Here’s how it started… Lisa (my wife) [shouting from office into the kitchen]: Tim, what’s this Amazon charge for $193? Me [thinking what I may have purchased and not remembered]: Um, don’t know…let me look. I then logged into my Amazon account to see what order I may have forgotten.  Surely I didn’t order $200 worth of MP3…that’s ridiculous.  Sure enough nothing was there.  Immediately I’m thinking fraud.  I start freaking out, getting mad, figuring out my revenge scheme on the scammer, etc. Then it hit me: Amazon Web Services account. The Culprit...

Many have inquired if Silverlight Live Streaming had a replacement since the announcement of it being deprecated.  The SLS team blog pointed to Azure as a possible solution.  Since it doesn’t seem like anyone except James has really tried this, I decided to dust off my Azure account information and give it a try. First, a note about SLS.  As I’ve said before I don’t think the offering was named very well from the start.  “Streaming” implies a specific technical connotation to most folks.  In fact, the media (or other files) hosted on SLS were never streamed as you...

From time to time I’ve gotten a few inquiries as to what platform my blog is, what tools do I use, etc.  After a recent trip to Redmond and visiting with the Live Writer team, I got another inquiry while talking with a customer.  I thought I’d just spit out my thoughts. First, my platform.  Yes there are many platforms out there for blogging.  Probably the most popular are Wordpress and Blogspot.  I think those are popular because you can get up and running for free and have it hosted.  My wife and her friends mostly use Blogspot for...

One of the great things I like about some of our platform products is that they are building in extensibility more and more.  Take Windows Live Writer as an example.  It’s no secret on this blog that I’ve got a geek affair with that tool.  I use it daily and have customized it (via plugins) and my blogging platform (Subtext) to make it even more of a best experience for me for web authoring. Writing plugins for Writer has been a lot of fun and a great way to get the functionality I want/need into a workflow without having...

After posting my sample implementation of accessing Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) via Silverlight, I reflected quickly and also chatted with some AWS engineers. Cross-domain Policy One thing that you should never do is just deploy a global clientaccesspolicy.xml file blindly.  Often times in samples, we (I) do this.  I need to be better about this guidance to be honest, so I’ll start here.  As an example, for the S3 cross domain policy file, we really should add some additional attributes to it to make it more secure.  Since we know it is a SOAP service, we can...

I ran into an interesting situation last week…the desire to access some of my Amazon S3 services from within a Silverlight application. Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3) is a pay service provided Amazon for object storage ‘in the cloud.’  Although there is no UI tool provided by Amazon to navigate your account in S3, a SOAP and REST API are available for developers to integrate S3 information into their applications or other uses.  You can view more information about Amazon S3 on their site. What is S3? Since S3 is a pretty flexible service, it can be used for many different things including...

Hot off the press, a new drop of Windows Live Writer was just released.  Get it here.  This is one of my favorite tools from Microsoft and the update brings a few new changes. First, I’m happy to report that Flickr4Writer and S3Browser still work fine and require no adjustments.  The other thing announced today from the Writer team is an updated SDK.  This new SDK includes a new type of plugin which enable plug-in activity for pre- and post-publish events.  Some of you following me on Twitter may have noticed something every so often that said...

For about a year now I've been using Amazon S3 services.  Mostly I'm using it for image storage for my blog and web site.  I decided to stop using Flickr for screenshot stuff and keep it to 'photographs' when I can.  I signed up for an S3 account and have been using it for screenshot type stuff since then.  If you don't know, S3 is a service that basically enables 'object' storage in the cloud.  An object can be anything really, but I'm treating it like a remote host for images. The one thing Amazon doesn't provide themselves is a tool...