I just finished doing a talk at OpenCa.mp in Dallas called “Scaling WordPress (and really any PHP application) on Microsoft. The reality is that there is a tremendous amount of support for WordPress on the Microsoft stack including Windows, IIS, SQL Server, Azure and more. OpenCa.mp was a an interesting conference and interesting crowd for my session. The idea behind OpenCa.mp is to get all of the big CMS options » read more.
I was planning on writing up a long blog post about the CTP of the Microsoft Driver for PHP for SQL Server driver but Brian Swan already did a fantastic job complete with code. Quick snippet from his post: Here’s a high-level list of the work that was done for this release: Code refactored to share common functionality between the SQLSRV and PDO_SQLSRV drivers. SQLSRV extension is rebuilt with refactored » read more.
A little while back I wrote a blog post titled Easy Setup for PHP On Azure Development. One of the things that I touched on is the PHP version conflicts. I had a much better idea which I’ve tried and have working so I thought I’d blog that here. What I had you doing in the Easy Setup for PHP On Azure Development is renaming the directory for PHP from » read more.
I was thrilled and honored to be a guest on the WordPress Podcast on WebMasterRadio.fm. This podcast is hosted by my friend Joost de Valk and Frederick Townes. I met Joost back at WordCamp Ireland back in March. That was a fun time. He and I talked about just about everything from being fathers to deep technical bits comparing various types of caching mechanisms. He even helped me with a » read more.
For the second year in a row, my friend and colleague Jeff Blankenburg has created what is quickly proving to live up to it’s namesake – the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever. Some of the puzzles are technical, some are not but all require that you understand the web, development and technology to solve. Even if you don’t get in on the fantastic prizes that Jeff has lined up, there’s great » read more.
You might have seen me tweet about the fact that PHPBB had submitted to the Web Application Gallery a couple of weeks back. Well, it’s official – the phpBB package has been finished, tested and accepted into the Web Application Gallery. You can see the official announcement on the Microsoft Web Platform blog. That means that you can install phpBB on Windows through the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) which gives » read more.
This is a cool use of Azure. The city of Miami tool their “311” data around potholes, trash pickup issues, recycling issues, broken sidewalks and the like and put that data in Azure. The next step is that they leveraged Bing Maps and Silverlight to visualize those issues spread on a map of the city. The solution takes advantage of virtually unlimited storage and processing power, provides the ability to » read more.
I’m all excited – Microsoft has signed the Joomla! Contributor Agreement. You can read about that on the official Joomla! blog – Microsoft signs the Joomla! Contributor Agreement. There’s a couple of fairly momentous things about that statement. Obviously it means that Microsoft employees can contribute to Joomla!. That’s exciting all by itself as Joomla! is the second largest PHP application in the world. In fact, that’s already happened in » read more.
Have you ever wondered what was possible with Silverlight, WPF or any of Microsoft’s User Experience (UX) technologies? Well, Christian Thilmany has answered that question in the form of the Microsoft UX Kit. From his blog: Today at SXSW, of which Microsoft Silverlight is a major sponsor of the Interactive Festival, Microsoft User Experience Kit is targeted at technical and creative leads who want to better understand the tools, technologies, » read more.
The SQL Server team had a great announcement yesterday at DrupalCon in San Francisco. They announced the availability of a PDO Driver for SQL Server to give fantastic access to SQL Server from PHP. PDO is the PHP Data Objects extension that has become the standard way to do data access in PHP 5.0 or later projects that want to have some level of database agnosticism. Drupal, for example, uses » read more.
