which is integrated wit...

Creating a generic Linq to SQL ModelBinder for the ASP.NET MVC framework

You are right! This is indeed my third post on ASP.NET MVC ModelBinders. The first one focussed on creating a ModelBinder from scratch in an older preview r...

CarTrackr - Sample ASP.NET MVC application

Some people may have already noticed the link in my VISUG session blog post, but for those who didn't... I've released my sample application CarTra...

Introduction to ASP.NET MVC for VISUG - Presentation materials

Yesterday evening, I did a presentation on the ASP.NET MVC framework for VISUG (Visual Studio User Group Belgium). I really hope everyone got a good feel o...

Using the ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder attribute - Second part

Just after the ASP.NET MVC preview 5 was released, I made a quick attempt to using the ModelBinder attribute. In short, a ModelBinder allows you to use comp...

Forms interaction with ASP.NET MVC (screencast)

Abstract: "This screencast is a short demonstration on how you can handle form interactions using the ASP.NET MVC framework." Download sample c...

ASP.NET MVC preview 5’s AntiForgeryToken helper method and attribute

The new ASP.NET MVC preview 5 featured a number of new HtmlHelper methods. One of these methods is the HtmlHelper.AntiForgeryToken. When you place <%=Htm...

Using the ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder attribute

ASP.NET MVC action methods can be developed using regular method parameters. In earlier versions of the ASP.NET MVC framework, these parameters were all sim...

Form validation with ASP.NET MVC preview 5

In earlier ASP.NET MVC previews, form validation was something that should be implemented "by hand". Since the new ASP.NET MVC preview 5, form val...

Building an ASP.NET MVC sitemap provider with security trimming

Warning!A new version of the source code provided in this post is available here. Use this blog post as reference only.  Yes, it has been a while sin...

MSDN Chopsticks on ASP.NET MVC (screencasts)

A while ago, KatrienDG asked me to do some screencasts on the ASP.NET MVC framework for the MSDN Chopsticks page. I've been working on 2 screencasts: an...

ASP.NET MVC - Upcoming preview 4 release

ScottGu just posted that there's an upcoming preview 4 release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. What I immediately noticed, is that there are actually some...

Article on ASP.NET MVC in .NET magazine #21

Yesterday, I received the new Dutch edition of .NET magazine containing my article on the ASP.NET MVC framework. Since the article was written quite a whil...

Extending ASP.NET MVC OutputCache ActionFilterAttribute - Adding substitution

In my previous blog post on ASP.NET MVC OutputCache, not all aspects of "classic" ASP.NET output caching were covered. For instance, substitution ...

Creating an ASP.NET MVC OutputCache ActionFilterAttribute

In every web application, there are situations where you want to cache the HTML output of a specific page for a certain amount of time, because underlying da...

The devil is in the details (Visual Studio Team System test policy)

Have you ever been in a difficult situation where a software product is overall very good, but a small detail is going wrong? At least I've been, for th...

Code based ASP.NET MVC GridView

Earlier this week a colleague of mine asked me if there was such thing as a  DataGrid or GridView or something like that in the ASP.NET MVC framework. M...

Detailed code metrics with NDepend

A while ago, I blogged about code performance analysis in Visual Studio 2008. Using profiling and hot path tracking, I measured code performance and was abl...

ASP.NET MVC framework preview 3 released!

Don't know how I do it, but I think this blog post is yet again the first one out there mentioning a new release of the ASP.NET framework (preview 3)&nb...

Creating a custom ViewEngine for the ASP.NET MVC framework

Have you ever seen a presentation of ScottGu about the ASP.NET MVC framework? There is one particular slide that keeps coming back, stating that every step ...

ASP.NET MVC custom ActionResult (ImageResult)

The ASP.NET MVC framework introduces the concept of returning an ActionResult in Controllers since the "preview preview" release on CodePlex. The ...

Having fun with project managers! (or: why you should lock your desktop)

Have you ever left your computer unattended? (I do hope that!) Do you lock your desktop when this occurs? (I hope so either!) Not locking your desktop can b...

Finally! My own custom BlogEngine.net template!

Right after my blog move to BlogEngine.net, I decided to create a custom template for my blog to make it more unique in the blogosphere. Less than a year la...

New Team Foundation Server projects on CodePlex!

Busy times... Lots of work, some holidays here in Belgium, ... But there's always time to browse CodePlex! It is actually a good thing to do that from t...

Zend Studio + Teamprise = PHP development with Team Foundation Server

Ever since I started developing PHPExcel, I noticed this option of connecting to CodePlex's Team Foundation Server using Teamprise for Eclipse (free Cod...

ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit alternative authentication

Last week, I blogged about the ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit and some of its features. Since then, Troy Goode and I are developing at warp-speed to pro...

To all BlogEngine.NET users… Go patch!

This morning, I read about a serious security issue in BlogEngine.NET. The security issue is in the JavaScript HTTP handler, which lets all files pass trou...

ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit

Yesterday, I read a cool blog post from Troy Goode about his new CodePlex project MvcMembership. I also noticed his call for help, so I decided to dedicate...

Reuse Excel business logic with PHPExcel

In many companies, business logic resides in Excel. This business logic is sometimes created by business analysts and sometimes by business users who want to...

ASP.NET MVC Framework out on CodePlex

This morning, I was browsing the new projects page on CodePlex and noticed something nice! The ASP.NET MVC team already rumoured around making the ASP.NET M...

ASP.NET MVC - Testing issues Q and A

When playing around with the ASP.NET MVC framework and automated tests using Rhino Mocks, you will probably find yourself close to throwing your computer t...

March 18 ASP.NET MVC links

Too busy this week to write large blog posts myself... Luckily other people do write interesting things on ASP.NET MVC! ASP.NET MVC Route tester Test y...

Heroes happen here - Microsoft TechDays 2008 in Belgium

Just to inform you: together with a numer of colleagues from Dolmen, I'll be attending the Microsoft TechDays 2008 in Ghent, Belgium on 12 and 13 M...

OpenXML + Silverlight 2.0 = cool!

Mix '08 announced some nice things, among them the release of Silverlight 2.0 (beta), ASP.NET MVC framework (CTP 2). This morning, I saw one very cool t...

PHPLinq version 0.2.0 released!

Last friday, I released PHPLinq version 0.2.0. LINQ, or Language Integrated Query, is a component inside the .NET framework which enables you to perform quer...

Data Driven Testing in Visual Studio 2008 - Part 2

This is the second post in my series on Data Driven Testing in Visual Studio 2008. The first post focusses on Data Driven Testing in regular Unit Tests. Thi...

Data Driven Testing in Visual Studio 2008 - Part 1

Last week, I blogged about code performance analysis in visual studio 2008. since that topic provoked lots of comments (thank you Bart for associating "...

Code performance analysis in Visual Studio 2008

Visual Studio developer, did you know you have a great performance analysis (profiling) tool at your fingertips? In Visual Studio 2008 this profiling tool h...

Indexing Word 2007 (docx) files with Zend_Search_Lucene

You may have noticed Microsoft released their Search Server 2008 a few weeks ago. Search Server delivers search capabilities to your organization quickly and...

Books I recently read…

A while ago, I was contacted by the people of Packt Publishing asking me to review two of their latest books, ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials ...

ASP.NET Session State Partitioning using State Server Load Balancing

It seems like amount of posts on ASP.NET's Session State keeps growing. Here's the list: ASP.NET Session State Partitioning ASP.NET load balancing and ASP.N...

ASP.NET Session State Partitioning

After my previous blog post on ASP.NET Session State, someone asked me if I knew anything about ASP.NET Session State Partitioning. Since this is a little kn...

LINQ for PHP (Language Integrated Query for PHP)

Perhaps you have already heard of C# 3.5's "LINQ" component. LINQ, or Language Integrated Query, is a component inside the .NET framework which enables you t...

Preview Word files (docx) in HTML using ASP.NET, OpenXML and LINQ to XML

Since an image (or even an example) tells more than any text will ever do, here's what I've created in the past few evening hours: Live examples: Test...

ASP.NET MVC framework - Security

Some posts ago, I started playing with the ASP.NET MVC framework. In an example I'm creating, I'm trying to add Forms-based security. "Class...

ASP.NET DataPager not paging after first PostBack?

A few posts ago, I mentioned that I am currently giving a classroom training on ASP.NET. People attending are currently working on a project I gave them, an...

Thank you, ISP!

Living in Belgium sometimes feels like living in the desert. Over the past few years, my ISP has always offered the same: a cable modem subsc...

ASP.NET MVC Framework - Basic sample application

You might have noticed that I'm quite enhousiast about the new ASP.NET MVC framework. What are you talking about? Basically, this new ASP.NET MVC&nbs...

ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP preview released

Just over the weekend, Microsoft has released the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP. This download includes several additions to ASP.NET 3.5: ASP.NET AJAX Impr...

LINQ to filesystem

The past few hours, I've been experimenting with LINQ. As a sample application, I'm trying to create a small photo album website, which shows me all...

ASP.NET MVC framework preview to be released next week

Half the world has been focussing on the release of the new Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 last week. That is good, as .NET 3.5 offers lots of nice new fea...

ASP.NET load balancing and ASP.NET state server (aspnet_state)

At one of our clients, we used to have only one server for ASP.NET applications (including web services). Since this machine is actually business-critical a...

PHP and OpenXML - New API project

It's been a while since I posted something related to PHP and OpenXML, but I fixed that glitch in this blog post. Browsing CodePlex, I found a new PH...

Advanced ASP.NET caching events

Currently, I'm giving an ASP.NET classroom training at our company, which actually is quite good for me: I needed to refresh all ASP.NET concepts, as th...

OpenXML in Healthcare in PHP

Here's a cool present just before the weekend... 2 days ago, Wouter posted on his blog about an article he co-operated on for MSDN: OpenXML in Healthcare. Be...

Generic arrays in PHP

Assuming everyone knows what generics are, let's get down to business right away. PHP does not support generics or something similar, though it could be very...

Inheritance is evil!

Read this on Bernie's blog: "All of the pain caused by inheritance can be traced back to the fact that inheritance forces 'is-a' rath...

Enabling HTTP proxy for .NET webservice client

Have you ever written code that makes external (Soap) webservice calls? Tried that same code on your company network? Most of the time, this does not work v...

Remove unnecessary HTTP modules from the ASP.NET pipeline

Trying to speed up some things in a demo ASP.NET application for a customer, I found a really simple and effective way to remove some HTTP modules from the ...

Creating Office2007 documents in C#

I've been too busy implementing <A class="" href="http://www.phpexcel.net/" target=_blank mce_href="http://www.phpexcel.net">SpreadsheetML</A> in...

Automatically generate SandCastle documentation using CruiseControl.NET or VSTS Team Build

Earlier this week, I was playing around with SandCastle, and found that the SandCastle Help File Builder (SHFB) was a great tool to quickly create SandCastl...

PackageExplorer, not only great for OpenXML…

The last few days, I've been working with <A class="" href="http://blogs.infosupport.com/wouterv" target=_blank mce_href="http://blogs.infosupport.com/wou...

Microsoft Tafiti just released

I'm sure you have already heared of SilverLight before, right? If not: it's Microsoft's answer to Adobe Flash, providing the same features + XAML-like markup...

TFS Team Build and ASP.NET websites

Here's one I'd really like to share with everyone trying to build ASP.NET websites using TFS Build. First of all, a little story about the project setup... A...

Open XML Developer workshop content

Over the last few months, Doug, Wouter, Brian and lots of other people delivered a series of OpenXML workshops around the globe. Those who were there, and th...

PHP zip:// and parse_url…

After having a few months of problems using PHP and fopen('zip://something.xlsx#xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml', 'r'), I finally found the reason ...

My job?

Seems that, according to <A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML" target=_blank mce_href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML">t...

NHibernate 1.2.0 - Unexpected row count: 0; expected: 1

Great... I've been working with NHibernate and MySQL for a while now, without having any strange problems. For a project I'm working on, I'm usi...

