I’m looking forward to starting this new webinar series that I’m launching in partnership with Zend about running PHP in general and Zend in particular on Microsoft Azure. My goal, as I’m writing the demos today after posting this, is to go through the...

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 . You can read about the podcast, PHP on IIS, PHP on Azure and much more on my blog at Wordpress...

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...

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. Read...

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 . Read more at Microsoft UX Kit | Josh Holmes

In this post, I want to walk through creating a simple Azure application that will show a few pages, leverage Blob storage, Table storage and generally get you started doing PHP on Azure development. In short, we are going to write a very simple PHP Blog...

I just got back from the JumpIn Camp in fantastic Zurich, Switzerland. I’ll blog about that whole experience shortly. In the meantime, however, I thought I’d get some resources out here that would have been useful last week. Specifically in this post...

I’m thrilled and honored to be doing another speaking tour through Europe. I’m getting to visit a number of countries that I haven’t visited before and some old favorites. I’ll be speaking on PHP, Ruby and other non .NET technologies on Azure.  ...

Building on the Windows Azure Command Line Tools blog post, I thought we could kick it up a notch and get PHP running in Azure leveraging the command line tools. The primary thing that we need to do is to copy the PHP bits up with the rest of your deployment...

There are a few applications that I’m playing with in Windows Azure that are reliant on MySql for various reason. For example, I’m working with a group that is doing Joomla development and it’s completely dependent on MySql. Mostly this is due to using...

There are times that you just need to leverage the raw power that you can get from the command line. For example, if you are trying to script something or if you are on a machine that is not all tooled up with Visual Studio, Eclipse and the like and,...

I was asked earlier when to use what Microsoft client Technology. I thought about just sending a link to Michael Schroeder’s post but decided I should put in my own thoughts on the matter first. For my thoughts on the subject – check out my post at When...

Last year I did a Polar Plunge to raise money for the Special Olympics – Read about it at Taking The Polar Plunge . I’m doing it again this year and have much loftier goals this year. Last year I raised $725.00 and this year I want to raise $1000.00 and...

For full disclosure, Packt Publishing sent me a review copy of this book. They did not ask for a positive review, just a review. This is the first book by Jorge Ramon that I’ve read. This book is exactly what the title says that it is, a Cookbook. It...

When I was preparing for RIAPalooza, I created and blogged about Creating a Simple Silverlight Countdown Blog badge . It was great but I wanted to updated it for the next event and realized that recompiling it was not really a user friendly option. The...

I’ve come to realize that many web designers don’t understand what “Above the Fold” and how it really should be used. Above the Fold is an old print newspaper layout term for what’s on the top part of the page, the part that is displayed in the window...

Building on the success of the DreamSpark and BizSpark program that we launched about 11 months ago Microsoft is now launching the WebsiteSpark program. WebsiteSpark is designed for small web consultancies ranging in size from 1 to 10 people. With WebsiteSpark...

I’m going to be speaking at RIAPalooza in about two weeks, well more specifically at the time of this writing it’s 10 days, 12 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds. :) I’m going to be tag teaming with Mike Labriola again talking about “10 questions about...

I’m in conversation with a group that’s using Ext JS for their RIA. As I haven’t used it, I thought I’d go ask at the international water fountain that is twitter about it.   Anyone using Ext JS? Thoughts compared to jQuery or Prototype/Scriptaculous...

On the heels of the announcement by Michael Eaton, I thought I should post about how excited I am about the upcoming Kalamazoo X Conference… The Kalamazoo X conference, while being put on by the technical community, is a very different sort of conference...

Like so many thing that we do in our daily development, there’s a high probability that someone has already solved the problem if you know where to look. This is just a collection of resources that I’ve found useful over time. Honestly, I’m posting these...

I ran across this article on ZDNet ( Wanted: ROI for internal app development )  that really worried me. My friends at PreEmptive Solutions ran a survey across a wide number of developers that included people from 21 different industry segments in...

Expression Blend, believe or not, has an add-in model. It’s highly unsupported but it exists. The unsupported nature of it means that you have to do a little Red Green style patching to get them to run in the first place and if they cause instability...

I’m going to be polar plunging to raise money for the Special Olympics Michigan this coming weekend in Belleville. This is a charity that is special to me because of my youngest daughter, Maura, who has a lot of challenges of her own. One day, my hope...

I’m at an internal conference at Microsoft this week and one of the sessions that I attended was called Practical Design tips and tricks for Developers. It was a set of hands on labs that were created out of the Expression team. It was really slick and...