Microsoft Cloud Day

I spent this tuesday at Microsoft in Kista for an event with the name Cloud Day. The main topic was of course Windows Azure. It is really not a question if the cloud should be used, but more what the cloud could be used for, and how?

When it comes to PaaS (Platform as a Service) Windows Azure offers a great advantage compared to traditional hosting. You only pay for the bandwidth and server needs you have at the moment. There are great savings to be made. But at the same time this presents a new challenge for system architechts, who have to think of for instance each database call as a potential cost.

In the future Microsoft will publish an online version of all their software as SaaS (Software as a Service). Today there is already the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which contains Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communicator and Office Live Meeting.

Apart from these topics we also got a preview of what is coming up in the cloud area. Two products were named, Windows Intune and Windows Azure Codename "Dallas". Definately worth checking out!

Comments

Google+ finally for everyone!

There have been a lot of whining on Google from their Apps-users since the launch of Google+ for everyone with a regular Google-account. The Apps-users have not been able to use Google+ , until now! (actually october 27 ) As usual I am impressed with most of the things Google accomplishes, but now when all of their services have gotten a visual and functional touchup I am getting really impressed. As someone at an early stage pointed out it is really sweet of Google to play naive and let me fill in my profile information when I create my profile (as if Google did not already know), but after a few clicks I am on the go. My albums from Picasa is automatically integrated and even the pictures I have uploaded to this blog is shown in Google+ . But what happens next? Practically no one of my friends are on Google+ so what do I use it for? I guess we will see. Hopefully there will be even more integration between the social networks in the future. I am anyhow very satified with

jQuery file upload with Bootstrap progress bar

Performing an asynchronous file upload from the browser is a common problem with almost as many solutions as there are developers. The following solution is the best fit for my needs, and also works well with most popular browsers. Backwards compatibility is not an issue in this case which is great, because I can use the new technologies as they are supposed to be used. Everything is put together in JSFiddle for a working example . I will continue to explain the parts below... First, the input field needs to be styled as a button. The form tag is only present for us to be able to reset the file input field later on. <form> <span class="fileUpload btn btn-default"> <span class="glyphicon glyphicon-upload"></span> Upload file <input type="file" id="uploadFile" /> </span> </form> .fileUpload { position: relative; overflow: hidden; } .fileUpload input { position: a

Quartz.NET and MEF

I have been implementing a scheduler service for several different jobs on several difference schedules, which led me into using Quartz.NET . This is a really nice framework, but since we're using MEF I ran into some issues. Quartz.NET basically consists of the scheduler engine which runs jobs implementing the IJob interface. The interface simply consists of an Execute method. I export each job with the IJob interface using MEF . [Export(typeof(IJob))] public class MyJob : IJob { public void Execute(JobExecutionContext context) { ... } } In my scheduler implementation the jobs are imported into an IEnumerable<IJob>. [ImportMany(typeof(IJob))] public IEnumerable<IJob> Jobs { get; set; } The initialization of the scheduled tasks is pretty straight forward. A standard scheduler factory is initialized which in turn gives us a scheduler instance. Each job that was imported by MEF is then added to the scheduler, here with a simple 10 min

Victor Stodell

Search This Blog