Tag: General

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.

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.

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:

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!

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.