Tag: Software
All the articles with the tag "Software".
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Running Memcached on Windows Azure for PHP
After three conferences in two weeks with a lot of “airport time”, which typically converts into “let’s code!” time, I think I may have tackled a commonly requested Windows Azure feature for PHP developers. Some sort of distributed caching is always a great thing to have when building scalable services and applications. While Windows Azure offers a distributed caching layer under the form of the Windows Azure Caching, that components currently lacks support for non-.NET technologies. I’ve heard there’s work being done there, but that’s not very interesting if you are building your app today. This blog post will show you how to modify a Windows Azure deployment to run and use Memcached in the easiest possible manner.
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Setting up a NuGet repository in seconds: MyGet public feeds
A few months ago, my colleague Xavier Decoster and I introduced MyGet as a tool where you can create your own, private NuGet feeds. A couple of weeks later we introduced some options to delegate feed privileges to other MyGet users allowing you to make another MyGet user “co-admin” or “contributor” to a feed. Since then we’ve expanded our view on the NuGet ecosystem and moved MyGet from a solution to create your private feeds to a service that allows you to set up a NuGet feed, whether private or public. Supporting public feeds allows you to set up a structure similar to www.nuget.org: you can give any user privileges to publish a package to your feed while the user can never manage other packages on your feed. This is great in several scenarios:
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NuGet push... to Windows Azure
When looking at how people like to deploy their applications to a cloud environment, a large faction seems to prefer being able to use their source control system as a source for their production deployment. While interesting, I see a lot of problems there: your source code may not run immediately and probably has to be compiled. You don’t want to maintain compiled assemblies in source control, right? Also, maybe some QA process is in place where a deployment can only occur after approval. Why not use source control for what it’s there for: source control? And how about using a NuGet repository as the source for our deployment? Meet the Windows Azure NuGetRole. Disclaimer/Warning: this is demo material and should probably not be used for real-life deployments without making it bullet proof!
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A client side Glimpse to your PHP application
A few months ago, the .NET world was surprised with a magnificent tool called “Glimpse”. Today I’m pleased to release a first draft of a PHP version for Glimpse! Now what is this Glimpse thing… Well: "what Firebug is for the client, Glimpse does for the server... in other words, a client side Glimpse into whats going on in your server." For a quick demonstration of what this means, check the video at http://getglimpse.com/. Yes, it’s a .NET based video but the idea behind Glimpse for PHP is the same. And if you do need a PHP-based one, check http://screenr.com/27ds (warning: unedited :-)) Fundamentally Glimpse is made up of 3 different parts, all of which are extensible and customizable for any platform:
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Version 4 of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP released
Only a few months after the Windows Azure SDK for PHP 3.0.0, Microsoft and RealDolmen are proud to present you the next version of the most complete SDK for Windows Azure out there (yes, that is a rant against the .NET SDK!): Windows Azure SDK for PHP. We’ve been working very hard with an expanding globally distributed team on getting this version out.
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Copy packages from one NuGet feed to another
Yesterday, a funny discussion was going on at the NuGet Discussion Forum on CodePlex. Funny, you say? Well yes. Funny because it was about a feature we envisioned as being a must-have feature for the NuGet ecosystem: copying packages from the NuGet feed to another feed. And funny because we already have that feature present in MyGet. You may wonder why anyone wants to do that? Allow me to explain.
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A first look at Windows Azure AppFabric Applications
After the Windows Azure AppFabric team announced the availability of Windows Azure AppFabric Applications (preview), I signed up for early access immediately and got in. After installing the tools and creating a namespace through the portal, I decided to give it a try to see what it’s all about. Note that Neil Mackenzie also has an extensive post on “WAAFapps” which I recommend you to read as well. Before answering that question, let’s have a brief look at what Windows Azure is today. According to Microsoft, Windows Azure is a “PaaS” (Platform-as-a-Service) offering. What that means is that Windows Azure offers a series of platform components like compute, storage, caching, authentication, a service bus, a database, a CDN, … to your applications.
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Delegate feed privileges to other users on MyGet
One of the first features we had envisioned for MyGet and which seemed increasingly popular was the ability to provide other users a means of managing packages on another user’s feed. As of today, we’re proud to announce the following new features: Now when is Microsoft going to buy us out :-) MyGet now allows you to make another MyGet user “co-admin” or “contributor” to a feed. This eases management of a private feed as that work can be spread across multiple people. If combined with the “private feeds” option, it’s also possible to give some users read access to the feed while unauthenticated users can not access the feed created.
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Enabling conditional Basic HTTP authentication on a WCF OData service
Yes, a long title, but also something I was not able to find too easily using Google. Here’s the situation: for MyGet, we are implementing basic authentication to the OData feed serving available NuGet packages. If you recall my post Using dynamic WCF service routes, you may have deducted that MyGet uses that technique to have one WCF OData service serving the feeds of all our users. It’s just convenient! Unless you want basic HTTP authentication for some feeds and not for others… After doing some research, I thought the easiest way to resolve this was to use WCF intercepting. Convenient, but how would you go about this? And moreover: how to make it extensible so we can use this for other WCF OData (or WebAPi) services in the future?
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MyGet now supports pushing from the command line
One of the work items we had opened for MyGet was the ability to push packages to a private feed from the command line. Only a few hours after our initial launch, David Fowler provided us with example code on how to implement NuGet command line pushes on the server side. An evening of coding later, I quickly hacked this into MyGet, which means that we now support pushing packages from the command line!