think first | code later

{News and Analysis}

• Open Source: An Emerging Driver For “Mobile First” Strategy
• Measuring Mobile Success . . . How Is Real-Time Data Making Your Customers Healt…
• What “Design For Mobile First!” Really Means
• Mobile Application Security: the Walled Garden versus the Open Grounds
• Mobile Devices are the Convenience Stores of the Web

Cross Platform

• Deft JS: Loosely Coupled MVC through Dependency Injection
• Xamarin Designer for Android available for Visual Studio and MonoDevelop

Microsoft

• Listbox, Why Art Thou Blanking?
• Discover partner offerings and resources to build better apps, faster
• Memory Profiling – The Heap Summary View

ag

{News and Analysis}

• To Be Private Cloud, Or Be Public Cloud: Is that Really the Question?
• SAP Gets Serious About The Large Enterprise Application Cloud
• Research Shows Cloud Computing Reduces Time and Money Spent Managing Security

Amazon

• Amazon RDS announces support for MySQL Read Replica in Amazon VPC
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk Now Available in the EU (Ireland) Region
• Amazon Simple Email Service Announces Domain Verification
• Amazon CloudFront gets whole site delivery and acceleration
• TCO Study for SAP on Amazon Web Services (AWS) White Paper
• Amazon CloudFront Now Supports Dynamic Content

Microsoft

• The Bing Search API on Windows Azure Marketplace is Here!

Rackspace

• Cloud Migration – The Pain And The Opportunity
• The CloudDB Client: An Extension For The Rackspace Cloud Database API
• The Imbalance Of Today’s Clouds

ag

Can you build a web, mobile, or cloud app in 24 hours? Prove it!

Developers: caffeinate and get ready to dominate! Bring your laptops, phones, gadgets and dev tools to the That Conference Minneapolis Hackathon for the inaugural 24-hour coding challenge. Develop your own web, mobile and/or cloud app, present it and compete for your share of prizes. Winners will walk away with mad props and cool loot.

And to add even more fun, your city’s reputation is on the line. That Conference is running hackathons across multiple cities to find the best developers. The top two teams from each city will get to compete to win the audience’s vote during That Conference in August.

What to Expect

Competition

The Minneapolis event kicks off on Saturday, June 23rd at The Nerdery and runs through the night until Sunday afternoon. Developers are free to use any technology to build any kind of web, mobile and/or cloud applications they choose. There are no limits on team size, but where’s the fun in going it alone?

Any Technology, Any Platform

Participants do NOT have to be here the full 24 hours, though we certainly encourage it (it’ll be a lot of fun!). We do ask registrants to indicate which times they’ll be at the hackathon so we can plan food, etc.

Judges will be on hand on Sunday afternoon to pick the top 2 teams. Feel free to invite your friends to watch you present.

What to bring

Bring your laptop (and powercord), phones, gadgets and development tools and anything you need to be productive. And your A-game. You’re going to need that.

Space is limited, so RSVP soon!

Food, beverages and refreshments will be provided.

Brought to You By

That Conference | Hackatopia | RBA | The Nerdery

I hope to see you there!

ag

{News and Analysis}

• Getting Started with Mobile Application Security

Cross Platform

• PhoneGap Beliefs, Goals, and Philosophy

Google

• Using DialogFragments

Microsoft

• Memory Profiling – The Heap Summary View

ag

{News and Analysis}

• Looking Through The Cloud
• Comparing On Premises and SaaS Total Cost of Ownership
• Reverse cloudwashing and the enterprization of Cloud Computing – lowering …
• Why would we want a private PaaS?
• Cloud or not, purchasing CRM business SaaS apps is not for the line of business …

Amazon

• Monitor Your AWS Charges with Billing Alerts Using Amazon CloudWatch
• Announcing API and AWS Identity & Access Management Support for AWS Storage Gate…
• New Managed Services for Windows Developers Worldwide
• New and Updated Microsoft SQL Server Offerings on Amazon EC2
• New Amazon RDS for Oracle Capabilities and Multi-AZ Enhancements

Cloud Foundry

• Running Workers on Cloud Foundry with Spring

force.com

• Generally Available Features for Force.com Developers in Summer ’12

Google

• Cloud SQL: pick the plan that fits your app
• Looking for search? Find it on Google App Engine

Microsoft

• Microsoft: We have ‘high tens of thousands’ of Azure customers
• Microsoft to eliminate its Azure cloud branding
• Microsoft to eliminate its Azure branding in billing portal
• Updates to Windows Azure Marketplace Offer More Flexibility and Opportunity
• Cloud services for Windows 8 and Windows Phone: Windows Live, reimagined

Rackspace

• Moving To The Cloud: Should You Rent or Buy?
• The Importance Of Monitoring, Even In A Managed Cloud Environment

ag

{News and Analysis}

• Identity and Access Management in a Mobile World
• Why Target Would Want To Kick Amazon Out
• Mobile Chat Will Widen The Gap Between Overlooked And Innovative Mobile Customer…

Cross Platform

• Behind the Sencha Command Utility and the Build Process
• PhoneGap 1.7.0 Released!

