Tag: General

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 (Content Delivery Network):

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 fact that there is great opportunity in scaling, even for small applications. In this blog post series, I will talk about the following:

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”) authentication like Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service with it. After a few attempts, I managed to wrap-up a module for Orchard which does that: Authentication.Federated. After installing, configuring and enabling this module, Orchard’s logon page is replaced with any SAML 2.0 STS that you configure. To give you a quick idea of what this looks like, here are a few screenshots:

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 happy!) my session got selected. Thanks a bunch! Oh and thanks, RealDolmen, for supporting me in doing things like this!

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. If you are still using ASP.NET MVC 2, no worries: version 2.3.1 contains the exact same functionality but is targeted at ASP.NET MVC 2. The changelog: Enjoy!

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 actually being read quite often. I’m not sure about which bloggers actually update their posts like if it was software, but I don’t. Old posts are outdated, that’s the convention when coming to my blog. However I recently received a on of questions if I could do something with ASP.NET MVC 3 and MEF. I did, and I took things seriously.

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 about a contest where I’m doing both, I thought this is definitely worth telling you:

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: votes are the only currency to get my session proposal in Vegas. Here’s the session abstract: So you have a team of developers? And a nice architecture to build on? How about making that architecture easy for everyone and getting developers up to speed quickly? Learn all about integrating the managed extensibility framework and ASP.NET MVC for creating loosely coupled, easy to use architectures that anyone can grasp.

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 into the CMS itself, but after fiddling around with it I found a lot of things missing: there are only 40 modules and widgets available at the moment and the only way to have a more rich ecosystem of modules is: contributing! And that’s what I did. Feel the need to add a list of recent tweets by a certain user to your Orchard website? Try my LatestTwitter widget. Here’s a screenshot of the widget in action:

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 me to learn new things. I can use my current skill set and build cool apps for that platform. But what about the other platforms? If you look at all platforms from a web developer perspective, there’s one library that also allows you to use your existing skill set: jQuery Mobile. Know HTML? Know jQuery? Know any web development language like PHP, RoR or ASP.NET (MVC)? Go ahead and build great looking mobile web apps!