Tag: General
All the articles with the tag "General".
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How we built TwitterMatic.net - Part 1: Introduction
“Once upon a time, Microsoft started a Windows Azure developing contest named new CloudApp();. While it first was only available for US candidates, the contest was opened for international submissions too. Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker and his fellow knightsmen at RealDolmen decided to submit a small sample application that could be hosted in an unknown environment, known by the digital villagers as “the cloud”. The application was called TwitterMatic, named after the great god of social networking, Twitter. It would allow digital villagers to tell the latest stories, even when they were asleep or busy working.”
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Announcing: Azure User Group Belgium
After the summer, I'll be joining Kurt Claeys and Yves Goeleven and for the start of the Azure User Group Belgium (or AZUG.BE). AZUG.BE is a Belgian user group with focus on development and architecture of the Microsoft Azure Services Platform. Azure is a cloud hosted development platform for internet oriented applications aimed at high scalability and based on .NET technology. Our goal is to share knowledge and experiences with the .NET community in development and architecture in the Azure Services Platform and the .NET Services technology. As new programming skills and a new architectural approach are needed we are inviting you to become member of this user group to prepare you for building this new style of applications.
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Application-wide action filters in ASP.NET MVC
Ever had a team of developers using your ASP.NET MVC framework? Chances are you have implemented some action filters (i.e. for logging) which should be applied on all controllers in the application. Two ways to do this: kindly ask your developers to add a [Logging] attribute to the controllers they write, or kindly ask to inherit from SomeCustomControllerWithActionsInPlace.
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Revised: ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
A while ago, I did a blog post on combining ASP.NET MVC and MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework), making it possible to “plug” controllers and views into your application as a module. I received a lot of positive feedback as well as a hard question from Dan Swatik who was experiencing a Server Error with this approach… Here’s a better approach to ASP.NET MVC and MEF. The stack trace was being quite verbose on this one:
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ASP.NET MVC TDD using Visual Studio 2010
Phil Haack announced yesterday that the tooling support for ASP.NET MVC is available for Visual Studio 2010. Troy Goode already blogged about the designer snippets (which are really really cool, just like other parts of the roadmap for ASP.NET MVC 2.0). I’ll give the new TDD workflow introduced in VS2010 a take. First of all, I’ll create a new ASP.NET MVC application in VS2010. After installing the project template (and the designer snippets if you are cool), this is easy in VS2010: Proceed and make sure to create a unit test project as well. Next, in your unit test project, add a new unit test class and name it DemoControllerTests.cs. Go ahead and start typing the following test: Now when you type CTRL-. (or right click the DemoController unknown class), you can pick “Generate other…”:
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A view from the cloud (or: locate your ASP.NET MVC views on Windows Azure Blob Storage)
Hosting and deploying ASP.NET MVC applications on Windows Azure works like a charm. However, if you have been reading my blog for a while, you might have seen that I don’t like the fact that my ASP.NET MVC views are stored in the deployed package as well… Why? If I want to change some text or I made a typo, I would have to re-deploy my entire application for this. Takes a while, application is down during deployment, … And all of that for a typo…
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PHP and Silverlight - DevDays session
I just returned from The Hague where Kevin and I delivered a session on PHP and Silverlight. As promised, we are putting our slides and demos online. Download the demo code from here: PHP and Silverlight - DevDays.zip (1.00 mb) Abstract: We really enjoyed DevDays and want to thank everyone who was there (and was in our session while beer drinking seemed more appropriate that time of day).
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ConnectedShow Podcast - PHP SDK for Windows Azure
The fifth episode of the ConnectedShow podcast is up. This podcast is all about cloud computing, Windows Azure, … Recently, they have asked me if I wanted to be in one of their podcasts on the PHP SDK for Windows Azure. In this episode Dmitry welcomes a new co-host, Peter Laudati. Next, we speak to Maarten Balliauw about the new PHP SDK for Windows Azure which is designed to help PHP developers use Windows Azure services. Here’s the link to the podcast: http://www.connectedshow.com/default.aspx?Episode=5
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ASP.NET MVC Domain Routing
Ever since the release of ASP.NET MVC and its routing engine (System.Web.Routing), Microsoft has been trying to convince us that you have full control over your URL and routing. This is true to a certain extent: as long as it’s related to your application path, everything works out nicely. If you need to take care of data tokens in your (sub)domain, you’re screwed by default. Earlier this week, Juliën Hanssens did a blog post on his approach to subdomain routing. While this is a good a approach, it has some drawbacks: Unfortunately, the ASP.NET MVC infrastructure is based around this VirtualPathData class. That’s right: only tokens in the URL’s path are used for routing… Check my entry on the ASP.NET MVC forums on that one.
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Document Interoperability Workshop, London, May 18 2009
After a pleasant flight with VLM airlines (Antwerp – London City), traveling under half of the city of London, I arrived at the Microsoft offices in Victoria for their third (?) DII workshop, of which I attended a previous one in Brussels last year. If you are wondering: “What are you doing there???”, here’s a short intro. I’ve been working on Microsoft interop projects for quite a few years now, like PHPExcel, PHPPowerPoint, PHPLinq, PHPAzure, … When working on PHPExcel and PHPPowerpoint, I hit the term “document interoperability” quite a lot. OpenXML (the underlying file format) is well documented, but there is some work on making sure the generated document by any of those tools is fully compatible with the standard. And that’s what these DII workshops are all about.