Enable sitemap security trimming in ASP.NET 2.0

Want to enable security trimming for your ASP.NET sitemap? Here's how... First of all, you need a new section in your web.config system.web element: ...

VSTS Project methodology

A quick linkdump of some VSTS project methodology templates: RUP - http://www.osellus.com/solutions/microsoft/rup-vsts_solutions.htmlScrum - http://www.scrum...

Team Foundation Server - Subversion bridge

Here's the thing: for my private development work (a.k.a. PHPExcel 8-)), I've been using Subversion as my source-control server (and client). As the PHP...

PHPExcel 1.3.5 released

Just a quick note on the new PHPExcel 1.3.5 release. There are some cool new features included! One of the new features is rich text: one can now write colou...

ASP.NET URL rewrites using .htaccess-like syntax

Having a PHP background, I've been using .htaccess mod_rewrite in Apache for ages. ASP.NET allows rewriting too, but using a different syntax than mod_r...

Enlisting an ADO.NET command in an NHibernate transaction

For everyone who has read my article on NHibernate, here's a story for you... When building an application, everyone comes to a point where one needs ...

Commandline FTP folder download

A quick annoyed post... I just spent two hours searching the Internet for a means on how to recursively download a complete FTP folder, command-line, a...

My blog has just moved…

<IMG style="MARGIN: 5px" height=104 src="/images/WindowsLiveWriter/Mybloghasjustmoved_D038/image%7B0%7D_thumb%5B3%5D.png" width=98 align=right border=0 mc...

OpenXML news overview

A lot of news around OpenXML these days, so I decided to bundle some things into one big blog post. 1. Microsoft released a Microsoft SDK for Open XML Forma...

A small TFS linkdump…

Some new TFS links I found: Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Guidehttp://www.codeplex.com/TFSGuide Work Item Creatorhttp://www.c...

New PHPExcel release: 1.3.0

The new version of PHPExcel has just been released, bringing 1.3.0 to the public. New features include formula calculation, inserting and removing columns/r...

Excel Formula Parsing using PHP?

One of the new (planned) features of PHPExcel is to implement parsing and calculating Excel formulas. One thing every developer should do is not to try to re...

MCTS for .NET framework 2.0 Web applications

Just like my colleague Kristof did last friday, I passed the Microsoft.NET Framework 2.0 - Web-based Client Development (Exam 070-528) exam yesterday, resul...

SendMailControl for ASP.NET

Have you ever used the ASP.NET PasswordRecovery control, or the CreateUserWizard? Probably, you used the mail capabilities of these controls too, and set up...

Excel, OpenXML and PHP

Yay! My new article on Excel, OpenXML and PHP has just been released in php|architect! A copy-paste action from http://www.phparch.com/issue.php?mid=102: ...

ASP.NET 2.0 Event Validation

Event Validation is a new feature in ASP.NET 2.0 which provides an additional level of checks on postback actions. It verifies whether a postback from a con...

Team Foundation Server tools linkdump

Currently, I'm playing around with TFS (Team Foundation Server), and here's just a quick linkdump of some TFS tools, mainly on CodePlex.  http://...

Workaround for PHP file_exists on ZIP file contents

Recently, I was writing some PHP code, to check if a specific file existed in a ZIP file. PHP has this special feature called "stream wrappers", which basica...

Scalable Apps with Asynchronous Programming in ASP.NET

A while ago, I posted about the DevDays, and some interesting sessions I took. One of these sessions was "Scalable Apps with Asynchronous Programming in ASP....

Developer & IT Pro days - Ghent - Day 2

Just got back from the second and last day at the DevDays. It's all more exhausting than I thought it would be. First of all: driving from Antwerp to Ghent a...

Developer & IT Pro Days - Ghent - Day 1

Day one of the Belgium Developer & IT Pro days is finished. I've been attending some inspiring sessions. First of all, Jelle Druyts showed us a quick ove...

Apache and IIS on same host, port 80, Windows XP

Yesterday, I decided to install an Apache web server on my development machine, next to IIS. Unfortunately, both use port 80, and I did not want to set one o...

New screen, Samsung is great!

Yesterday, I bought myself a Samsung SyncMaster 940BW wide screen TFT. My old screen, a IIyama 17 inch monster weighing CRT, needed a replacement. Not becau...

PHPExcel 1.0.0 final

I'm quite proud to announce the 1.0.0 version of PHPExcel, a set of classes that allows you to wirte Excel2007 files from PHP. Since my last post on this, a...

Five things you didn’t know about me…

I was tagged by Joris and Kristof, so I guess it's about time I give away some secrets about myself. Did you know that... ... I wrote my first letter of ...

PHP Excel classes on CodePlex

Just for the record: my PHP Excel classes have been released on CodePlex under a GPL license, and will be further released over there. The full URL: www.cod...

Back from winter vacation!

No posts last week: I was on a ski vacation to Pitztal, Austria. Found a cheap (and good!) hotel over there, Pension Haid, which offered me breakfast and di...

MyGeneration template for Zend_Db_Table

In my article on NHibernate, I mentioned MyGeneration, a tool which creates database classes / ORM classes from your database tables. Since MyGeneration use...

PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library

Something really interesting has just been released on CodePlex: PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library. The code you have to use in your scripts is clean and easy, ...

PHP code performance tweaks

Thanks to Sam Cooper's testing, some scalability issues came up in my SpreadSheet classes. Seems PHP has some odd internal quirks, which cause performance l...

Excel2007 in PHP - Project status

After a month of development, I think it's time for a status update on my PHP Excel2007 classes. 16 december 2007, I started working on these classes as a te...

DataBindable Business Objects in .NET

Checkout Emmanuel Nuyttens' article on DataBindable Business Objects. It's an interesting article, focussing on the other side of data binding that I wrote a...

Article in .NET magazine

The new .NET magazine Belgium/Netherlands has been distributed to all subscribers. For the latest edition, #15, I've written an article on the basic princip...

Office 2007 SpreadsheetML classes in PHP

In my evening hours, I've been working on a set of PHP classes to create Offixe 2007 SpreasheetML documents (.xlsx files). I finished my first goals (so...

Zend Framework custom route

Today, I was once again testing the Zed Framework. One of the things I was trying to do, is creating URL's in different languages. What I did was creating a ...

Bart Online

One of my former classmates, Bart Dekeersmaeker, has just created his own blog. He will be posting news from Chennai, India, where he currently resides for w...

Microsoft and Zend collaborate on PHP for Windows

A nice press release today at Microsoft: Microsoft and Zend Technologies Announce Technical Collaboration to Improve Interoperability of PHP on the Windows S...

Munin PHP based mod_security

Today, I discovered a nice PHP thing: Munin. This is a PHP version of Apache mod_security, allowing it to be run on IIS too. Munin performs rule based check...

PHP WSDL generator

Everyone who has ever created a webservice in PHP, using the PHP5 native functions, NuSOAP, PEAR, ..., certainly has cursed a lot while creating WSDL files f...

Use Zend Framework on IIS

A while ago, I was experimenting with the Zend Framework. At first, I tried running a small sample on top of IIS, but unfortunately, that did not work... On...

CruiseControl.NET configurator

For those looking for a CruiseControl.NET configuration tool: I just stumbled on this one at CodePlex This is an imported post. It was imported from my...

PHP on IIS7 (RC1), but unsafe!

Earlier this week, BillS has posted some information on how to run PHP on the upcoming IIS 7. To be honest, it's quite similar to installing it onto IIS 6 bu...

Back from vacation!

I’m back from vacation! I went to Salou, Spain. Not to party or to find a new girlfriend every evening (I have one for almost 4 years now), but just for the...

Microsoft AJAX Library and ASP.NET AJAX Extensions

Scott Guthrie, one of the Microsoft "Atlas" guys, announced the "Atlas" 1.0 Naming and Roadmap stating that: Atlas will be renamed: the client-side JavaSc...

Seems like Google updated satellite maps

Sometimes, I take a look at Google maps to check if Belgium is finally mapped and photographed with more detail. When I checked today, I found out some...

Buying books…

Seems like Proxis is offering a 10% discount when you order 2 computer books before the end of september! And I saw 2 nice PHP books… “Php5 Objects, Patterns...

Simple SAX parser for PHP

Yesterday, I was working on PRAjax. The UpdatePanel did not work completely as I wanted it to work: in the background, the whole page was still fetched and u...

Internet Explorer 7 RC1 available

When I opened my RSS reader this morning, I saw good news: Internet Explorer 7 RC1 has just been released! You can download it here or install it as stand-a...

Google Analytics open for everyone!

Almost a year ago, Google acquired Urchin, a company specialised in providing web site statistics. They renamed Urchin's project to Google Analytics and sta...

JavaScript URI parameter encoding

When creating a HTTP request in JavaScript, I always used encode() and decode() to pass data between client and server. I also used this approach in PRAjax, ...

Goggles, a flight sim on Google Maps

You have probably already seen over a hundred uses for Google Maps. Today, I received a link of a new use: Goggles. Goggles allows you to fly a plane over&n...

Kurkdroog

I regularly drink a glass of beer (I prefer the Belgian Trappists) or a glass of wine. While surfing, I stumbled upon a handy link for all Belgian people who...

Age of Pirates

A few weeks ago, I discovered a nice online multi-player game: Age of Pirates. AoP is in a certain way similar to one of my favourite games Age of Empires, ...

Phalanger

Today, I noticed that Phalanger has released a new beta a few days ago (well OK, half a month ago [*-)]). Phalanger is an open-source project, aiming to prov...

Have you alreday tried PRAjax?

Some people who know me, have already experimented with my home-brew PHP Ajax framework, PRAjax. PRAjax is short for PHP Reflected Ajax, and provides the glu...

A new computer…

2 weeks ago, my previous computer died. A black screen with a white blinking cursor was the only thing it still did. Curious about that, I opened the case an...

My first blog post!

Starting today, I will try to regularly post some information about myself, my job, my life, my opinions. Some of my colleagues at work, mainly Joris, told m...

Setting up a webfarm using Windows Azure Virtual Machines

With the release of Microsoft’s Windows Azure Virtual Machines, a bunch of new scenarios became available on their cloud platform. If you plan to host multip...

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’...

New screen, Samsung is great!

Yesterday, I bought myself a Samsung SyncMaster 940BW wide screen TFT. My old screen, a IIyama 17 inch monster weighing CRT, needed a replacement. Not becau...

A new computer…

2 weeks ago, my previous computer died. A black screen with a white blinking cursor was the only thing it still did. Curious about that, I opened the case an...

How HTTP Chunked Encoding was killing a request

Recently, someone asked me to look at their ASP.NET MVC application and help figure out why a certain request was taking 16 seconds to complete. It’s always ...

Remote debugging of Node.js apps on Azure App Service from WebStorm

At Microsoft Build 2018, a number of Azure App Service on Linux enhancements were announced. One that I was interested in was this one:

Retiring as a Microsoft MVP

I have decided to retire from the Microsoft MVP program. In the first week of April, an e-mail from Microsoft landed in my mailbox. I was given the choice to...

Running Kotlin in Azure Functions

A while back, the Azure folks announced support for Java on Azure Functions. My immediate thought was: “Do they mean Java or JVM? And if they mean JVM, will ...

Using operator overloads for concatenating file system paths in CSharp

The past few days, I’ve been working on some cross-platform C# code. In this code, I needed to build a path to a file, by concatenating folder names. As you ...

On speaker life…

Last week, I did a tweet while at the Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, working on blog posts (part of my job) and drinking bad coffee.

Building a scheduled task in ASP.NET Core/Standard 2.0

In this post, we’ll look at writing a simple system for scheduling tasks in ASP.NET Core 2.0. That’s quite a big claim, so I want to add a disclaimer: this s...

Making string validation faster by not using a regular expression. A story.

