Tag: General
All the articles with the tag "General".
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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… Imagine you have an application running in your own datacenter. Everything works smoothly, except for some capacity spikes now and then. Someone has asked you for doing something about it with low budget. Not enough budget for new hardware, and frankly new hardware would be ridiculous to just ensure capacity for a few hours each month. A possible solution would be: migrating the application to the cloud during capacity spikes. Not all the time though: the hardware is in house and you may be a server-hugger that wants to see blinking LAN and HDD lights most of the time. I have to admit: blinking lights are cool! But I digress.
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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 that I’m handsome. But the fact that I paid $99 for listing an application in the marketplace that they were hoping me to port to Windows Phone 7. The wait continued: july? No phone. August? No phone. By september I thought I was not getting a Windows Phone 7 anymore. Until this week: another e-mail stating that the device was shipped. And today, FedEx kindly handed me over a developer device. After installing my SIM card and starting the phone, I was welcomed by the nice looking Windows Phone 7 tiles. And that is where the rest of my journey started…
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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 developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. If you download and install NuPack into Visual Studio, you can now reference MvcSiteMapProvider with a few simple clicks! From within your ASP.NET MVC 2 project, right click the project file and use the new “Add Package Reference…” option.
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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 applications and solutions for cloud computing and Windows Azure requires a completely different way of considering the operating costs. Cloud computing and platforms like Windows Azure are billed as “the next big thing” in IT. This certainly seems true when you consider the myriad advantages to cloud computing. Computing and storage become an on-demand story that you can use at any time, paying only for what you effectively use. However, this also poses a problem. If a cloud application is designed like a regular application, chances are that that application’s cost perspective will not be as expected.
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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. Thanks for joining!
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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. Abstract: “It’s time to take advantage of the cloud! In this session Maarten builds further on the application created during Gill Cleeren’s Silverlight session. The campaign website that was developed in Silverlight 4 still needs a home. Because the campaign will only run for a short period of time, the company chose for cloud computing on the Windows Azure platform. Learn how to leverage flexible hosting with automated scaling on Windows Azure, combined with the power of a cloud hosted SQL Azure database to create a cost-effective and responsive web application.” Thanks for joining and bearing with me during this tough session with very sparse bandwidth!
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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, … All this is valuable information when investigating application issues or doing performance tuning. Windows Azure is slightly different in diagnostics from a regular web application. Usually, you log into a machine via remote desktop or SSH and inspect the log files: management tools (remote desktop or SSH) and data (log files) are all on the same machine. This approach also works with 2 machines, maybe even with 3. However on Windows Azure, you may scale beyond that and have a hard time looking into what is happening in your application if you would have to use the above approach. A solution for this? Meet the Diagnostics Monitor.
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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 summarize: Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse for PHP has been updated and is on par with Visual Studio tooling (which means you can deploy a PHP app to Windows Azure without leaving Eclipse!). The Windows Azure Command-line Tools for PHP have been updated, and there’s a new release of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP and a Windows Azure Storage plugin for WordPress built on that.
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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 conference consisting of three different tracks: Cirrus – the high level stuff, Altocumulus – the mid level stuff (cast studies) and Stratocumulus – the low level stuff (deep tech). I’ll be doing a session in the Stratocumulus track. Since this is an online conference, feel free to subscribe for the event! All details can be found on the UK Windows Azure Online Conference announcement. I feel this is going to be very interesting, covering a broad range of Windows Azure topics! Here’s the list of sessions I’ll try to attend: The only thing I’m wondering about: how are they going to provide lunch through Live Meeting…
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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 notice this spam if I did not approve it as a valid comment. However, I found myself cleaning up comment spam from in between legitimate comments in the BlogEngine.NET admin interface. In an effort of trying to reduce comment spam, I tried the following: Luckily, the latest version of BlogEngine.NET (and also earlier version if you go down the hacky road) featured a new comment system, including spam filtering. After using it for a few months, I must say I’m very close to zero comment spam! I have configured BlogEngine.NET as follows: