Archives
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This Week’s Link List (April 29, 2011)
I’m partial to writing, so one of the highlights in this week’s list is the podcast Elizabeth Naramore’s 2010 DPC presentation on technical writing. Other highlights are Andrew Burst’s look at NoSQL and the Azure platform and my discovery of chat rooms on Stackoverflow. Lots more good stuff too…happy reading…
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Sorting Azure Table Entities by Timestamp with PHP
This is a short post that describes one way to sort Windows Azure Table entities by timestamp when using the Windows Azure SDK for PHP. The problem boils down to sorting an array of objects by a timestamp property, so the information here is nothing that hasn’t been done before. However, after spending some time looking for a way to use a filter in the Windows Azure SDK for PHP API, I didn’t find one, so I’m hoping this post might save others some time. In the end, my solution simply uses the PHP array_multisort function.
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This Week’s Link List (April 22, 2011)
There was a lot of good content this week. Highlights for me included the release of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3 (beta), some excellent interviews, and Chris Cornutt’s insight into the work he puts into PHPDeveloper.org…
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How to Use the Storage Emulator with the Windows Azure SDK for PHP
This is a short post to address this question: How do I use the local Storage Emulator (formerly known as Development Storage) when using the Windows Azure SDK for PHP? The Windows Azure Command Line Tools for PHP provide an option for running an application locally in the Compute Emulator, but I didn’t see an option for using the local Storage Emulator. As it turns out, the answer is very simple, although somewhat difficult to find…
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This Week’s Link List (April 15th, 2011)
Lot’s of news coming out of MIX11 in Las Vegas this week, some interesting discussion of the state of PHP development, and don’t miss the the latest build of WinCache that fixes WordPress plug-in bug…
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Updating PHP Settings in Windows Azure
I came across this question on Twitter last week: “How can I turn display_errors on for an application that is running in Windows Azure?” I have to admit that I was stumped. The only thing I could think of was to re-deploy the application with an updated php.ini file. But, I happened to mention this question to Ben Lobaugh who suggested a very simple idea: Store your PHP settings in some durable store external to your application as key-value pairs, then loop through the settings and update them with the ini_set function when a page loads. An example will help make this clear, but first, a couple of caveats:
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This Week’s Link List (April 8, 2011)
Once again, lots going on this week. I found the two articles about Zitec deploying their PHP social networking application to Windows Azure to be especially interesting. And, of course, topics for math geeks are near and dear to my heart…maybe I should make “For the math geek” a regular category? Enjoy…
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Interview with Mark Brown, Senior Product Manager for Microsoft Web Platform
I recently had a chance to catch up with the very busy Mark Brown, Senior Product Manager for the Microsoft Web Platform. I’ve had the good fortune of working with Mark in my day-to-day work as well as at a couple of conferences (DrupalCon SF and JumpIn! Camp Redmond), but lately he’s been heads-down focused on WebMatrix. I wrote about WebMatrix in its beta stages and purely from a PHP-developer point of view (here and here), but I know it has come a long way since then. In this interview, Mark talks about what WebMatrix has evolved into and what it will take to make it successful. However, what I found most interesting about the interview is the perspective Mark shares about Microsoft’s engagement with open source technologies and communities…
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This Week’s Link List (April 1, 2011)
I missed posting my weekly reading last week, so this week’s list is longer than usual. Lot’s of interesting news around PHP-Microsoft interoperability and PHP on Azure as the PHP on Azure contest heats up. Enjoy…