Tag: General

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:

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

Today, Phil Haack did a blog post on the release of ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1! Get it while it’s fresh :-) An updated roadmap is also available on CodePlex. Guess now is about time to start revising my ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly book…

Just learned I’ll be doing a session on ASP.NET MVC at ReMIX Belgium. ReMix brings the best of MIX09 in Las Vegas to Belgium: it bring us international speakers presenting on the best of MIX09, as well as local cases, with a story focus on User Experience (UX). The session will be around building a Twitter clone in 60 minutes. Bear with me at ReMIX 2009!

I’m pleased to announce PHPLinq currently supports basic querying of Windows Azure Table Storage. PHPLinq is a class library for PHP, based on the idea of Microsoft’s LINQ technology. LINQ is short for language integrated query, a component in the .NET framework which enables you to perform queries on a variety of data sources like arrays, XML, SQL server, … These queries are defined using a syntax which is very similar to SQL.

Don’t you get sick of having to register at website X, at website Y, at website Z, …? It is really not fun to maintain all these accounts, change passwords, … Luckily, there are some large websites offering delegated sign-in (for example Google Accounts, Live ID, Twitter OAuth, …). You can use these delegated sign-in methods on your own site, removing the need of registering yet another account. Unfortunately, not everyone has an account at provider X…