Tag: General
All the articles with the tag "General".
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Simple API for Cloud Application Services
Zend, in co-operation with IBM, Microsoft, Rackspace, GoGrid and other cloud leaders, today have released their Simple API for Cloud Application Services project. The Simple Cloud API project empowers developers to use one interface to interact with the cloud services offered by different vendors. These vendors are all contributing to this open source project, making sure the Simple Cloud API “fits like a glove” on top of their service. Zend Cloud adapters will be available for services such as: Note that the Simple Cloud API is focused on providing a simple and re-usable interface across different cloud services. This implicates that specific features a service offers will not be available using the Simple Cloud API.
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Joined The Lounge network
Last week, I received my invitation to the Lounge network, an exclusive advertising network for “trusted and respected publishers focused on Microsoft technologies”. First of all, it’s cool to see that at least someone considers me as trusted and respected. Next, it’s probably a better advertising solution than the Amazon ads I had earlier. The Lounge will always display ads related to .NET technology, whereas Amazon had its days of displaying lamps and home furniture enhancements. Let’s see how this works out.
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ASP.NET MVC MvcSiteMapProvider 1.0 released
Back in March, I blogged about an experimental MvcSiteMap provider I was building. Today, I am proud to announce that it is stable enough to call it version 1.0! Download MvcSiteMapProvider 1.0 over at CodePlex. Ever since the source code release I did back in March, a lot of new features have been added, such as HtmlHelper extension methods, attributes, dynamic parameters, … I’ll leave most of them up to you to discover, but there are some I want to quickly highlight.
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SQL Azure Manager
A few days ago, the SQL Server Team announced the availability of three major CTP’s and several new upcoming projects in the SQL related family tree: SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server StreamInsight and SQL Azure. Now that last one is interesting: Microsoft will offer a 1GB or 10GB database server “in the cloud” for a good price.
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Book review: Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0
It sure looks like August 2009 is the month in which I found multiple books on my doormat for review. Last week I did ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Development, this time I’ll be reviewing a competitor to my own book on ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly: Simone Chiaretta and Keyvan Nayyeri’s “Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0”. Let’s start with the “official book overview”, which I usually copy-paste from Amazon. This book will learn you: After doing some reading over the weekend, I can say this book is great! It follows a different path than most of the ASP.NET MVC books out there today: of course it offers the basic introduction to ASP.NET MVC, it talks about models, controllers, views, …, however: it also covers more advanced topics like dependency injection (using NInject).
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ASP.NET MVC Chained Controller Factory
My last post on the REST for ASP.NET MVC SDK received an interesting comment… Basically, the spirit of the comment was: “There are tons of controller factories out there, but you can only use one at a time!”. This is true. One can have an IControllerFactory for MEF, for Castle Windsor, a custom one that creates a controller based on the current weather, … Most of the time, these IControllerFactory implementations do not glue together… Unless you chain them! The ChainedControllerFactory that I will be creating is quite easy: it builds a list of IControllerFactory instances that may be able to create an IController and asks them one by one to create it. The one that can create it, will be the one that delivers the controller. In code: [code:c#]
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REST for ASP.NET MVC SDK
Earlier this week, Phil Haack did a post on the newly released REST for ASP.NET MVC SDK. I had the feeling though that this post did not really get the attention it deserved. I do not have the idea my blog gets more visitors than Phil’s, but I’ll try to give the SDK some more attention by blogging an example. But first things first… “REST for ASP .NET MVC is a set of capabilities that enable developers building a website using ASP .NET MVC to easily expose a Web API for the functionality of the site. “ Ok then. Now you know. It will get more clear after reading the next topic. There are of course features in WCF that enable you to build REST-ful services, but…
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Book review: ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Development
From time to time, the people at Packt Publishing send me a free book, fresh of the presses, and ask nicely if I want to read it and write a review on my blog. Last week, I received their fresh ASP.NET 3.5 CMS Development book, written by Curt Christianson and Jeff Cochran, both Microsoft MVP (ASP.NET and IIS). According to the website, the book aims at learning people how to build a CMS. Now, I know from writing my ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly book that these texts are written mostly by marketing people.
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Signed Access Signatures and PHP SDK for Windows Azure
The latest Windows Azure storage release featured a new concept: “Shared Access Signatures”. The idea of those is that you can create signatures for specific resources in blob storage and that you can provide more granular access than the default “all-or-nothing” approach that is taken by Azure blob storage. Steve Marx posted a sample on this, demonstrating how you can provide read access to a blob for a specified amount of minutes, after which the access is revoked. The PHP SDK for Windows Azure is now equipped with a credentials mechanism, based on Signed Access Signatures. Let’s see if we can demonstrate how this would work… Let’s take Steve’s Wazdrop sample and upload a few files, we get a set of permissions:
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Accessing ServiceConfiguration in FastCGI (PHP) web role
While working on a sample PHP application hosted on Windows Azure, I found that it is nearly impossible to retrieve information from the Windows Azure ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file. Also, it is impossible to write log messages to the Windows Azure Web Role. Well, both are not 100% impossible: you can imagine dirty hacks where you let a ASP.NET page do something from PHP and stuff like that. But how about a clean solution? How about… A PHP extension module? I’ll not be going into detail on how this module was built, but there is a native C++ RoleManager implementation in the Windows Azure samples. Using the resources listed below, I managed to create a PHP extension module, wrapping this RoleManager. The result? You can now retrieve configuration values from the ServiceConfiguration.