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

Getting started with Silverlight

In my work with the Cornball as my first Silverlight project I have had to solve a huge amount of problems which turned out to be quite a high threshold before I could get started with the development for real. Not the least in the difference between a WinForms application and a Silverlight application. In this post I will mention a couple of the things i encountered. Splash Screen/Preloader The builtin preloader in Silverlight does not look too bad, but it is definately more fun to create a custom preloader to fit with the rest of the application. I choose to create a very simple but functional preloader. First I had to include all the images as resources in the application for the preloader to actually have a purpose. By adding the images to the project and select Resource as Build Action the images will be included in the XAP-file. To show the images in the application, something of the following will do. XAML <Image Name="Card" Source="/SilverlightApplicatio

Victor Stodell

Search This Blog