Tag: General

“After setting up his workplace, knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker thought of something else: if a farmer wants to keep a lot of hay, he needs a barn, right? Since the cloudy application would also need to keep things that can be used by the digital villagers, our knight needs a barn in the clouds. Looking at the azure sky, an idea popped into the knight’s head: why not use Windows Azure storage service? It’s a barn that’s always there, a barn that can catch fire and will still have its stored items located in a second barn (and a third). Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker jumped on his horse and went on a quest, a quest in the clouds.**”

“Knight Maarten The Brave Coffeedrinker was about to start working on his TwitterMatic application, named after the great god of social networking, Twitter. Before he could start working, he first needed the right tools. He downloaded the Windows Azure SDK, a set of tools recommended by the smith (or was it the carpenter?) of the digital village. Our knight’s work shack was soon ready to start working. The table on which the application would be crafted, was still empty. Time for action, the knight thought. And he started working.”

“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.”

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.

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.

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: InvalidOperationException The view at ’~/Plugins/Views/Demo/Index.aspx’ must derive from ViewPage, ViewPage, ViewUserControl, or ViewUserControl.

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.

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…

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: “So you have an existing PHP application and would like to spice it up with a rich and attractive front-end. Next to Adobe Flex, you can also choose Silverlight as a solution. This session shows you around in Silverlight and shows that PHP and Silverlight can go together easily.” PHP And Silverlight - DevDays session

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