Tag: General
All the articles with the tag "General".
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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 things using the command line tools from within Visual Studio as well? Sure you can! At least if you have the NuGet Package Manager Console installed into your Visual Studio. For good order: you can use either the PowerShell cmdlets that are available or use the Node-based tools available (how-to). In this post we’ll be using the PowerShell cmdlets. And once those are installed… there’s nothing you have to do to get these working in Visual Studio!
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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 the IDE. Since I’m not a Java guy, writing a plugin was not an option. Fortunately, PhpStorm (or WebStorm for that matter) provide support for issuing commands from the IDE. Which led me to think that it may be possible to hook up the Windows Azure Command Line Tools in my IDE… Let’s see what we can do… First of all, we’ll need the ‘azure’ tools. These are available for download for Windows or Mac. If you happen to have Node and NPM installed, simply issue npm install azure-cli -g and we’re good to go.
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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 tool would integrate with Windows Azure Web Sites. Now before you quit reading this post because of that acronym: if you are a Node-head you can also use WebStorm to do the same things I will describe in this post. Let’s see if we can get a simple PHP application running on Windows Azure right from within our IDE… Let’s go through setting up a Windows Azure Web Site real quickly. If this is the first time you hear about Web Sites and want more detail on getting started, check the Windows Azure website for a detailed step-by-step explanation.
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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 storage. What’s the best way to do this? What about security?”. Shortly thereafter, an answer came around: “That can be done directly from the client. And storage credentials can be encrypted for use in your VSTO plugin.” While that’s certainly a solution to the problem, it’s not the best. Let’s try and answer… The first solution that comes to mind is implementing the following flow: the client authenticates and uploads data to your service which then stores the upload on blob storage.
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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 Internet expose an API which can be consumed by everyone using a web browser or a mobile application on their smartphone or tablet. How would you build your API if you want these apps to be a full-fledged front-end to your service without compromising security? In this article, I’ll dive into that. We’ll be using OAuth2 and the Windows Azure Access Control Service to secure our API yet provide access to all those apps out there.
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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 been struggling with something that you will struggle with as well in your ASP.NET Web API’s: supporting additional HTTP methods like HEAD, PATCH or PROPFIND. ASP.NET Web API has no issue with those, but when hosting them on IIS you’ll find yourself in Yellow-screen-of-death heaven.
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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, GoogleAnalyticsTracker, lives on GitHub and NuGet and has since evolved into something that supports Windows Phone and Windows RT as well. But let’s not focus on the open-source aspect. It’s funny how things evolve. GoogleAnalyticsTracker started as a small component inside MyGet, and since a couple of weeks it uses MyGet to publish itself to NuGet. Say what? In this blog post, I’ll elaborate a bit on the development tools used on this tiny component.
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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 as well. Find the source code for this post here: 05 ConfirmPhoneNumberDemo.zip (1.32 mb). It has been written earlier this year, some versions of packages used (like jQuery or SignalR) may be outdated in this post. Live with it.
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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 blog as well. Find the source code for this post here: 04 SendingEmailsFromTheCloud.zip (922.27 kb). When a user subscribes, you send him a thank-you e-mail. When his account expires, you send him a warning message containing a link to purchase a new subscription. When he places an order, you send him an order confirmation. I think you get the picture: a fairly common scenario in almost any application is sending out e-mails.
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(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!”-start, but a start where my fresh colleagues and I got a 4 months deep dive from people in the industry. Entirely different from what school taught me, focused “on the job”. 4 months later, I started at my first customer, then the second, third, a project developed in-house, did some TFS customizations, some Windows Azure, …