Tag: General

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.

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, …

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 of the things I like a lot is the fact that you can do very powerful things that you know and love from the ASP.NET MVC stack, like, for example, using filter attributes. Action filters, result filters and… authorization filters.

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 Windows Azure. One of the questions he recently had was around PartitionKey and RowKey in Windows Azure Table Storage. What are these for? Do I have to specify them manually? Let’s explain…

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 his great stuff to the world… In short: MyGet Build Services enable you to add packages to your feed by just giving us your GitHub repo. We build it, we package it, we publish it.

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 their machine. I’ve done so too and I wanted to share with your two tools: one that helped me get up to speed fast, one that will help me up to speed even faster the next time I want to reset my PC. One of the best things created for Windows, ever, is Chocolatey. If you are familiar with Ninite, you will find that both serve the same purpose, however Chocolatey is more developer focused.

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 OAuth2. To refresh your mind, here’s what’s required (at least): That’s a lot to build there. Wouldn’t it be great to outsource part of that list to a third party? A little-known feature of the Windows Azure Access Control Service is that you can use it to keep track of applications, user consent and token expiration & refresh token handling. That leaves you with implementing: Let’s do it!

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced their Windows Azure Services for Windows Server. If you’ve ever heard about the Windows Azure Appliance (which is vaporware imho :-)), you’ll be interested to see that the Windows Azure Services for Windows Server are in fact bringing the Windows Azure Services to your datacenter. It’s still a Technical Preview, but I took the plunge and installed this on a bunch of virtual machines I had lying around. In this post, I’ll share you with some impressions, ideas, pains and speculations.

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 that this PHP-based WebDAV server was missing some configuration at the webserver level. Some HTTP keywords required for the WebDAV protocol were not mapped to the PHP runtime making it virtually impossible to run a custom WebDAV implementation on PHP. Unless there’s some configuration possible…

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 with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Windows Azure technical communities during the past year. The Microsoft MVP Award provides us the unique opportunity to celebrate and honor your significant contributions and say “Thank you for your technical leadership.”