A while back, we were performance profiling an application and noticed a big performance bottleneck while mapping objects using AutoMapper. Mapping is of cou...

Extending .NET CLI with custom tools - dotnet init initializes your NuGet package

A few weeks back, .NET Core 1.1 was released (and a boatload of related tools such as Visual Studio 2017. For .NET Core projects, a big breaking change was i...

Using dotPeek to figure out why IIS crashed

Here’s a story on how I once used dotPeek to provide debugger symbols and (decompiled) source code for a crashed application for which we had nothing but the...

Application Insights telemetry processors

Two weeks ago I had a wonderful experience speaking at a small conference in Finland. The talk was titled What is going on - Application diagnostics on Azure...

Exploring .NET managed heap with ClrMD

Since my posts on making code allocate less memory and memory allocation for strings were quite well received, I decided to add another post to the series: E...

Exploring memory allocation and strings

A while back, I wrote about making code allocate less memory (go read it now if you haven’t). In that post, we saw how the Garbage Collector works and how it...

Making .NET code less allocatey - Allocations and the Garbage Collector

The .NET Garbage Collector (GC) is quite cool. In combination with the runtime’s virtual memory, it helps providing our applications with virtually unlimited...

Hotel California

At the start of 2015, I checked out from JetBrains to join Microsoft. Today, after almost two years in the NuGet team, it’s time for change. Microsoft and Nu...

NuGet and NPM news from the community

You may know (or not, shame on you!) Xavier Decoster and myself are operating MyGet, a hosted service providing teams with hosting and management of NuGet, n...

Building NuGet (.NET Core) using Atlassian Bitbucket Pipelines

A while back, I signed up for the beta of Bitbucket Pipelines, a new continuous integration service from Atlassian, built into Bitbucket. The build system pr...

Someone broke the Internet! Or why you may want to mirror your dependencies…

Twitter celebrated its 10th birthday this week, and those who have been on that social network long enough know that at least once a week there’s a massive o...

Disabling session affinity in Azure App Service Web Apps (Websites)

In one of our production systems, we’re using Azure Websites to host a back-end web API. It runs on several machines and benefits from the automatic load bal...

Working with a private npm registry in Azure Web Apps

Using Azure Web Apps, we can deploy and host Node applications quite easily. But what to do with packages the site depends on? Do we have to upload them manu...

Not enough space on the disk - Azure Cloud Services

I have been using Microsoft Azure Cloud Services since PDC 2008 when it was first announced. Ever since, I’ve been a huge fan of “cloud services”, the cattle...

Replaying IIS request logs using Apache JMeter

How would you validate a new API is compatible with an old API? While upgrading frameworks in a web application we’re building, that was exactly the question...

Domain Routing and resolving current tenant with ASP.NET MVC 6 / ASP.NET 5

So you’re building a multi-tenant application. And just like many multi-tenant applications out there, the application will use a single (sub)domain per tena...

Building future .NET projects is quite pleasant

You may remember my ranty post from a couple of months back. If not, read about how building .NET projects is a world of pain and here’s how we should solve ...

There is no good mobile operating system

I’m back on Windows Phone. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have read in the past weeks that I switched from being a Windows Phone user to being an Andro...

Could not load file or assembly… NuGet Assembly Redirects

When working in larger projects, you will sometimes encounter errors similar to this one: “Could not load file or assembly 'Newtonsoft.Json, Version=4.5.0.0,...

Automatically strong name signing NuGet packages

Some developers prefer to strong name sign their assemblies. Signing them also means that the dependencies that are consumed must be signed. Not all third-pa...

Someone broke the Internet! Or why you may want to mirror your dependencies…

Twitter celebrated its 10th birthday this week, and those who have been on that social network long enough know that at least once a week there’s a massive o...

Working with a private npm registry in Azure Web Apps

Using Azure Web Apps, we can deploy and host Node applications quite easily. But what to do with packages the site depends on? Do we have to upload them manu...

Developing for the Tessel with WebStorm

In a previous post, I mentioned that (finally) my Tessel arrived, “an internet-connected microcontroller programmable in JavaScript”. I like WebStorm a lot a...

Getting Started with the Tessel

Somewhere last year (I honestly no longer remember when), I saw a few tweets that piqued my interest: a crowdfunding project for the Tessel, “an internet-con...

Visual Studio Online for Windows Azure Web Sites

Today’s official Visual Studio 2013 launch provides some interesting novelties, especially for Windows Azure Web Sites. There is now the choice of choo...

Developing Windows Azure Mobile Services server-side

Word of warning: This is a partial cross-post from the JetBrains WebStorm blog. The post you are currently reading adds some more information around Windows ...

Using SignalR to broadcast a slide deck

Last week, I’ve discussed Techniques for real-time client-server communication on the web (SignalR to the rescue). We’ve seen that when building ...

Techniques for real-time client-server communication on the web (SignalR to the rescue)

When building web applications, you often face the fact that HTTP, the foundation of the web, is a request/response protocol. A client issues a request, a se...

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 ...

Book review: Learning Ext JS

For a project at one of our customers, we’re building a rich web application using the Coolite web controls in ASP.NET MVC. Coolite is a great product...

Running Kotlin in Azure Functions

A while back, the Azure folks announced support for Java on Azure Functions. My immediate thought was: “Do they mean Java or JVM? And if they mean JVM, will ...

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 Micr...

Query the cloud with PHP (PHPLinq and Windows Azure)

I’m pleased to announce PHPLinq currently supports basic querying of Windows Azure Table Storage. PHPLinq is a class library for PHP, based on the ide...

PHPLinq 0.4.0 released on CodePlex!

I’m pleased to announce that PHPLinq 0.4.0 has been released on CodePlex. PHPLinq is currently one year old, and I decided to add a huge step in funct...

New Entity Framework / LINQ blog!

Just a quick recommendation note: One of my colleagues, Julien Hanssens, has started blogging on his experiences with the Entity Framework and LINQ. Here ar...

Heroes happen here - Microsoft TechDays 2008 in Belgium

Just to inform you: together with a numer of colleagues from Dolmen, I'll be attending the Microsoft TechDays 2008 in Ghent, Belgium on 12 and 13 M...

PHPLinq version 0.2.0 released!

Last friday, I released PHPLinq version 0.2.0. LINQ, or Language Integrated Query, is a component inside the .NET framework which enables you to perform quer...

Books I recently read…

A while ago, I was contacted by the people of Packt Publishing asking me to review two of their latest books, ASP.NET Data Presentation Controls Essentials ...

LINQ for PHP (Language Integrated Query for PHP)

Perhaps you have already heard of C# 3.5's "LINQ" component. LINQ, or Language Integrated Query, is a component inside the .NET framework which enables you t...

Preview Word files (docx) in HTML using ASP.NET, OpenXML and LINQ to XML

Since an image (or even an example) tells more than any text will ever do, here's what I've created in the past few evening hours: Live examples: Test...

LINQ to filesystem

The past few hours, I've been experimenting with LINQ. As a sample application, I'm trying to create a small photo album website, which shows me all...

Tracking API usage with Google Analytics

So you have an API. Congratulations! You should have one. But how do you track who uses it, what client software they use and so on? You may be logging API c...

Windows Azure Diagnostics in PHP

When working with PHP on Windows Azure, chances are you may want to have a look at what’s going on: log files, crash dumps, performance counters, &hell...

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: “N...

Pro NuGet second edition is out

Pfew! Around February 2013, Xavier and I started planning work on an update of our book. Eight months later, we’re proud to present you with Pro NuGet ...

Community Day 2011 - Fun with ASP.NET MVC, MEF and NuGet

To start the blog post: AWESOME! That’s what I have to say about the latest edition of Community Day 2011. I had the privilege of doing a session on AS...

MyGet now supports pushing from the command line

One of the work items we had opened for MyGet was the ability to push packages to a private feed from the command line. Only a few hours after our initial la...

Creating your own private NuGet feed: MyGet

Ever since NuGet came out, I’ve been thinking about leveraging it in a corporate environment. I've seen two NuGet server implementations appear on...

Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1 KB2478063 Service Pack 5 Feature Set 3.1 R2 November Edition RTW

As you can see, a new .NET Framework version just came out. Read about it at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/endpoint/archive/2011/04/18/microsoft-net-framework-4-pl...

Slides for my talk at MIX11: Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3, MEF and NuGet

As promised, here are the slides and demo code for my talk "Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3, MEF and NuGet" I presented at MIX in Las Vegas. Abstract: "So you have a ...

Official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app released

I’m proud to announce that we (RealDolmen) have released the official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app! The official Belgium TechDays 2011 gives you...

Thank you for getting me in Vegas!

I wish to thank everyone who has been voring for getting me in Vegas, speaking at MIX11. Without having expectations, I was really really surprised (and happ...

ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framewok on NuGet

If you search on my blog, there’s a bunch of posts where I talk about ASP.NET MVC and MEF. And what’s cool: these posts are the ones that are act...

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: ...

ASP.NET MVC 3 and MEF sitting in a tree…

As I stated in a previous blog post: ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1 has been released! I talked about some of the new features and promised to do a blog post in the...

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...

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! ...

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 sessi...

Revised: ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

A while ago, I did a blog post on combining ASP.NET MVC and MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework), making it possible to “plug” controllers and v...

ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

Microsoft’s Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a .NET library (released on CodePlex) that enables greater re-use of application components. You c...

Domain Routing and resolving current tenant with ASP.NET MVC 6 / ASP.NET 5

So you’re building a multi-tenant application. And just like many multi-tenant applications out there, the application will use a single (sub)domain per tena...

Speeding up ASP.NET vNext package restore

TL;DR: If you have multiple NuGet feeds configured on your machine, it may be worth to do some tweaking in the NuGet.config file shipping with your project. ...

Pro NuGet second edition is out

Pfew! Around February 2013, Xavier and I started planning work on an update of our book. Eight months later, we’re proud to present you with Pro NuGet ...

A new year’s present: introducing Glimpse plugins for Windows Azure

Have you tried Glimpse before? It shows you server-side information like execution times, server configuration, request data and such in your browser. At the...

Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)

With the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) released as a preview, I thought it was a good time to write up some details about how to work with it....

Just released: MvcSiteMapProvider 4.0

After a beta version about a month ago, we are proud to release MvcSiteMapProvider 4.0 stable! (get it from NuGet, it’s fresh!) It took 6 months to complete ...

Storing user uploads in Windows Azure blob storage

On one of the mailing lists I follow, an interesting question came up: “We want to write a VSTO plugin for Outlook which copies attachments to blob sto...

Sending e-mail from Windows Azure

Note: this blog post used to be an article for the Windows Azure Roadtrip website. Since that one no longer exists, I decided to post the articles on my blo...

From API key to user with ASP.NET Web API

ASP.NET Web API is a great tool to build an API with. Or as my buddy Kristof Rennen (and the French) always say: “it makes you ‘api”. One o...

Domain based routing with ASP.NET Web API

Imagine you are building an API which is “multi-tenant”: the domain name defines the tenant or customer name and should be passed as a route valu...

Setting up a webfarm using Windows Azure Virtual Machines

With the release of Microsoft’s Windows Azure Virtual Machines, a bunch of new scenarios became available on their cloud platform. If you plan to host multip...

Use NuGet Package Restore to avoid pushing assemblies to Windows Azure Websites

Windows Azure Websites allows you to publish a web site in ASP.NET, PHP, Node, … to Windows Azure by simply pushing your source code to a TFS or Git r...

GitHub for Windows Azure Websites

With the new release of Windows Azure and Windows Azure Websites, a lot of new scenarios with Windows Azure just became possible. One I like a lot, especiall...

I’m an ASP Insider

Cool! I’ve just learned that I’m invited to join the ASPInsiders. I’m really excited and honored to be part of this group of great ASP.NET experts. Very much...

Introducing MyGet package source proxy (beta)

My blog already has quite the number of blog posts around MyGet, our NuGet-as-a-Service solution which my colleague Xavier and I are running. There are a lot...

