Ok I’ve seen all the announcements and read all the buzz.  I know some folks on the team as well and had heard all their raving about their offering.  It wasn’t until today where I really realized what was going on.  In fact I was thinking about titling this post: WordPress installed and configured in under 5 minutes, but it’s much more than just that. Introducing: Web Platform Installer 2. The team at Microsoft has been working hard to make getting your web platform (server and client) up and running quickly and taking any pain out of...

I’m sure you’ve heard of the IIS7 Smooth Streaming information and perhaps even experienced it if you watched some of the NBC Olympics streams last year or the Presidential Inauguration this past January.  It’s a great experience for online media being able to seamlessly deliver quality media online without constant buffering when latency occurs in networks you don’t control, such as your customers’ ISP accounts. You may have wanted to try out this experience yourself to see exactly what it does and how it works…as well as to simulate bad/good bandwidth.  Well, you can.  Here’s what you do: ...

Apparently “soon” means “the next day” to the Encoder team :-).  On 28 OCT James Clarke told us all about the goodness that is coming to Encoder SP1 and noted it would be available “real soon.” Little did we know he had already clicked the publish process to the download servers.  What are you waiting for, go start the download for Encoder SP1 and I’ll share my thoughts on some things here. What’s in it?  I’ll pick my favorites: New Silverlight output templates, H.264/AAC support and IIS7 smooth streaming support. H.264/AAC Device Encoding Support SP1...

In IIS7 you can do very simple testing for SSL related site hosting.  It literally is like a 2 click process: Enter a name for the cert and done, you now have SSL on your box.  Of course this is a self-issued/signed certificate so it will do you know good in the real world, but for most of the developer world it will work fine.  There may be those times, however, where things may not be quite working right and you want to eliminate the self-signed cert form the equation to make sure it isn’t the issue....

this morning, scottgu posted details on the roadmap for the .net web platform.  it is an exciting roadmap to me, so let me hit some of the highlights: ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions - this will include the MVC framework, AJAX improvements, dynamic data support, asp.net and silverlight support, and ado.net data services (entity framework).  this release is expected to be available for download on the web next week in the first preview mode. silverlight: because of the significant effort being made and...

in a world of changing technology, when we look for places to put our apps, we're probably looking for people who are on the cutting edge of the frameworks as well.  i want to draw your attention to discountasp.net.  why?  well, for one their feature set rocks. free iis7/.net 3.5 hosting during the beta (one of the early adopter hosters) real-time data backup tools great sql support with tooling as well ...

while i'm off galavanting in the aspen trees, some of my counterparts are up in san francisco attending zendcon, a php conference. some updates on some news that microsoft is announcing at zendcon... FastCGI for PHP -- this was a collaborative project between zend and microsoft to build a better fastcgi implementation for windows.  announced today will be that zend will be redistributing FastCGI in Zend Core.  additionally, zend will make sure that FastCGI is supported in the server core installation option for windows server 2008! ...

i'm sitting in andi gutman's presentation at oscon about building rich internet applications in php.  my expectations will be that this will be talking about ajax and flex (given the nature of the conference). andi's first talking about the nature of ajax for rich applications in php.  what is cool is that he mentioned the micorosft ajax client library and the codeplex php kit in the talk so far.  he said he likes talking about it because it demonstrates the nature of ajax standards.  he also talked initially about simplexml as a mechanism for communicating with ajax...