Tag: General
All the articles with the tag "General".
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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 effort, package authors can publish their symbols and sources, and package consumers can debug into them from Visual Studio, simply by pushing a symbols package in addition to the standard NuGet package. Today, we’re proud to announce MyGet has partnered with SymbolSource.org to offer an easy workflow to publish symbol packages for a private MyGet feed. This means from now on you can publish symbol packages for your private feeds as well!
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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 server. For example, one can be in the situation where two servers are hosting a WCF OData Service and are exposed to the Internet through either a load balancer or a reverse proxy. Below is a figure of such setup using a reverse proxy. As you can see, the external server listens on the URL www.example.com, while both internal servers are listening on their respective host names. Guess what: whenever someone accesses a WCF OData Service through the reverse proxy, the XML generated by one of the two backend servers is slightly invalid:
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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 may have tackled a commonly requested Windows Azure feature for PHP developers. Some sort of distributed caching is always a great thing to have when building scalable services and applications. While Windows Azure offers a distributed caching layer under the form of the Windows Azure Caching, that components currently lacks support for non-.NET technologies. I’ve heard there’s work being done there, but that’s not very interesting if you are building your app today. This blog post will show you how to modify a Windows Azure deployment to run and use Memcached in the easiest possible manner.
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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 we introduced some options to delegate feed privileges to other MyGet users allowing you to make another MyGet user “co-admin” or “contributor” to a feed. Since then we’ve expanded our view on the NuGet ecosystem and moved MyGet from a solution to create your private feeds to a service that allows you to set up a NuGet feed, whether private or public. Supporting public feeds allows you to set up a structure similar to www.nuget.org: you can give any user privileges to publish a package to your feed while the user can never manage other packages on your feed. This is great in several scenarios:
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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 system as a source for their production deployment. While interesting, I see a lot of problems there: your source code may not run immediately and probably has to be compiled. You don’t want to maintain compiled assemblies in source control, right? Also, maybe some QA process is in place where a deployment can only occur after approval. Why not use source control for what it’s there for: source control? And how about using a NuGet repository as the source for our deployment? Meet the Windows Azure NuGetRole. Disclaimer/Warning: this is demo material and should probably not be used for real-life deployments without making it bullet proof!
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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 page on which various sections would be rendered based on which plugins are loaded in the application. Intrigued by the question and having no clue on how to do this, I quickly hacked together a SettingsViewModel, to which he could add all section view models no matter what type they are: Code highlighting produced by Actipro CodeHighlighter (freeware) http://www.CodeHighlighter.com/ —>1 public class SettingsViewModel 2 { 3 public List<dynamic> SettingsSections = new List<dynamic>(); 4 }
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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 for MyGet, a website with enough users but not enough to justify the “scalability” aspect he thought Windows Azure was offering. Since Windows Azure is much, much more than scalability alone, I decided to do a quick writeup about the various reasons on why we use Windows Azure for MyGet. And those are not scalability. First of all, here’s a high-level overview of our deployment, which may illustrate some of the aspects below:
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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. During this review I had no idea who the author of the book was but after publishing it seems the author is no one less than my fellow Windows Azure MVP Neil Mackenzie! If you read his blog you should know you should immediately buy this book. Why? Well, Neil usually goes both broad and deep: all required context for understanding a recipe is given and the recipe itself goes deep enough to know most of the ins and outs of a specific feature of Windows Azure. Well written, to the point and clear to every reader both novice and expert.
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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 PHP version for Glimpse! Now what is this Glimpse thing… Well: "what Firebug is for the client, Glimpse does for the server... in other words, a client side Glimpse into whats going on in your server." For a quick demonstration of what this means, check the video at http://getglimpse.com/. Yes, it’s a .NET based video but the idea behind Glimpse for PHP is the same. And if you do need a PHP-based one, check http://screenr.com/27ds (warning: unedited :-)) Fundamentally Glimpse is made up of 3 different parts, all of which are extensible and customizable for any platform:
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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 out there (yes, that is a rant against the .NET SDK!): Windows Azure SDK for PHP. We’ve been working very hard with an expanding globally distributed team on getting this version out.