Slides for TechDays Belgium 2012: SignalR

It was the last session on the last day of TechDays 2012 so I was expecting almost nobody to show up. Still, a packed room came to have a look at how to make...

Using SignalR to broadcast a slide deck

Last week, I’ve discussed Techniques for real-time client-server communication on the web (SignalR to the rescue). We’ve seen that when building ...

Techniques for real-time client-server communication on the web (SignalR to the rescue)

When building web applications, you often face the fact that HTTP, the foundation of the web, is a request/response protocol. A client issues a request, a se...

Rewriting WCF OData Services base URL with load balancing & reverse proxy

When scaling out an application to multiple servers, often a form of load balancing or reverse proxying is used to provide external users access to a web ser...

ASP.NET MVC dynamic view sections

Earlier today, a colleague of mine asked for advice on how he could create a “dynamic” view. To elaborate, he wanted to create a change settings ...

Why MyGet uses Windows Azure

Recently one of the Tweeps following me started fooling around and hit one of my sweet spots: Windows Azure. Basically, he mocked me for using Windows Azure ...

Windows Azure Accelerator for Web Roles

One of the questions I often get around Windows Azure is: “Is Windows Azure interesting for me?”. It’s a tough one, because most of the time when someone ask...

A first look at Windows Azure AppFabric Applications

After the Windows Azure AppFabric team announced the availability of Windows Azure AppFabric Applications (preview), I signed up for early access immediately...

Delegate feed privileges to other users on MyGet

One of the first features we had envisioned for MyGet and which seemed increasingly popular was the ability to provide other users a means of managing packag...

Enabling conditional Basic HTTP authentication on a WCF OData service

Yes, a long title, but also something I was not able to find too easily using Google. Here’s the situation: for MyGet, we are implementing basic authenticati...

MyGet now supports pushing from the command line

One of the work items we had opened for MyGet was the ability to push packages to a private feed from the command line. Only a few hours after our initial la...

Creating your own private NuGet feed: MyGet

Ever since NuGet came out, I’ve been thinking about leveraging it in a corporate environment. I've seen two NuGet server implementations appear on...

Just released: MvcSiteMapProvider 3.1.0 RC

It looks like I’m really cr… ehm… releasing way too much over the past few days, but yes, here’s another one: I just posted MvcSiteMapProvider 3.1.0 RC both ...

Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1 KB2478063 Service Pack 5 Feature Set 3.1 R2 November Edition RTW

As you can see, a new .NET Framework version just came out. Read about it at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/endpoint/archive/2011/04/18/microsoft-net-framework-4-pl...

A Glimpse at Windows Identity Foundation claims

For a current project, I’m using Glimpse to inspect what’s going on behind the ASP.NET covers. I really hope that you have heard about the greatest ASP.NET m...

Using dynamic WCF service routes

For a demo I am working on, I’m creating an OData feed. This OData feed is in essence a WCF service which is activated using System.ServiceModel.Activation.S...

Official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app released

I’m proud to announce that we (RealDolmen) have released the official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app! The official Belgium TechDays 2011 gives you...

Authenticate Orchard users with AppFabric Access Control Service

From the initial release of Orchard, the new .NET CMS, I have been wondering how difficult (or easy) it would be to integrate external (“federated”) authenti...

Thank you for getting me in Vegas!

I wish to thank everyone who has been voring for getting me in Vegas, speaking at MIX11. Without having expectations, I was really really surprised (and happ...

MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 released

Just a quick note to tell that MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 has been released and is available on CodePlex and NuGet. This version is targeted at ASP.NET MVC 3. ...

ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framewok on NuGet

If you search on my blog, there’s a bunch of posts where I talk about ASP.NET MVC and MEF. And what’s cool: these posts are the ones that are act...

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: ...

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 int...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

Using MvcSiteMapProvider throuh NuPack

Probably you have seen the buzz around NuPack, a package manager for .NET with thight integration in Visual Studio 2010. NuPack is a free, open source develo...

MvcSiteMapProvider 2.1.0 released!

The release for MvcSiteMapProvider 2.1.0 has just been posted on CodePlex. MvcSiteMapProvider is, as the name implies, an ASP.NET MVC SiteMapProvider implem...

ASP.NET MVC 3 and MEF sitting in a tree…

As I stated in a previous blog post: ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1 has been released! I talked about some of the new features and promised to do a blog post in the...

ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1 is out! Quick review…

I just noticed a very interesting download: ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1. Yes, you are reading this correctly, the first bits for v3.0 are there! Let’s have...

ASP.NET MVC - MvcSiteMapProvider 2.0 is out!

I’m very proud to announce the release of the ASP.NET MVC MvcSiteMapProvider 2.0! I’m also proud that the name of this product now exceeds the av...

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, ...

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 th...

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 mar...

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...

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 id...

Microsoft PDC09 keynote highlights

Finally found some time to write a short blog post on the announcements this morning at PDC 2009. Ray Ozzie started the keynote this morning, focusing on Mic...

Localize ASP.NET MVC 2 DataAnnotations validation messages

Living in a country where there are there are three languages being used, almost every application you work on requires some form of localization. In an earl...

Recording of my session at Remix 2009 - ASP.NET MVC

On September 29, I did a session on ASP.NET MVC at Remix 2009 Belgium. All session recordings are now online, check the Remix09 site. Slides and code fo...

Let me Bing that for you

Have you ever been bugged with stupid questions? Do you get tired of people asking stuff that is only one search engine query away? Chances are you answered ...

Leveraging ASP.NET MVC 2 futures “ViewState”

Let’s start this blog post with a confession: yes, I abused a feature in the ASP.NET MVC 2 futures assembly to fire up discussion. In my previous blog ...

Exploring the ASP.NET MVC 2 futures assemby

The latest preview of ASP.NET MVC 2, preview 2, has been released on CodePlex last week. All features of the preview 1 version are still in, as well as some...

Remix 2009 session - Slides and code

As promised during the session at Remix 2009, here’s my example code and slide deck. Abstract: "Building a Twitter clone in 60 minutes, featuring what's...

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...

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...

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 contr...

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 atte...

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 CodePl...

ReMIX Belgium session on ASP.NET MVC

Just learned I’ll be doing a session on ASP.NET MVC at ReMIX Belgium. ReMix brings the best of MIX09 in Las Vegas to Belgium: it bring us internationa...

Authenticating users with RPXNow (in ASP.NET MVC)

Don’t you get sick of having to register at website X, at website Y, at website Z, …? It is really not fun to maintain all these accounts, chan...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 5: the front-end

“After having found a god-like guardian for his application, Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker found out that his application still had no functio...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 4: Authentication and membership

“Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker just returned from his quest to a barn in the clouds, when he discovered that he forgot to lock the door to his...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 3: Store data in the cloud

“After setting up his workplace, knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker thought of something else: if a farmer wants to keep a lot of hay, he needs a ...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 2: Creating an Azure project

“Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker was about to start working on his TwitterMatic application, named after the great god of social networking, Tw...

How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 1: Introduction

“Once upon a time, Microsoft started a Windows Azure developing contest named new CloudApp();. While it first was only available for US candidates, th...

Application-wide action filters in ASP.NET MVC

Ever had a team of developers using your ASP.NET MVC framework? Chances are you have implemented some action filters (i.e. for logging) which should be appli...

Revised: ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

A while ago, I did a blog post on combining ASP.NET MVC and MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework), making it possible to “plug” controllers and v...

ASP.NET MVC TDD using Visual Studio 2010

Phil Haack announced yesterday that the tooling support for ASP.NET MVC is available for Visual Studio 2010. Troy Goode already blogged about the designer sn...

A view from the cloud (or: locate your ASP.NET MVC views on Windows Azure Blob Storage)

Hosting and deploying ASP.NET MVC applications on Windows Azure works like a charm. However, if you have been reading my blog for a while, you might have see...

ASP.NET MVC Domain Routing

Looking for an ASP.NET MVC 6 version? Check this post. Ever since the release of ASP.NET MVC and its routing engine (System.Web.Routing), Microsoft has been...

MSDN session on ASP.NET MVC

As promised to all people attending my online session on ASP.NET MVC this afternoon, here is the slide deck I’ve used. MSDN - ASP.NET MVC</embed>...

ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

Microsoft’s Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a .NET library (released on CodePlex) that enables greater re-use of application components. You c...

Using the ASP.NET MVC Futures AsyncController

Last week, I blogged about all stuff that is included in the ASP.NET MVC Futures assembly, which is an assembly available on CodePlex and contains possible ...

Speaking at DevDays 2009, The Hague (and more)

Some Great news (at least: I think this is great :-)): Kevin Dockx and I will be giving a session on PHP and Silverlight at the Netherlands DevDays09. This e...

Back to the future! Exploring ASP.NET MVC Futures

For those of you who did not know yet: next to the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 version and its source code, there’s also an interesting assembly available if you ...

New CodePlex project: MvcSiteMap – ASP.NET MVC sitemap provider

If you have been using the ASP.NET MVC framework, you possibly have been searching for something like the classic ASP.NET sitemap. After you've played with i...

Sample chapter from ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

Here’s a shameless, commercial blogpost… With yesterday’s 1.0 release of the ASP.NET MVC framework, I’m sure the following sample ...

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 has been released!

To keep up with a good tradition (see here and here), I have some great news on ASP.NET MVC: we are at version 1.0! This means production ready, supported, ...

CRUD with ASP.NET MVC (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! CRUD with ASP.NET MVC (screencast) Abstr...

Creating an ASP.NET MVC application with Google Gears

Offline web applications… This term really sounds like 2 different things: offline, no network, and web application, online. Maarten, you speak in ri...

Announcing my book: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

It’s been quite a job, but there it is: Packt just announced my very first book on their site. It is titled “ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly”, co...

Form validation with ASP.NET MVC release candidate

Last week, the ASP.NET MVC framework release candidate was released (check ScottGu’s post). Apart from some great new tooling support, form validation...

Updated CarTrackr to ASP.NET MVC RC

As you may have noticed, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate has been released over the night. You can read all about it in ScottGu’s blog post, coveri...

Checking username availability with jQuery (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! Checking username availability with jQuer...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 5 - Deploying in the cloud

This post is part 5 (and the final part) of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 4 - Membership and authentication

This post is part 4 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 3 - Data storage

This post is part 3 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is...

CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 2 - Cloud-enabling CarTrackr

This post is part 2 of my series on Windows Azure, in which I'll try to convert my ASP.NET MVC application into a cloud application. The current post is...

Track your car expenses in the cloud! CarTrackr on Windows Azure - Part 1 - Introduction

As you may see in the title, I will be starting a series on modifying my CarTrackr sample application to a cloud-based, Windows Azure application. At this p...

ASP.NET MVC XForms released on CodePlex

Just noticed there's a new project on CodePlex related to the ASP.NET MVC framework: MVC XForms. MVC XForms is a simple UI framework for ASP.NET MVC bas...

Using the ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! Using ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder Abstract: ...

Partial page updates with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery (and action filters)

When building an ASP.NET MVC application, chances are that you are using master pages. After working on the application for a while, it's time to spice ...

Creating a generic Linq to SQL ModelBinder for the ASP.NET MVC framework

You are right! This is indeed my third post on ASP.NET MVC ModelBinders. The first one focussed on creating a ModelBinder from scratch in an older preview r...

CarTrackr - Sample ASP.NET MVC application

Some people may have already noticed the link in my VISUG session blog post, but for those who didn't... I've released my sample application CarTra...

Introduction to ASP.NET MVC for VISUG - Presentation materials

Yesterday evening, I did a presentation on the ASP.NET MVC framework for VISUG (Visual Studio User Group Belgium). I really hope everyone got a good feel o...

Using the ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder attribute - Second part

Just after the ASP.NET MVC preview 5 was released, I made a quick attempt to using the ModelBinder attribute. In short, a ModelBinder allows you to use comp...

