Skip to main content

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

Popular posts from this blog

User.Identity returns old login name after name change

When a person gets married or makes a name change for some other reason this usually means that the login name for the Active Directory-account changes as well. This is rarely a problem, but it turned out to cause some issues on our web server, where the  User.Identity  property was still returning the old login name. The user logged on with the new login name, but was identified by the web application as the old login name. The reason this occurs is because the  User.Identity  property relies on the  LsaLookupSids  method to convert the user SID to a login name. The method first calls the local  LSA-cache , which is not synchronized with the Active Directory. For this purpose a simple reboot of the web server to clear the  LSA-cache  propably would have sufficed. But since we didn't want to take the application offline rebooting was not an option. Instead, it is possible to set the registry value  LsaLookupCacheMaxSize in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa. If this val

Binding Enum with DescriptionAttribute in WPF

Binding an enumeration to a ComboBox can be done in several ways. In most cases you don't want to display the value itself, but a more user friendly description. One common approach is to use the DescriptionAttribute on the Enum values to supply a description for each value.  This is all possible in a very MVVM friendly way. First step is to add the  DescriptionAttribute  to the values of the enumeration. public enum MyValues { [Description("First value")] First, [Description("Second value")] Second } To retrieve the description from the enum we use a simple extension method. This method returns the value of the DescriptionAttribute if it exists, otherwise the string representation of the enum value is returned. public static string GetDescription(this Enum value) { var fieldInfo = value.GetType().GetField(value.ToString()); var attribute = fieldInfo.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(DescriptionAttribute), false).FirstOrDefault() as

Programming AD with C#.NET – part 4

Our transition to the  System.DirectoryServices.Protocols  has in the whole gone very smooth, but there have been some issues with one environment that contains subdomains. Most things are working fine, but writing to a subdomain does not work in the same way as it did before. What is generally bad with the  System.DirectoryServices.Protocols is the documentation, which is practically non-existent. But most things can  be figured out anyway since most classes just are wrappers for the wldap32.dll, which in turn is way better documented. I would like to have as little bindings to a specific server as possible but still be able to access the domain. In the  LdapConnection  it is possible to set the identifier to null and use the executing computer as a starting point to find a domain controller. But sometimes I must know that I am using a Global Catalog, and with more and more RODC in the environment I sometimes must know that I am working against a writeable domain controller.