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

Moving to the cloud - part 1

I cannot with words describe the hype around the cloud today, and of course I had to join the croud. I have transferred all my applications, files and services to the cloud. I thought I would share some of the experiences and difficulties I have hit during my jourey. These are the steps I have performed in order to complete my move to the cloud: Most of my files are safely stored with Dropbox . E-mail accounts for stodell.se were moved from service provider to Google Apps . The Cornball was moved from service provider to Windows Azure och SQL Azure . This blog was moved from Wordpress at a service provider to Google's Blogger . Even though Loopia has been a great service provider during many years I have now been able to cancel all my services except the domain hosting with them. The replacement being free services and the Azure capacity that is included in the MSDN subscription.

Binding a HTML-formatted string to a WPF WebBrowser control

Sometimes there is a need to display a HTML formatted string in a WPF application. There are a couple of ways to do this, but the most stright forward is to use a WebBrowser control and the NavigateToString method. This approach has one big flaw, you cannot use binding to a string out of the box, but I found a great solution through Stack Overflow which adds a bindable property to the WebBrowser control using NavigateToString . The following class is all that is needed to add that behavior. A new depencency property named Html is introduced to the WebBrowser and the proper change action is performed in the OnHtmlChanged method. public class BrowserBehavior { public static readonly DependencyProperty HtmlProperty = DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached( "Html", typeof(string), typeof(BrowserBehavior), new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(OnHtmlChanged)); [AttachedPropertyBrowsableForType(typeof(WebBrowser))] public static string GetHtml(WebBrowser bro

Using Bootstrap Tooltip to show Parsley validation errors

I'm currently working on a web application using a variety of different frameworks, such as Backbone for the back-end, Bootstrap for the front-end and Parsley for client side form validation. Parsley is a really powerful validation toolkit, but it takes some tweaking to make it blend with the Bootstrap front-end. Fortunately this is a one time fix, which can be re-used all over our project. Since there will be some custom options in our Parsley object, we can't use the default parsley-validate attribute on the form. Instead we have to initialize the validation with the jQuery syntax: $('#my-form').parsley(parsleyOptions); The options are were the magic happens, and in our case we have a global options object that our forms use to get the same experience all over the application. Here's what it looks like: var parsleyOptions = { // Sets success and error class to Bootstrap class names successClass: 'has-success', errorClass: 'has-er

Victor Stodell

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