Forms interaction with ASP.NET MVC (screencast)

Abstract: "This screencast is a short demonstration on how you can handle form interactions using the ASP.NET MVC framework." Download sample c...

ASP.NET MVC preview 5’s AntiForgeryToken helper method and attribute

The new ASP.NET MVC preview 5 featured a number of new HtmlHelper methods. One of these methods is the HtmlHelper.AntiForgeryToken. When you place <%=Htm...

Using the ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder attribute

ASP.NET MVC action methods can be developed using regular method parameters. In earlier versions of the ASP.NET MVC framework, these parameters were all sim...

Form validation with ASP.NET MVC preview 5

In earlier ASP.NET MVC previews, form validation was something that should be implemented "by hand". Since the new ASP.NET MVC preview 5, form val...

Building an ASP.NET MVC sitemap provider with security trimming

Warning!A new version of the source code provided in this post is available here. Use this blog post as reference only.  Yes, it has been a while sin...

MSDN Chopsticks on ASP.NET MVC (screencasts)

A while ago, KatrienDG asked me to do some screencasts on the ASP.NET MVC framework for the MSDN Chopsticks page. I've been working on 2 screencasts: an...

ASP.NET MVC - Upcoming preview 4 release

ScottGu just posted that there's an upcoming preview 4 release of the ASP.NET MVC framework. What I immediately noticed, is that there are actually some...

Article on ASP.NET MVC in .NET magazine #21

Yesterday, I received the new Dutch edition of .NET magazine containing my article on the ASP.NET MVC framework. Since the article was written quite a whil...

Extending ASP.NET MVC OutputCache ActionFilterAttribute - Adding substitution

In my previous blog post on ASP.NET MVC OutputCache, not all aspects of "classic" ASP.NET output caching were covered. For instance, substitution ...

Creating an ASP.NET MVC OutputCache ActionFilterAttribute

In every web application, there are situations where you want to cache the HTML output of a specific page for a certain amount of time, because underlying da...

Code based ASP.NET MVC GridView

Earlier this week a colleague of mine asked me if there was such thing as a  DataGrid or GridView or something like that in the ASP.NET MVC framework. M...

ASP.NET MVC framework preview 3 released!

Don't know how I do it, but I think this blog post is yet again the first one out there mentioning a new release of the ASP.NET framework (preview 3)&nb...

Creating a custom ViewEngine for the ASP.NET MVC framework

Have you ever seen a presentation of ScottGu about the ASP.NET MVC framework? There is one particular slide that keeps coming back, stating that every step ...

ASP.NET MVC custom ActionResult (ImageResult)

The ASP.NET MVC framework introduces the concept of returning an ActionResult in Controllers since the "preview preview" release on CodePlex. The ...

ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit alternative authentication

Last week, I blogged about the ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit and some of its features. Since then, Troy Goode and I are developing at warp-speed to pro...

ASP.Net MVC Membership Starter Kit

Yesterday, I read a cool blog post from Troy Goode about his new CodePlex project MvcMembership. I also noticed his call for help, so I decided to dedicate...

ASP.NET MVC Framework out on CodePlex

This morning, I was browsing the new projects page on CodePlex and noticed something nice! The ASP.NET MVC team already rumoured around making the ASP.NET M...

ASP.NET MVC - Testing issues Q and A

When playing around with the ASP.NET MVC framework and automated tests using Rhino Mocks, you will probably find yourself close to throwing your computer t...

March 18 ASP.NET MVC links

Too busy this week to write large blog posts myself... Luckily other people do write interesting things on ASP.NET MVC! ASP.NET MVC Route tester Test y...

Heroes happen here - Microsoft TechDays 2008 in Belgium

Just to inform you: together with a numer of colleagues from Dolmen, I'll be attending the Microsoft TechDays 2008 in Ghent, Belgium on 12 and 13 M...

ASP.NET MVC framework - Security

Some posts ago, I started playing with the ASP.NET MVC framework. In an example I'm creating, I'm trying to add Forms-based security. "Class...

ASP.NET MVC Framework - Basic sample application

You might have noticed that I'm quite enhousiast about the new ASP.NET MVC framework. What are you talking about? Basically, this new ASP.NET MVC&nbs...

Fourth year as an MVP, second year for Windows Azure

Woohoo! I just received the great mail I expect yearly on the first of July: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you wit...

I’m an ASP Insider

Cool! I’ve just learned that I’m invited to join the ASPInsiders. I’m really excited and honored to be part of this group of great ASP.NET experts. Very much...

Renewed MVP ASP.NET for 2010!

Just got the best e-mail a Microsoft community member can receive in his mailbox: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present yo...

I’m an MVP ASP.NET!

Yesterday evening, I received the following e-mail: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP ...

Exploring .NET managed heap with ClrMD

Since my posts on making code allocate less memory and memory allocation for strings were quite well received, I decided to add another post to the series: E...

Exploring memory allocation and strings

A while back, I wrote about making code allocate less memory (go read it now if you haven’t). In that post, we saw how the Garbage Collector works and how it...

Making .NET code less allocatey - Allocations and the Garbage Collector

The .NET Garbage Collector (GC) is quite cool. In combination with the runtime’s virtual memory, it helps providing our applications with virtually unlimited...

Extending .NET CLI with custom tools - dotnet init initializes your NuGet package

A few weeks back, .NET Core 1.1 was released (and a boatload of related tools such as Visual Studio 2017. For .NET Core projects, a big breaking change was i...

NuGet and NPM news from the community

You may know (or not, shame on you!) Xavier Decoster and myself are operating MyGet, a hosted service providing teams with hosting and management of NuGet, n...

Building NuGet (.NET Core) using Atlassian Bitbucket Pipelines

A while back, I signed up for the beta of Bitbucket Pipelines, a new continuous integration service from Atlassian, built into Bitbucket. The build system pr...

Someone broke the Internet! Or why you may want to mirror your dependencies…

Twitter celebrated its 10th birthday this week, and those who have been on that social network long enough know that at least once a week there’s a massive o...

Could not load file or assembly… NuGet Assembly Redirects

When working in larger projects, you will sometimes encounter errors similar to this one: “Could not load file or assembly 'Newtonsoft.Json, Version=4.5.0.0,...

Automatically strong name signing NuGet packages

Some developers prefer to strong name sign their assemblies. Signing them also means that the dependencies that are consumed must be signed. Not all third-pa...

Speeding up ASP.NET vNext package restore

TL;DR: If you have multiple NuGet feeds configured on your machine, it may be worth to do some tweaking in the NuGet.config file shipping with your project. ...

Building .NET projects is a world of pain and here’s how we should solve it

During the past few weeks, I’ve been working on and off on setting up a build agent that can build as many open-source .NET projects as possible in an effort...

NuGet Configuration File inheritance is awesome

One way to remove friction from using NuGet in multiple projects is by making use of NuGet Configuration File inheritance, probably the awesomest unknown fea...

Pro NuGet second edition is out

Pfew! Around February 2013, Xavier and I started planning work on an update of our book. Eight months later, we’re proud to present you with Pro NuGet ...

Create a list of favorite ReSharper plugins

With the latest version of the ReSharper 8 EAP, JetBrains shipped an extension manager for plugins, annotations and settings. Where it previously was a hassl...

SymbolSource support for NuGet Package Source Discovery

A couple of weeks, I told you about NuGet Package Source Discovery. In short, it allows you to add some meta information to your website and use your website...

NuGet Package Source Discovery

It’s already been 2 years since NuGet was introduced. This.NET package manager features the concept of feeds, or “package sources”, on whic...

Working with Windows Azure command line tools from within Visual Studio

Right after my last post (Working with Windows Azure command line tools from PhpStorm), the obvious question came to mind… Can I do Windows Azure thin...

MyGet Build Services - Join the private beta!

Good news! Over the past 4 weeks we’ve been sending out tweets about our secret project MyGet project “wonka”. Today is the day Wonka shows...

Use NuGet Package Restore to avoid pushing assemblies to Windows Azure Websites

Windows Azure Websites allows you to publish a web site in ASP.NET, PHP, Node, … to Windows Azure by simply pushing your source code to a TFS or Git r...

Pro NuGet is finally there!

Short version: Install-Package ProNuget or http://amzn.to/pronuget It’s been a while since I wrote my first book. After I’ve been telling that wr...

Slides for TechDays Belgium 2012: SignalR

It was the last session on the last day of TechDays 2012 so I was expecting almost nobody to show up. Still, a packed room came to have a look at how to make...

Tracking API usage with Google Analytics

So you have an API. Congratulations! You should have one. But how do you track who uses it, what client software they use and so on? You may be logging API c...

Using SignalR to broadcast a slide deck

Last week, I’ve discussed Techniques for real-time client-server communication on the web (SignalR to the rescue). We’ve seen that when building ...

Publishing symbol packages for a MyGet feed

Ever since NuGet 1.2, there is a great way for NuGet package authors to let their users debug into the package’s binaries. With almost no additional ef...

Setting up a NuGet repository in seconds: MyGet public feeds

A few months ago, my colleague Xavier Decoster and I introduced MyGet as a tool where you can create your own, private NuGet feeds. A couple of weeks later ...

NuGet push… to Windows Azure

When looking at how people like to deploy their applications to a cloud environment, a large faction seems to prefer being able to use their source control s...

Someone broke the Internet! Or why you may want to mirror your dependencies…

Twitter celebrated its 10th birthday this week, and those who have been on that social network long enough know that at least once a week there’s a massive o...

Community guidelines to stay out of the busy trap

For the past few days, an interesting blog post on the NY Times has been popping up in my Twitter timeline. In your as well, probably, since almost everyone ...

AZUG Windows Azure Saturday overview

As one of the board members of the Windows Azure User Group in Belgium, I wanted to write a post on an event we organized last weekend. We do more events (on...

The world is changing: the future of IT

I’ve had my say on cloud and the new world of IT already in an earlier post, Predictions for the future. Today, I’m seeing signs the world is in fact startin...

Predictions for the future

It’s almost the end of 2011. Typically a time where bloggers start to write about their past year and what they’ll do in the next. A time where t...

Windows Phone 7 First Impressions

Back in june of this year, I received a very surprising e-mail stating that I would receive a Windows Phone 7 developer device. The reason for this? No, not ...

BlogEngine.NET comment spam filtering

It’s been a month or three since I was utterly fed up with comment spam on my blog. Sure, I did turn on comment moderation so you, as a visitor, would not no...

Replacement during my vacation: Wilson

This morning, I arrived at work after a great week of skiing in Pitztal, Austria. Unfortunately, I found my chair occupied by a new colleague looking a bit ...

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 Micr...

Document Interoperability Workshop, London, May 18 2009

After a pleasant flight with VLM airlines (Antwerp – London City), traveling under half of the city of London, I arrived at the Microsoft offices in V...

PHPPowerPoint 0.1.0 (CTP1) released!

People following me on Twitter could have already guessed, but here’s something I probably should not have done for my agenda: next to the well known ...

Saving a PHPExcel spreadsheet to Google Documents

As you may know, PHPExcel is built using an extensible model, supporting different input and output formats. The PHPExcel core class library features a sprea...

ECMA-376 implementation notes are out

Last month, Microsoft released the implementation notes for their ODF implementation in Office 2007. These implementation notes are actually the documentat...

Microsoft launches Implementation Notes (for ODF)

Just a quick post: at the Document Operability workshop in Brussels on December 2, Microsoft already announced they were going to do something with impleme...

OpenXML DII workshop Brussels - Quick summary

A few days ago, I wrote I was doing a presentation on the DII workshop in Brussels together with Julien Chable. Apart from heavy traffic from Antwerp to Bru...

PHPExcel featured in php

architect / November 2008

Nice to see that there's a lot of activity going on related to PHPExcel! This weekend, I receievd my electronic copy of php|architect / November 2008 f...

Presenting at the OpenXML DII workshop Brussels

First things first: WTF is DII??? It's the "Document Interoperability Initiative" that Microsoft launched. The workshop will be a day filled w...

