DarksideCookie

For the last year, there have been few things in the development space I have heard as much about, as I have heard about Windows Azure. Microsoft has been pushing the Azure platform hard, we all know that, but not all of us have had the chance to try it out though.

Luckily I have had the fortune of being on a few projects that have been using it, but to be honest, I haven’t been really blown away yet. Yes…it does offer some awesome features that work extremely well in certain scenarios, but I would still claim that it isn’t for everyone. Having that said, I admit that I have only scratched the surface of the platform…

Lately however, more or less every time I hear Azure, it comes bundled with the term Service Bus. Either in “this would be such a great scenario for the service bus”, or in “wonder if we can get the service bus in there so that we can try it out”. Ok…so one of these are ok, the other isn’t to be honest… Playing with the service bus isn’t hard, as I will show you in future posts, and thus does not need to be added to a project to be tried. But before I start coding, I want to have a little rant about what it is. Or at least a rant about how I have understood it…

More...

Earlier today I got word that some of my sessions, that I had sent in as a part of the Open Call for MIX11, had gone past the initial round and are on the MIX11 website for voting. And the sessions that get the most votes gets to be presented at MIX11.

So this obviously means that I need a LOT of votes. And that means that I need you to vote on any of my sessions  that you find interesting. Or all of them if you just want to help me to get the possibility to present at MIX11…

The sessions are available here: http://live.visitmix.com/OpenCall/.

And what are my sessions? Well, I am glad you asked. They are…

Silverlight and Windows Azure - Tips from the Trenches
Join Chris Klug as he share his expertise in combining Windows Azure and Silverlight. This session will provide practical insights on using Silverlight with Windows Azure. It will include guidance on using Silverlight applications with Azure Web and Worker roles as well as approaches for using Windows Azure storage directly from your Silverlight app. This session will also cover the use of Windows Azure as a delivery mechanism for Windows Phone 7 push notifications and as a delivery mechanism for streaming media. Vote

From Phone Zero to Phone Hero in 60 minutes
Join Chris Klug & Chris Auld from Intergen as they build a real Windows Phone 7 app from scratch in 60 minutes. This is a hard core, dual data projector, coding marathon. Chris and Chris will build a Windows Phone 7 series application including Windows Azure hosted push notifications, a rich Silverlight UI and partner integration. You'll see how to take an idea from concept to the Windows Phone Marketplace in just an hour. In other words, not your general 'Hello World' application. Vote

MVVM - The Naked Truth
Model-View-ViewModel is the pattern of choice when writing Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone 7 applications. It offers the developer a structured way to implement UI functionality and logic. It especially well with the mentioned technologies, as it uses built in features to enable a clean separation between form and function. During this session you will join Chris Klug, a Silverlight Solution Specialist from New Zealand, as he tells all about how you get started with MVVM. The goal is to get an understanding of why it is useful and how it can make your life simpler. And it will be presented in a naked form, no frameworks or helpers, enabling you to focus on the basic ins and outs of the pattern. Vote

Building Composite Silverlight Applications
Silverlight is a great platform for rich internet applications, but a lot of developers seem to forget that we can use many of our advanced desktop app approaches too. By adding a plug-in architecture we can make our apps easily extensible for future requirements. This session provides an introduction to plug-in approaches in Silverlight. It explores both PRISM and MEF as tools for implementing this pattern. You'll leave with the practical knowledge you need to add a plugin mechanism to your new and existing applications. Vote

The Phone Zero to Phone Hero will probably not be presented together with Christ Auld though as he probably won’t be able to go to MIX this year. But I will try and find a worthy replacement if that session were to get picked. And I really hope it is, cause it is a very entertaining session that is very far from your normal session. And also because it seems to polarize the crowd a lot. We have got feedback that ranges from more or less “the worst session ever attended” to “the best session ever attended”. Luckily, the good feedback seems to come from people who go to a lot of conferences and have a bit of experience, which is sort of required to grasp the information at the speed that it is presented…

That’s it for now. More coming soon… I hope… I have a little too much to do at the moment…

Next Wednesday, October 20th, I will be presenting at the .NET user group here in Wellington again. This time the talk is all about smooth streaming (same talk as I presented at TechEd NZ). It covers everything from encoding your media, to publishing it on your server and of course also how to consume it from Silverlight. It will also be covering how to get your first live smooth streaming event going.

The talk does, as you can see, cover a wide array of things that has to do with smooth streaming. And to make it even broader, I will show off the Rough Cut Editor (an open source rough video editing tool built in Silverlight). And it would of course not be complete with out touching the cloud. So to finish it off, I will show you how you can deliver smooth streaming media out of Azure blob storage. A very cost effective and good way to share your media.

So if you are in Wellington, or close by, feel free to drop by if it sounds interesting. More information is available here: http://www.dot.net.nz/UserGroupPages/WellingtonNET.aspx

Everyone, and by that I mean anyone that has been coding for more than a year, talks about decoupling and layers. It’s all about building an n-tier architecture, and about decoupling the layer so that they can be changed later on.

And however much I understand this, and like it, and use it, I still argue that it is sometimes overkill. And even though I definitely can argue both sides of this topic, I am not even going to get started doing so. Maybe I will in a later post, when I feel like getting flamed… :)

This post is about how decoupling your view from your view logic using MVVM can really be helpful. And I am not going to talk about how unit testing will help or anything like that. I am going to explain why MVVM is more important than just testing by showing an example…

More...

I have just come back to Wellington after having spent a week travelling around and speaking at TechEd Australia and TechEd New Zealand...and of course CodeCamp in Auckland before TechEd.

Both TechEds were full of interesting people and interesting sessions. Not that I actually attended that many. But I assume they were interesting…

At both the aussie and kiwi conferences, me and Chris Auld showed off how to build an Azure backed Windows Phone 7 application in 60 minutes. And at both conferences, we promised to put up some blog posts around it. So here is my first one…one that talks about some of the key pieces that were shown. As well as some that weren’t shown…

More...

As some of you might have seen/heard, I am speaking at TechEd New Zealand and TechEd Australia the coming two weeks. This is the reason for my blog being kind of quiet lately, I have just had a bit too much to do.

One of the presentations I am doing, is presented together with Chris Auld and is called "Phone Zero to Phone Hero in 60 minutes". It is a  "double feature presentation" with two projectors, two computers, two presenters and two applications. And at the end of the presentation, the two applications come together to form a Windows Phone 7 application backed by an Azure service.

We have finally got all of it built and up and running, so I thought I would give you a sneak peak of what is to come.

More...

I have recently worked on several projects that have been built to utilize the Microsoft cloud platform called Azure. Azure offers a lot of really interesting benefits, and especially when it comes to being elastic. You can basically throw however much data you want at it, and as long as you are willing to pay for it, it will handle it. It doesn’t matter if you throw data at it that needs to be computed, or if you throw vast amounts of data that needs to be stored. Azure will handle it for you.

On top of that, it is really easy to build for. There isn’t really a whole lot to learn before one can get up and running in the cloud. Microsoft even offers a sweet SDK that gives you access to the cloud based services locally on your machine. It offers you the ability to deploy your webroles (web applications) straight to a local “cloud” and debug it. So you don’t even need to have an Azure account to starting to work with it.

More...