Tag: General

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.

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.

Once again, Packt Publishing has asked me to do a book review on one of their latest books, “PHP 5 E-commerce Development” by Michael Peacock. The book promises the following: All of this is true, but… Not all is negative of course! The writing style is good and provides an easy read. Next to that, all concepts and pitfalls that go with building an online commerce site are well explained. Still, my advise on this book would not be “buy it”.

It looks like I’m only doing sessions lately :-) Here’s another slide deck for a presentation I did on the Architect Forum last week in Belgium. Abstract: “No, this session is not about greener IT. Learn about using the RoleEnvironment and diagnostics provided by Windows Azure. Communication between roles, logging and automatic upscaling of your application are just some of the possibilities of what you can do if you know about how the Windows Azure environment works.” Taking care of a cloud environment Thanks for attending!

As part of my global domination plans, I this week visited Vienna, Austria for a session at Linuxwochen around PHP on Windows. Abstract: “Ever wanted to get started with PHP development on Windows? This session covers the basics of running PHP on the Windows platform and will help getting your development environment ready.” PHP on Windows Thanks for being in this session! I know it is a controversial one on a Linux event :-)

As promised, here are the slides of the VISUG session me and Kris van der Mast did yesterday. Abstract: “Don’t tell us you’re jealous of those Silverlight fanboys! We’ll show you that applications with bling can be developed using ASP.NET MVC and jQuery. We’re talking MVC, template helpers, AJAX, JSON, transitions, live bindings, …” Being a pimp without silverlight

First of all: thank you for attending the sessions Kevin Dockx and I gave at TechDays 2010 Portugal! A wonder we made it there with all the ash clouds and volcanic interference based in Iceland. Abstract: “While working together with Microsoft on the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, we found that we needed an popular example application hosted on Microsoft’s Windows Azure. Wordpress was an obvious choice, but not an obvious task. Learn more about Windows Azure, the PHP SDK that we developed, SQL Azure and about the problems we faced porting an existing PHP application to Windows Azure.”

At the JumpIn Camp in Zürich this week, we are trying to get some of the more popular PHP applications running on Windows Azure. As you may know, Windows Azure has different storage options like blobs, tables, queues and drives. There’s the Windows Azure SDK for PHP for most of this, except for drives. Which is normal: drives are at the operating system level and have nothing to do with the REST calls that are used for the other storage types. By the way: I did a post on using Windows Azure Drive (or “XDrive”) a while ago if you want more info.

Yesterday I did some talks on PHP and Windows Azure at JumpIn Camp in Zürich together with Josh Holmes. Here are the slide decks and samples we used. Josh talked on what Windows Azure is, what components are available and how you can get started with PHP and Windows Azure. Scaling Big While Sleeping Well I did not do the entire deck, but showed some slides and concepts. This is mainly the same content as Josh’s session with some additions. Running PHP In The Cloud This deck talks about the different storage concepts and how to use them in PHP. Windows Azure Storage & Sql Azure