OpenXML support in Zend Framework 1.7 Lucene indexer

It has indeed been a long time since I blogged about OpenXML. However, this does not mean I'm completely doing nothing with it! PHPExcel still keeps ea...

Reuse Excel business logic with PHPExcel

In many companies, business logic resides in Excel. This business logic is sometimes created by business analysts and sometimes by business users who want to...

OpenXML + Silverlight 2.0 = cool!

Mix '08 announced some nice things, among them the release of Silverlight 2.0 (beta), ASP.NET MVC framework (CTP 2). This morning, I saw one very cool t...

Indexing Word 2007 (docx) files with Zend_Search_Lucene

You may have noticed Microsoft released their Search Server 2008 a few weeks ago. Search Server delivers search capabilities to your organization quickly and...

Preview Word files (docx) in HTML using ASP.NET, OpenXML and LINQ to XML

Since an image (or even an example) tells more than any text will ever do, here's what I've created in the past few evening hours: Live examples: Test...

PHP and OpenXML - New API project

It's been a while since I posted something related to PHP and OpenXML, but I fixed that glitch in this blog post. Browsing CodePlex, I found a new PH...

OpenXML in Healthcare in PHP

Here's a cool present just before the weekend... 2 days ago, Wouter posted on his blog about an article he co-operated on for MSDN: OpenXML in Healthcare. Be...

Creating Office2007 documents in C#

I've been too busy implementing <A class="" href="http://www.phpexcel.net/" target=_blank mce_href="http://www.phpexcel.net">SpreadsheetML</A> in...

PackageExplorer, not only great for OpenXML…

The last few days, I've been working with <A class="" href="http://blogs.infosupport.com/wouterv" target=_blank mce_href="http://blogs.infosupport.com/wou...

Open XML Developer workshop content

Over the last few months, Doug, Wouter, Brian and lots of other people delivered a series of OpenXML workshops around the globe. Those who were there, and th...

OpenXML news overview

A lot of news around OpenXML these days, so I decided to bundle some things into one big blog post. 1. Microsoft released a Microsoft SDK for Open XML Forma...

Working with Windows Azure SQL Database in PhpStorm

Disclaimer: My job at JetBrains holds a lot of “exploration of tools”. From time to time I discover things I personally find really cool and blog about those...

Running unit tests when deploying to Windows Azure Web Sites

When deploying an application to Windows Azure Web Sites, a number of deployment steps are executed. For .NET projects, msbuild is triggered. For node.js app...

Working with Windows Azure from within PhpStorm

Working with Windows Azure and my new toy (PhpStorm), I wanted to have support for doing specific actions like creating a new web site or a new database in t...

Windows Azure Websites and PhpStorm

In my new role as Technical Evangelist at JetBrains, I’ve been experimenting with one of our products a lot: PhpStorm. I was kind of curious how this t...

Running Memcached on Windows Azure for PHP

After three conferences in two weeks with a lot of “airport time”, which typically converts into “let’s code!” time, I think I ...

A client side Glimpse to your PHP application

A few months ago, the .NET world was surprised with a magnificent tool called “Glimpse”. Today I’m pleased to release a first draft of a PH...

Version 4 of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP released

Only a few months after the Windows Azure SDK for PHP 3.0.0, Microsoft and RealDolmen are proud to present you the next version of the most complete SDK for ...

A hidden gem in the Windows Azure SDK for PHP: command line parsing

It’s always fun to dive into frameworks: often you’ll find little hidden gems that can be of great use in your own projects. A dive into the Windows Azure SD...

Scaffolding and packaging a Windows Azure project in PHP

With the fresh release of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0, it’s time to have a look at the future. One of the features we’re playing with is c...

Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0 released

Microsoft and RealDolmen are very proud to announce the availability of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0 on CodePlex! (here's the official Microsoft post) ...

Wordpress auto sign-on with IIS7 and a plugin

For our RealDolmen blog platform, where we use Wordpress as the engine running multiple external and internal blogs (yes, that’s an internal SaaS we have the...

Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0.0 BETA released

Microsoft and RealDolmen are very proud to announce the availability of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0.0 BETA on CodePlex. This releases is somethin...

Lightweight PHP application deployment to Windows Azure

Those of you who are deploying PHP applications to Windows Azure, are probably using the Windows Azure tooling for Eclipse or the fantastic command-line tool...

Windows Azure and scaling: how? (PHP)

One of the key ideas behind cloud computing is the concept of scaling.Talking to customers and cloud enthusiasts, many people seem to be unaware about the fa...

Introducing the PHP on Azure Contest

It’s not every day that I get to be in the jury for a contest. It’s not every day that I deliver a training about PHP on Azure. Since this is abo...

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. Unles...

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… Im...

PHP on Windows and on Azure slide deck

As promised during my session on PHP Summer Camp in Lisbon, Portugal, here's the slide deck. PHP on Windows and on Azure PHP on Windows and on Azure</emb...

Windows Azure Diagnostics in PHP

When working with PHP on Windows Azure, chances are you may want to have a look at what’s going on: log files, crash dumps, performance counters, &hell...

Introducing Windows Azure Companion – Cloud for the masses?

At OSIDays in India, the Interoperability team at Microsoft has made an interesting series of announcements related to PHP and Windows Azure.  To summar...

Extension methods for PHP

The concept of “extension” methods will be nothing new to this blog’s .NET-related audience. For the PHP-related audience, this is probably something new. L...

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 ...

Linuxwochen Austria

As part of my global domination plans, I this week visited Vienna, Austria for a session at Linuxwochen around PHP on Windows. PHP on Windows Abstract: &ldqu...

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 vo...

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, Window...

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. Sc...

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, bu...

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 Mi...

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 in...

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! ...

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...

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 Micr...

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 sessi...

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 ...

Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse for PHP developers

Pfew! Finally I can spread the word on this! While working on the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, I had the opportunity to test-drive the development builds of th...

Upcoming sessions on Azure, PHP and ASP.NET

It’s going to be a filled end of 2009… There’s Microsoft PDC which I will be attending and will probably cause me some sleepless nights (b...

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...

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 Servic...

Query the cloud with PHP (PHPLinq and Windows Azure)

I’m pleased to announce PHPLinq currently supports basic querying of Windows Azure Table Storage. PHPLinq is a class library for PHP, based on the ide...

PHP SDK for Windows Azure - Milestone 2 release

I’m proud to announce our second milestone for the PHP SDK for Windows Azure project that Microsoft and RealDolmen started back in May. Next to our re...

PHP and Silverlight - DevDays session

I just returned from The Hague where Kevin and I delivered a session on PHP and Silverlight. As promised, we are putting our slides and demos online. Downlo...

ConnectedShow Podcast - PHP SDK for Windows Azure

The fifth episode of the ConnectedShow podcast is up. This podcast is all about cloud computing, Windows Azure, … Recently, they have asked me if I wanted to...

Document Interoperability Workshop, London, May 18 2009

After a pleasant flight with VLM airlines (Antwerp – London City), traveling under half of the city of London, I arrived at the Microsoft offices in V...

Announcing PHP SDK for Windows Azure

As part of Microsoft’s commitment to Interoperability, a new open source project has just been released on CodePlex: PHP SDK for Windows Azure, bridgi...

PHPPowerPoint 0.1.0 (CTP1) released!

People following me on Twitter could have already guessed, but here’s something I probably should not have done for my agenda: next to the well known ...

Speaking at DevDays 2009, The Hague (and more)

Some Great news (at least: I think this is great :-)): Kevin Dockx and I will be giving a session on PHP and Silverlight at the Netherlands DevDays09. This e...

Accessing Windows Azure Blob Storage from PHP

Pfew! A week of Microsoft TechDays here in Belgium with lots of talks on new Microsoft stuff, Azure included. You may know I already experimented with Window...

Saving a PHPExcel spreadsheet to Google Documents

As you may know, PHPExcel is built using an extensible model, supporting different input and output formats. The PHPExcel core class library features a sprea...

PHPLinq 0.4.0 released on CodePlex!

I’m pleased to announce that PHPLinq 0.4.0 has been released on CodePlex. PHPLinq is currently one year old, and I decided to add a huge step in funct...

ECMA-376 implementation notes are out

Last month, Microsoft released the implementation notes for their ODF implementation in Office 2007. These implementation notes are actually the documentat...

OpenXML DII workshop Brussels - Quick summary

A few days ago, I wrote I was doing a presentation on the DII workshop in Brussels together with Julien Chable. Apart from heavy traffic from Antwerp to Bru...

PHPExcel featured in php

architect / November 2008

Nice to see that there's a lot of activity going on related to PHPExcel! This weekend, I receievd my electronic copy of php|architect / November 2008 f...

Presenting at the OpenXML DII workshop Brussels

First things first: WTF is DII??? It's the "Document Interoperability Initiative" that Microsoft launched. The workshop will be a day filled w...

OpenXML support in Zend Framework 1.7 Lucene indexer

It has indeed been a long time since I blogged about OpenXML. However, this does not mean I'm completely doing nothing with it! PHPExcel still keeps ea...

Zend Studio + Teamprise = PHP development with Team Foundation Server

Ever since I started developing PHPExcel, I noticed this option of connecting to CodePlex's Team Foundation Server using Teamprise for Eclipse (free Cod...

Reuse Excel business logic with PHPExcel

In many companies, business logic resides in Excel. This business logic is sometimes created by business analysts and sometimes by business users who want to...

PHPLinq version 0.2.0 released!

Last friday, I released PHPLinq version 0.2.0. LINQ, or Language Integrated Query, is a component inside the .NET framework which enables you to perform quer...

Indexing Word 2007 (docx) files with Zend_Search_Lucene

You may have noticed Microsoft released their Search Server 2008 a few weeks ago. Search Server delivers search capabilities to your organization quickly and...

LINQ for PHP (Language Integrated Query for PHP)

Perhaps you have already heard of C# 3.5's "LINQ" component. LINQ, or Language Integrated Query, is a component inside the .NET framework which enables you t...

PHP and OpenXML - New API project

It's been a while since I posted something related to PHP and OpenXML, but I fixed that glitch in this blog post. Browsing CodePlex, I found a new PH...

OpenXML in Healthcare in PHP

Here's a cool present just before the weekend... 2 days ago, Wouter posted on his blog about an article he co-operated on for MSDN: OpenXML in Healthcare. Be...

Generic arrays in PHP

Assuming everyone knows what generics are, let's get down to business right away. PHP does not support generics or something similar, though it could be very...

Creating Office2007 documents in C#

I've been too busy implementing <A class="" href="http://www.phpexcel.net/" target=_blank mce_href="http://www.phpexcel.net">SpreadsheetML</A> in...

PHP zip:// and parse_url…

After having a few months of problems using PHP and fopen('zip://something.xlsx#xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml', 'r'), I finally found the reason ...

PHPExcel 1.3.5 released

Just a quick note on the new PHPExcel 1.3.5 release. There are some cool new features included! One of the new features is rich text: one can now write colou...

OpenXML news overview

A lot of news around OpenXML these days, so I decided to bundle some things into one big blog post. 1. Microsoft released a Microsoft SDK for Open XML Forma...

New PHPExcel release: 1.3.0

The new version of PHPExcel has just been released, bringing 1.3.0 to the public. New features include formula calculation, inserting and removing columns/r...

Excel Formula Parsing using PHP?

One of the new (planned) features of PHPExcel is to implement parsing and calculating Excel formulas. One thing every developer should do is not to try to re...

Excel, OpenXML and PHP

Yay! My new article on Excel, OpenXML and PHP has just been released in php|architect! A copy-paste action from http://www.phparch.com/issue.php?mid=102: ...

Workaround for PHP file_exists on ZIP file contents

Recently, I was writing some PHP code, to check if a specific file existed in a ZIP file. PHP has this special feature called "stream wrappers", which basica...

