Tag: General

I actually just noticed it has been a while since I did a blog post. I also know that writing about this is not really a good idea in the blogosphere. Unless… it’s for a good reason! The good reason for not being that active on my blog lately is the fact that I’m producing content for Microsoft’s Interoperability team. Have you ever wanted to start working with Windows Azure and PHP? No idea where to start? Meet the official portal: Developing Applications for Azure with PHP.

I’m proud to announce that MvcSiteMapProvider 2.2.0 has just been uploaded to CodePlex. It should also be available through NuPack in the coming hours. This release has taken a while, but that’s because I’ve been making some important changes… MvcSiteMapProvider is, as the name implies, an ASP.NET MVC SiteMapProvider implementation for the ASP.NET MVC framework. Targeted at ASP.NET MVC 2, it provides sitemap XML functionality and interoperability with the classic ASP.NET sitemap controls, like the SiteMapPath control for rendering breadcrumbs and the Menu control.

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.

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.

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.

Just wanted to do a quick plug to an article I’ve written for TechNet Magazine: Windows Azure: Cost Architecting for Windows Azure.

As promised during my session on PHP Summer Camp in Lisbon, Portugal, here’s the slide deck. PHP on Windows and on Azure Thanks for joining!

As promised during my session on Remix 10 yesterday in Belgium, here’s the slide deck and sample code.

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.

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.