Tag: General
All the articles with the tag "General".
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Book review: Refactoring with Visual Studio 2010
Yet again, Packt Publishing has sent me a book for review. For once, one without the typical orange/black cover but instead a classy white/black cover: Refactoring with Visual Studio 2010 by Peter Ritchie. Since my book shelf is quite heavy on the Packt side (really, almost have their complete collection I guess, they keep sending me books), I was a bit in doubt if I should write yet another review for one of their books as I think I’m starting to sound like a Packt marketing guy. After reading it though, I thought that this book deserves some credit!
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Hybrid Azure applications using OData
In the whole Windows Azure story, Microsoft has always been telling you could build hybrid applications: an on-premise application with a service on Azure or a database on SQL Azure. But how to do it in the opposite direction? Easy answer there: use the (careful, long product name coming!) Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus to expose an on-premise WCF service securely to an application hosted on Windows Azure. Now how would you go about exposing your database to Windows Azure? Open a hole in the firewall? Use something like PortBridge to redirect TCP traffic over the service bus? Why not just create an OData service for our database and expose that over AppFabric Service Bus. In this post, I’ll show you how.
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Simplified access control using Windows Azure AppFabric Labs
Earlier this week, Zane Adam announced the availability of the New AppFabric Access Control service in LABS. The highlights for this release (and I quote): Wow! This just *has* to be good! Let’s see how easy it is to work with claims based authentication and the AppFabric Labs Access Control Service, which I’ll abbreviate to “ACS” throughout this post. In essence, I’ll be “outsourcing” the access control part of my application to the ACS. When a user comes to the application, he will be asked to present certain “claims”, for example a claim that tells what the user’s role is. Of course, the application will only trust claims that have been signed by a trusted party, which in this case will be the ACS.
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MvcSiteMapProvider 2.1.0 released!
The release for MvcSiteMapProvider 2.1.0 has just been posted on CodePlex. 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. Next to a brand new logo, the component has been patched up with several bugfixes, the visibility attribute is back (in a slightly cooler reincarnation) and a number of new extension points have been introduced. Let’s give you a quick overview…
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ASP.NET MVC 3 and MEF sitting in a tree...
As I stated in a previous blog post: ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1 has been released! I talked about some of the new features and promised to do a blog post in the dependency injection part. In this post, I'll show you how to use that together with MEF. Download my sample code: Mvc3WithMEF.zip (256.21 kb) First of all, there’s 4 new hooks for injecting dependencies:
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ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1 is out! Quick review...
I just noticed a very interesting download: ASP.NET MVC 3 preview 1. Yes, you are reading this correctly, the first bits for v3.0 are there! Let’s have a quick look around and see what’s new... ScottGu blogged about Razor before. ASP.NET MVC has always supported the concept of “view engines”, pluggable modules that allow you to have your views rendered by different engines like for example the WebForms engine, Spark, NHAML, … Razor is a new view engine, focused on less code clutter and shorter code-expressions for generating HTML dynamically. As an example, have a look at the following view: [code:c#] <ul> <% foreach (var c in Model.Customers) { %> <li><%:c.DisplayName%></li> <% } %> </ul> [/code] In Razor syntax, this becomes: [code:c#]
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Manage your SQL Azure database from your browser
Yesterday, I noticed on Twitter that the SQL Azure - Project “Houston” CTP 1 has been released online. For those who do not know Houston, this is a lightweight and easy to use database management tool for SQL Azure databases built in Silverlight. Translation: you can now easily manage your SQL Azure database using any browser. It’s not a replacement for SSMS, but it’s a viable, quick solution into connecting to your cloudy database. After connecting to your SQL Azure database through http://manage.sqlazurelabs.com, you’ll see a quick overview of your database elements (tables, views, stored procedures) as well as a fancy, three-dimensional cube displaying your database details. Let’s create a new table… After clicking the “New table” toolbar item on top, a simple table designer pops up:
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Renewed MVP ASP.NET for 2010!
Just got the best e-mail a Microsoft community member can receive in his mailbox: Dear Maarten Balliauw, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 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 ASP/ASP.NET technical communities during the past year. (...) Toby Richards General Manager Community Support Services I wish to thank everyone who has been supporting me, encouraging me, challenging me and thus bringing me to a second year of MVP duty. I will try to achieve the same for next year: do a lot of sessions, work on open-source, do blog posts, …
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ASP.NET MVC - MvcSiteMapProvider 2.0 is out!
I’m very proud to announce the release of the ASP.NET MVC MvcSiteMapProvider 2.0! I’m also proud that the name of this product now exceeds the average length of Microsoft product names. In this blog post, I will give you a feel of what you can (and can not) do with this ASP.NET-specific SiteMapProvider. As a warning: if you’ve used version 1 of this library, you will notice that I have not thought of backwards compatibility. A lot of principles have also changed. For good reasons though: this release is a rewrite of the original version with improved features, extensibility and stability. The example code is all based on the excellent ASP.NET MVC Music Store sample application by Jon Galloway.
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Running on Windows Azure - ChronoRace - Autoscaling
At RealDolmen, we had the luck of doing the first (known) project on Windows Azure in Belgium. Together with Microsoft, we had the opportunity to make the ChronoRace website robust enough to withstand large sports events like the 20km through Brussels.