PHPExcel 1.0.0 final

I'm quite proud to announce the 1.0.0 version of PHPExcel, a set of classes that allows you to wirte Excel2007 files from PHP. Since my last post on this, a...

PHP Excel classes on CodePlex

Just for the record: my PHP Excel classes have been released on CodePlex under a GPL license, and will be further released over there. The full URL: www.cod...

MyGeneration template for Zend_Db_Table

In my article on NHibernate, I mentioned MyGeneration, a tool which creates database classes / ORM classes from your database tables. Since MyGeneration use...

PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library

Something really interesting has just been released on CodePlex: PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library. The code you have to use in your scripts is clean and easy, ...

PHP code performance tweaks

Thanks to Sam Cooper's testing, some scalability issues came up in my SpreadSheet classes. Seems PHP has some odd internal quirks, which cause performance l...

Excel2007 in PHP - Project status

After a month of development, I think it's time for a status update on my PHP Excel2007 classes. 16 december 2007, I started working on these classes as a te...

Office 2007 SpreadsheetML classes in PHP

In my evening hours, I've been working on a set of PHP classes to create Offixe 2007 SpreasheetML documents (.xlsx files). I finished my first goals (so...

Zend Framework custom route

Today, I was once again testing the Zed Framework. One of the things I was trying to do, is creating URL's in different languages. What I did was creating a ...

Microsoft and Zend collaborate on PHP for Windows

A nice press release today at Microsoft: Microsoft and Zend Technologies Announce Technical Collaboration to Improve Interoperability of PHP on the Windows S...

Munin PHP based mod_security

Today, I discovered a nice PHP thing: Munin. This is a PHP version of Apache mod_security, allowing it to be run on IIS too. Munin performs rule based check...

PHP WSDL generator

Everyone who has ever created a webservice in PHP, using the PHP5 native functions, NuSOAP, PEAR, ..., certainly has cursed a lot while creating WSDL files f...

Use Zend Framework on IIS

A while ago, I was experimenting with the Zend Framework. At first, I tried running a small sample on top of IIS, but unfortunately, that did not work... On...

PHP on IIS7 (RC1), but unsafe!

Earlier this week, BillS has posted some information on how to run PHP on the upcoming IIS 7. To be honest, it's quite similar to installing it onto IIS 6 bu...

Buying books…

Seems like Proxis is offering a 10% discount when you order 2 computer books before the end of september! And I saw 2 nice PHP books… “Php5 Objects, Patterns...

Simple SAX parser for PHP

Yesterday, I was working on PRAjax. The UpdatePanel did not work completely as I wanted it to work: in the background, the whole page was still fetched and u...

Phalanger

Today, I noticed that Phalanger has released a new beta a few days ago (well OK, half a month ago [*-)]). Phalanger is an open-source project, aiming to prov...

How HTTP Chunked Encoding was killing a request

Recently, someone asked me to look at their ASP.NET MVC application and help figure out why a certain request was taking 16 seconds to complete. It’s always ...

Exploring .NET managed heap with ClrMD

Since my posts on making code allocate less memory and memory allocation for strings were quite well received, I decided to add another post to the series: E...

Exploring memory allocation and strings

A while back, I wrote about making code allocate less memory (go read it now if you haven’t). In that post, we saw how the Garbage Collector works and how it...

Making .NET code less allocatey - Allocations and the Garbage Collector

The .NET Garbage Collector (GC) is quite cool. In combination with the runtime’s virtual memory, it helps providing our applications with virtually unlimited...

How HTTP Chunked Encoding was killing a request

Recently, someone asked me to look at their ASP.NET MVC application and help figure out why a certain request was taking 16 seconds to complete. It’s always ...

Remote debugging of Node.js apps on Azure App Service from WebStorm

At Microsoft Build 2018, a number of Azure App Service on Linux enhancements were announced. One that I was interested in was this one:

Retiring as a Microsoft MVP

I have decided to retire from the Microsoft MVP program. In the first week of April, an e-mail from Microsoft landed in my mailbox. I was given the choice to...

Hotel California

At the start of 2015, I checked out from JetBrains to join Microsoft. Today, after almost two years in the NuGet team, it’s time for change. Microsoft and Nu...

Someone broke the Internet! Or why you may want to mirror your dependencies…

Twitter celebrated its 10th birthday this week, and those who have been on that social network long enough know that at least once a week there’s a massive o...

s/JetBrains/Microsoft

December 9th, 2012., was my first day at JetBrains, after being in consultancy for a good 7 years. Hadi Hariri, my new boss, showed the world how new employe...

What happened to Code Spaces could happen to you. On Amazon, Azure and any host out there.

Earlier this week, a sad thing happened to the version control hosting service Code Spaces. A malicious person gained access to their Amazon control panel an...

Microsoft Azure cloud plugin for TeamCity (dabbling in Java code)

NOTE: While the content is this blog post will still work, JetBrains now has a plugin that is the recommended way of working with TeamCity and build agents o...

Pro NuGet second edition is out

Pfew! Around February 2013, Xavier and I started planning work on an update of our book. Eight months later, we’re proud to present you with Pro NuGet ...

Using Amazon Login (and LinkedIn and …) with Windows Azure Access Control

One of the services provided by the Windows Azure cloud computing platform is the Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS). It is a service that provides f...

NuGet Package Source Discovery

It’s already been 2 years since NuGet was introduced. This.NET package manager features the concept of feeds, or “package sources”, on whic...

Taking over the @msdnbelux Twitter account

Just a quick post to let you know I’ll be taking over the @msdnbelux Twitter account for the next two weeks. This is the official Twitter account for M...

(Almost) time for something new…

September 1st, 2005. Fresh from school, I got the opportunity to start at RealDolmen (Dolmen, back then). Not just a “welcome, here’s your customer, cya!”-st...

Get your Windows 8 up to speed fast

With the release of Windows 8 on MSDN yesterday, I have a gut feeling that today, around the globe, people are installing this fresh operating system on thei...

Community guidelines to stay out of the busy trap

For the past few days, an interesting blog post on the NY Times has been popping up in my Twitter timeline. In your as well, probably, since almost everyone ...

Fourth year as an MVP, second year for Windows Azure

Woohoo! I just received the great mail I expect yearly on the first of July: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you wit...

The world is changing: the future of IT

I’ve had my say on cloud and the new world of IT already in an earlier post, Predictions for the future. Today, I’m seeing signs the world is in fact startin...

I’m an ASP Insider

Cool! I’ve just learned that I’m invited to join the ASPInsiders. I’m really excited and honored to be part of this group of great ASP.NET experts. Very much...

Introducing MyGet package source proxy (beta)

My blog already has quite the number of blog posts around MyGet, our NuGet-as-a-Service solution which my colleague Xavier and I are running. There are a lot...

Predictions for the future

It’s almost the end of 2011. Typically a time where bloggers start to write about their past year and what they’ll do in the next. A time where t...

Repaving your PC: the easier way

It"’s been a while since I had to repave my laptop. I have a Windows Home Server (WHS) at home which images my PC almost daily and allows restoring it ...

Setting up a NuGet repository in seconds: MyGet public feeds

A few months ago, my colleague Xavier Decoster and I introduced MyGet as a tool where you can create your own, private NuGet feeds. A couple of weeks later ...

Officially a cloudhead now! (or: re-awarded MVP)

Woohoo! I just received the great mail I expect yearly on the first of July: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present ...

Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1 KB2478063 Service Pack 5 Feature Set 3.1 R2 November Edition RTW

As you can see, a new .NET Framework version just came out. Read about it at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/endpoint/archive/2011/04/18/microsoft-net-framework-4-pl...

Official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app released

I’m proud to announce that we (RealDolmen) have released the official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app! The official Belgium TechDays 2011 gives you...

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: ...

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 me...

Windows Phone 7 First Impressions

Back in june of this year, I received a very surprising e-mail stating that I would receive a Windows Phone 7 developer device. The reason for this? No, not ...

BlogEngine.NET comment spam filtering

It’s been a month or three since I was utterly fed up with comment spam on my blog. Sure, I did turn on comment moderation so you, as a visitor, would not no...

Renewed MVP ASP.NET for 2010!

Just got the best e-mail a Microsoft community member can receive in his mailbox: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present yo...

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...

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 per...

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...

I’m an MVP ASP.NET!

Yesterday evening, I received the following e-mail: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP ...

Revised: ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

A while ago, I did a blog post on combining ASP.NET MVC and MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework), making it possible to “plug” controllers and v...

Sample chapter from ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

Here’s a shameless, commercial blogpost… With yesterday’s 1.0 release of the ASP.NET MVC framework, I’m sure the following sample ...

Announcing my book: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

It’s been quite a job, but there it is: Packt just announced my very first book on their site. It is titled “ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly”, co...

Replacement during my vacation: Wilson

This morning, I arrived at work after a great week of skiing in Pitztal, Austria. Unfortunately, I found my chair occupied by a new colleague looking a bit ...

PHPLinq 0.4.0 released on CodePlex!

I’m pleased to announce that PHPLinq 0.4.0 has been released on CodePlex. PHPLinq is currently one year old, and I decided to add a huge step in funct...

Updated CarTrackr to ASP.NET MVC RC

As you may have noticed, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate has been released over the night. You can read all about it in ScottGu’s blog post, coveri...

Seven things you didn’t know about me

Seems 2009 is starting off with yet another round of tagging people. Back in 2007, I already had to write five things about myself. Since we are now two yea...

PHPExcel featured in php

architect / November 2008

Nice to see that there's a lot of activity going on related to PHPExcel! This weekend, I receievd my electronic copy of php|architect / November 2008 f...

Using the ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! Using ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder Abstract: ...

Article on ASP.NET MVC in .NET magazine #21

Yesterday, I received the new Dutch edition of .NET magazine containing my article on the ASP.NET MVC framework. Since the article was written quite a whil...

Creating an ASP.NET MVC OutputCache ActionFilterAttribute

In every web application, there are situations where you want to cache the HTML output of a specific page for a certain amount of time, because underlying da...

ASP.NET MVC custom ActionResult (ImageResult)

The ASP.NET MVC framework introduces the concept of returning an ActionResult in Controllers since the "preview preview" release on CodePlex. The ...

Having fun with project managers! (or: why you should lock your desktop)

Have you ever left your computer unattended? (I do hope that!) Do you lock your desktop when this occurs? (I hope so either!) Not locking your desktop can b...

Finally! My own custom BlogEngine.net template!

Right after my blog move to BlogEngine.net, I decided to create a custom template for my blog to make it more unique in the blogosphere. Less than a year la...

Thank you, ISP!

Living in Belgium sometimes feels like living in the desert. Over the past few years, my ISP has always offered the same: a cable modem subsc...

ASP.NET MVC Framework - Basic sample application

You might have noticed that I'm quite enhousiast about the new ASP.NET MVC framework. What are you talking about? Basically, this new ASP.NET MVC&nbs...

PackageExplorer, not only great for OpenXML…

The last few days, I've been working with <A class="" href="http://blogs.infosupport.com/wouterv" target=_blank mce_href="http://blogs.infosupport.com/wou...

PHP zip:// and parse_url…

After having a few months of problems using PHP and fopen('zip://something.xlsx#xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml', 'r'), I finally found the reason ...

My job?

Seems that, according to <A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML" target=_blank mce_href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML">t...

Commandline FTP folder download

A quick annoyed post... I just spent two hours searching the Internet for a means on how to recursively download a complete FTP folder, command-line, a...

My blog has just moved…

<IMG style="MARGIN: 5px" height=104 src="/images/WindowsLiveWriter/Mybloghasjustmoved_D038/image%7B0%7D_thumb%5B3%5D.png" width=98 align=right border=0 mc...

MCTS for .NET framework 2.0 Web applications

Just like my colleague Kristof did last friday, I passed the Microsoft.NET Framework 2.0 - Web-based Client Development (Exam 070-528) exam yesterday, resul...

