Tag: General

I just got the following invitation from Microsoft, and would like to encourage you to participate as well if you are interested in bot PHP and the Microsoft worlds.

With today’s release of the Windows Azure Tools and SDK version 1.1, also the Windows Azure Drive feature has been released. Announced at last year’s PDC as X-Drive, which has nothing to do with a well-known German car manufacturer, this new feature enables a Windows Azure application to use existing NTFS APIs to access a durable drive. This allows the Windows Azure application to mount a page blob as a drive letter, such as X:, and enables easily migration of existing NTFS applications to the cloud.

Slides of my talk at the PHPBenelux conference last weekend are online. Bit of a pity my live demo went wrong due to my www.azure.com trial account going into read-only mode while doing the demo. 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.”

For one of the first blog posts of the new year, I thought about doing something cool. And being someone working with ASP.NET MVC, I thought about a cool thing related to that: let’s do something with routes! Since System.Web.Routing is not limited to ASP.NET MVC, this post will also play nice with ASP.NET Webforms. But what’s the cool thing? How about… translating route values?

A while ago, I did a conceptual blog post on PHP Managed Extensibility Framework – PHPMEF. Today, I’m proud to announce the first public release of PHPMEF! After PHPExcel, PHPLinq, PHPPowerPoint and the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, PHPMEF is the 5th open-source project I started on interoperability (or conceptual interoperability) between the Microsoft world and the PHP world. Noble price for peace upcoming :-)

When Windows Azure was first released, only Web Roles were able to have an externally facing endpoint. Since PDC 2009, Worker Roles can now also have an external facing endpoint, allowing for a custom application server to be hosted in a Worker Role. Another option would be to run your own WCF service and have it hosted in a Worker Role. Features like load balancing, multiple instances of the Worker are all available. Let’s see how you can create a simple TCP service that can display the current date and time.

Ever worked with the templated helpers provided by ASP.NET MVC 2? Templated helpers provide a way to automatically build UI based on a data model that is marked with attributes defined in the* System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace. For example, a property in the model can be decorated with the attribute [DisplayFormat(DataFormatString = “{0:c}”)]*, and the templated helpers will always render this field formatted as currency. If you have worked with templated helpers, you must agree: they can be useful! There’s one thing which is impossible in the current version: ordering fields.

Everybody knows the Microsoft MIX event, right? The one in Las Vegas? The one with all the fancy web-related stuff? Rings a bell? Ok, great. In the beginning of December 2009, Microsoft did an open call for speakers, which I answered with some session proposals. Who doesn’t want to go to Vegas, right? The open call proposals have been processed (150+ sessions submitted, wow!) and a voting has started. Yes, you hear me coming: please go ahead and vote for a session I submitted. Voting ends January 15th, 2010.

A year just ended, a new has begun. Congratulations! Happy newyear 2010! And welcome in the next decennium. It’s time for a 2009 wrap-up post. And perhaps, even the time for some things I want to do in 2010. First things first: the top 5 blog posts of 2009.

How about ending the year 2009 with a blog post on something annoying I see on the Internet, as well as some others? I’m talking about automatic localization… Please, go ahead and read some tweets by @KvdM and @patrickv. And then, there’s my own annoyance on Windows Mobile Marketplace. The base for al this frustrated year-end whining has to do with the fact that there are assumptions being made about the location of a user, rather than about a user itself…