SendMailControl for ASP.NET

Have you ever used the ASP.NET PasswordRecovery control, or the CreateUserWizard? Probably, you used the mail capabilities of these controls too, and set up...

Excel, OpenXML and PHP

Yay! My new article on Excel, OpenXML and PHP has just been released in php|architect! A copy-paste action from http://www.phparch.com/issue.php?mid=102: ...

New screen, Samsung is great!

Yesterday, I bought myself a Samsung SyncMaster 940BW wide screen TFT. My old screen, a IIyama 17 inch monster weighing CRT, needed a replacement. Not becau...

Five things you didn’t know about me…

I was tagged by Joris and Kristof, so I guess it's about time I give away some secrets about myself. Did you know that... ... I wrote my first letter of ...

Back from winter vacation!

No posts last week: I was on a ski vacation to Pitztal, Austria. Found a cheap (and good!) hotel over there, Pension Haid, which offered me breakfast and di...

Article in .NET magazine

The new .NET magazine Belgium/Netherlands has been distributed to all subscribers. For the latest edition, #15, I've written an article on the basic princip...

Bart Online

One of my former classmates, Bart Dekeersmaeker, has just created his own blog. He will be posting news from Chennai, India, where he currently resides for w...

Back from vacation!

I’m back from vacation! I went to Salou, Spain. Not to party or to find a new girlfriend every evening (I have one for almost 4 years now), but just for the...

Seems like Google updated satellite maps

Sometimes, I take a look at Google maps to check if Belgium is finally mapped and photographed with more detail. When I checked today, I found out some...

Buying books…

Seems like Proxis is offering a 10% discount when you order 2 computer books before the end of september! And I saw 2 nice PHP books… “Php5 Objects, Patterns...

Google Analytics open for everyone!

Almost a year ago, Google acquired Urchin, a company specialised in providing web site statistics. They renamed Urchin's project to Google Analytics and sta...

Kurkdroog

I regularly drink a glass of beer (I prefer the Belgian Trappists) or a glass of wine. While surfing, I stumbled upon a handy link for all Belgian people who...

My first blog post!

Starting today, I will try to regularly post some information about myself, my job, my life, my opinions. Some of my colleagues at work, mainly Joris, told m...

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 Micr...

ConnectedShow Podcast - PHP SDK for Windows Azure

The fifth episode of the ConnectedShow podcast is up. This podcast is all about cloud computing, Windows Azure, … Recently, they have asked me if I wanted to...

TechDays Finland - Architectural Patterns for the Cloud - NuGet

As promised, here are the slide decks for the two sessions delivered at TechDays Finland last week. Architectural Patterns for the Cloud The promise of all c...

Slides for TechDays Belgium 2012: SignalR

It was the last session on the last day of TechDays 2012 so I was expecting almost nobody to show up. Still, a packed room came to have a look at how to make...

Community Day 2011 - Fun with ASP.NET MVC, MEF and NuGet

To start the blog post: AWESOME! That’s what I have to say about the latest edition of Community Day 2011. I had the privilege of doing a session on AS...

Slides for my talk at MIX11: Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3, MEF and NuGet

As promised, here are the slides and demo code for my talk "Fun with ASP.NET MVC 3, MEF and NuGet" I presented at MIX in Las Vegas. Abstract: "So you have a ...

Official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app released

I’m proud to announce that we (RealDolmen) have released the official Belgium TechDays 2011 Windows Phone 7 app! The official Belgium TechDays 2011 gives you...

Thank you for getting me in Vegas!

I wish to thank everyone who has been voring for getting me in Vegas, speaking at MIX11. Without having expectations, I was really really surprised (and happ...

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: ...

PHP on Windows and on Azure slide deck

As promised during my session on PHP Summer Camp in Lisbon, Portugal, here's the slide deck. PHP on Windows and on Azure PHP on Windows and on Azure</emb...

Remix 2010 slides and sample code

As promised during my session on Remix 10 yesterday in Belgium, here's the slide deck and sample code. Building for the cloud: integrating an application on ...

Announcing the Windows Azure Online Conference

Steve Plank from Microsoft UK has just announced the UK Windows Azure Online Conference on his blog. This will be a whole day, online Windows Azure conferenc...

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: “N...

Linuxwochen Austria

As part of my global domination plans, I this week visited Vienna, Austria for a session at Linuxwochen around PHP on Windows. PHP on Windows Abstract: &ldqu...

Slides of our VISUG session

As promised, here are the slides of the VISUG session me and Kris van der Mast did yesterday. Being a pimp without Silverlight! Abstract: “Don't tell us you'...

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 vo...

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. Sc...

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 pl...

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, bu...

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 in...

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...

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. Abstra...

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 Micr...

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 ...

Upcoming sessions on Azure, PHP and ASP.NET

It’s going to be a filled end of 2009… There’s Microsoft PDC which I will be attending and will probably cause me some sleepless nights (b...

Recording of my session at Remix 2009 - ASP.NET MVC

On September 29, I did a session on ASP.NET MVC at Remix 2009 Belgium. All session recordings are now online, check the Remix09 site. Slides and code fo...

Remix 2009 session - Slides and code

As promised during the session at Remix 2009, here’s my example code and slide deck. Abstract: "Building a Twitter clone in 60 minutes, featuring what's...

ReMIX Belgium session on ASP.NET MVC

Just learned I’ll be doing a session on ASP.NET MVC at ReMIX Belgium. ReMix brings the best of MIX09 in Las Vegas to Belgium: it bring us internationa...

PHP and Silverlight - DevDays session

I just returned from The Hague where Kevin and I delivered a session on PHP and Silverlight. As promised, we are putting our slides and demos online. Downlo...

ConnectedShow Podcast - PHP SDK for Windows Azure

The fifth episode of the ConnectedShow podcast is up. This podcast is all about cloud computing, Windows Azure, … Recently, they have asked me if I wanted to...

Mocking - VISUG session (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! Mocking - VISUG session (screencast) Abstract: "...

Mocking - VISUG session

Thursday evening, I did a session on Mocking for the VISUG (Visual Studio User Group Belgium). As promised, here is the slide deck I’ve used. The sessi...

MSDN session on ASP.NET MVC

As promised to all people attending my online session on ASP.NET MVC this afternoon, here is the slide deck I’ve used. MSDN - ASP.NET MVC</embed>...

Speaking at DevDays 2009, The Hague (and more)

Some Great news (at least: I think this is great :-)): Kevin Dockx and I will be giving a session on PHP and Silverlight at the Netherlands DevDays09. This e...

CRUD with ASP.NET MVC (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! CRUD with ASP.NET MVC (screencast) Abstr...

Checking username availability with jQuery (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! Checking username availability with jQuer...

OpenXML DII workshop Brussels - Quick summary

A few days ago, I wrote I was doing a presentation on the DII workshop in Brussels together with Julien Chable. Apart from heavy traffic from Antwerp to Bru...

Presenting at the OpenXML DII workshop Brussels

First things first: WTF is DII??? It's the "Document Interoperability Initiative" that Microsoft launched. The workshop will be a day filled w...

Using the ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder (screencast)

A new screencast has just been uploaded to the MSDN Belgium Chopsticks page. Don't forget to rate the video! Using ASP.NET MVC ModelBinder Abstract: ...

CarTrackr - Sample ASP.NET MVC application

Some people may have already noticed the link in my VISUG session blog post, but for those who didn't... I've released my sample application CarTra...

Introduction to ASP.NET MVC for VISUG - Presentation materials

Yesterday evening, I did a presentation on the ASP.NET MVC framework for VISUG (Visual Studio User Group Belgium). I really hope everyone got a good feel o...

Exploring .NET managed heap with ClrMD

Since my posts on making code allocate less memory and memory allocation for strings were quite well received, I decided to add another post to the series: E...

Exploring memory allocation and strings

A while back, I wrote about making code allocate less memory (go read it now if you haven’t). In that post, we saw how the Garbage Collector works and how it...

Making .NET code less allocatey - Allocations and the Garbage Collector

The .NET Garbage Collector (GC) is quite cool. In combination with the runtime’s virtual memory, it helps providing our applications with virtually unlimited...

Replaying IIS request logs using Apache JMeter

How would you validate a new API is compatible with an old API? While upgrading frameworks in a web application we’re building, that was exactly the question...

Optimizing calls to Azure storage using Fiddler

Last week, Xavier and I were really happy for achieving a milestone. After having spent quite some evenings on bringing Visual Studio Online integration to M...

Remote profiling Windows Azure Cloud Services with dotTrace

Here’s another cross-post from our JetBrains .NET blog. It’s focused around dotTrace but there are a lot of tips and tricks around Windows Azure ...

A Glimpse at Windows Identity Foundation claims

For a current project, I’m using Glimpse to inspect what’s going on behind the ASP.NET covers. I really hope that you have heard about the greatest ASP.NET m...

Book review: Software Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2008

Another book review, this time for Packt’s “Software Testing with Visual Studio Team System 2008”. The book introduces you to the main ty...

Detailed code metrics with NDepend

A while ago, I blogged about code performance analysis in Visual Studio 2008. Using profiling and hot path tracking, I measured code performance and was abl...

Code performance analysis in Visual Studio 2008

Visual Studio developer, did you know you have a great performance analysis (profiling) tool at your fingertips? In Visual Studio 2008 this profiling tool h...

Writing and distributing Roslyn analyzers with MyGet

Pretty sweet: MyGet just announced Vsix support has been enabled for all MyGet customers! I wanted to work on a fun example for this new feature and came up ...

Domain Routing and resolving current tenant with ASP.NET MVC 6 / ASP.NET 5

So you’re building a multi-tenant application. And just like many multi-tenant applications out there, the application will use a single (sub)domain per tena...

Building future .NET projects is quite pleasant

You may remember my ranty post from a couple of months back. If not, read about how building .NET projects is a world of pain and here’s how we should solve ...

Automatically strong name signing NuGet packages

Some developers prefer to strong name sign their assemblies. Signing them also means that the dependencies that are consumed must be signed. Not all third-pa...

Developing for the Tessel with WebStorm

In a previous post, I mentioned that (finally) my Tessel arrived, “an internet-connected microcontroller programmable in JavaScript”. I like WebStorm a lot a...

Getting Started with the Tessel

Somewhere last year (I honestly no longer remember when), I saw a few tweets that piqued my interest: a crowdfunding project for the Tessel, “an internet-con...

Microsoft Azure cloud plugin for TeamCity (dabbling in Java code)

NOTE: While the content is this blog post will still work, JetBrains now has a plugin that is the recommended way of working with TeamCity and build agents o...

Building .NET projects is a world of pain and here’s how we should solve it

During the past few weeks, I’ve been working on and off on setting up a build agent that can build as many open-source .NET projects as possible in an effort...

Pro NuGet second edition is out

Pfew! Around February 2013, Xavier and I started planning work on an update of our book. Eight months later, we’re proud to present you with Pro NuGet ...

A new year’s present: introducing Glimpse plugins for Windows Azure

Have you tried Glimpse before? It shows you server-side information like execution times, server configuration, request data and such in your browser. At the...

An autoscaling build farm using TeamCity and Windows Azure

NOTE: While the content is this blog post will still work, JetBrains now has a plugin that is the recommended way of working with TeamCity and build agents o...

Just released: MvcSiteMapProvider 4.0

After a beta version about a month ago, we are proud to release MvcSiteMapProvider 4.0 stable! (get it from NuGet, it’s fresh!) It took 6 months to complete ...

And there it is - MvcSiteMapProvider v4 (beta)

It has been a while since a new major update has been done to the MvcSiteMapProvider project, but today is the day! MvcSiteMapProvider is a tool that provide...

Create a list of favorite ReSharper plugins

With the latest version of the ReSharper 8 EAP, JetBrains shipped an extension manager for plugins, annotations and settings. Where it previously was a hassl...

Using Amazon Login (and LinkedIn and …) with Windows Azure Access Control