Microsoft

• The Web Marketplace Launches in 22 New Countries
• Delivering Rich Mobile Web Experiences in Windows Phone 7.5 (ESPN.com Case Study…
• Four ways we’re improving Marketplace

ag

{News and Analysis}

• Why would we want a private PaaS?
• Cloud or not, purchasing CRM business SaaS apps is not for the line of business …
• Cloud Content Management Is Not A Cure-All
• Active Directory moving to the cloud?
• Why Do You Need Shared Services If You Have the Cloud?
• How To Choose The Best Cloud For Your Data

Amazon

• New and Updated Microsoft SQL Server Offerings on Amazon EC2
• New Amazon RDS for Oracle Capabilities and Multi-AZ Enhancements

Cloud Foundry

• Cloud Foundry Improves Support For Background Processing

force.com

• Chatter REST API & the Apigee Console

Google App Engine

• App Engine and Google’s new Deprecation Policy

Microsoft

• Cloud services for Windows 8 and Windows Phone: Windows Live, reimagined
• Announcing Native Windows Azure Libraries and Special Free Pricing using Twilio …
• Announcing Casablanca, a Native Library to Access the Cloud From C++
• Simple Capped Exponential Back-Off for Queues

Rackspace

• Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures: Overcoming Management Hurdles
• Cloud – It’s Not About Cost
• Performance Matters: Rackspace Cloud Databases Is Faster Than Amazon RDS

ag

On Thursday May 3rd, 2012 I gave a talk at the Twin Cities .NET User Group on Node.js. Below is a list of resources for anyone who wants to learn more about using this new framework.

General Node.js References

• Main Site
• Overview
• Documentation
• NodeBits
• Node.js Manual
• The Node Beginner Book

NPM References

• Node.js Package Manager (npm) Registry
• Geddy (MVC framework)
• Jake (JavaScript build engine)
• Mocha (testing framework)
• Should (BDD style assertions)
• Socket.io (real time browser apps)
• Express (MVC framework)
• Jade (View Engine)

Node.js on Windows References

• iisnode (iis module to enable node.js)
• Tomasz Janczuk (author of iisnode)
• Node.js templates for WebMatrix

Node.js on Azure References

• Microsoft’s Node.js Developer Center
• Cloud 9 IDE

Last week a colleague of mine at RBA, Alex Culp, pinged me on IM. He was preparing to lead a Windows Azure Boot Camp in Austin, TX and was having trouble getting his Azure demos any websites to run in his local emulator. Below is a screenshot of the error he would receive any time he ran a brand new Windows Azure project with a web role (regardless of if the web role was MVC or Web Forms):

Here’s just a sample of what we tried to resolve the problem:

• Restart the emulators
• Reboot the machine
• Re-install the Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio
• Running iisreset
• Running aspnet_regiis
• Running dsinit

Of course none of those things worked.

Luckily for him, he was able to work it out later that night. Here’s an excerpt from an email he sent me detailing the cause of the problem:

…Because I am in consulting I keep all of my customer source code in an encrypted folder. Because the application pool is running under NETWORK SERVICE it does not have permissions to decrypt the files it needs to run.

Moral of the story? Your websites should probably not be running in encrypted folders, unless you want their app pools to run with an account with elevated privileges (something I would not recommend).

ag

{This isn’t something I would typically post, but my daughter was so spot on with this that I just had to to share it.}

My nine year old daughter, Maya, has had an iPad for close to a year now. We bought her the iPad at the end of third grade as she was getting to a point where she was going to need a computer of her own. At the time the iPad seemed like the perfect solution. I’m glad to say that it has server her well for both educational and entertainment purposes. She made some outstanding charts and graphs for a science project using Numbers as well as conquered numerous levels on every edition of Angry Birds.

Before she had her iPad she would use one of the laptops sitting around the house to play games online. Most All of those games were built with Adobe’s Flash technology. When she got her iPad and tried to access one of her favorite sites at the time, Webkinz, she was disappointed to find out that she couldn’t use the site because the iPad doesn’t support the Flash plug-in. She asked me why, and I made some references to this post by Apple. She just nodded her head and said “OK dad, maybe I should write a letter to Steve Jobs.” Every few months she asks me about Flash on the iPad, hoping that Apple has changed their mind about allow the plug-in on iOS. Of course, I have to crush those hopes.

The other night was different. On the way to swim practice we started talking about Flash on the iPad. Here’s the conversation:

Maya: “Dad, I think I know why Apple doesn’t allow Flash on iPads.”

Me: “Oh really? Tell me why.”

Maya: “Simple, if they allowed Flash on iPads, people wouldn’t need MacBooks.”

Me: “OK, go on.”

Maya: “Well if people didn’t need MacBooks, then Apple wouldn’t sell as many MacBooks and they would make less money.”

Me: “You know what? I never thought about that before.”

Maya: “Yeah, I was just thinking about it.”

Brilliant!

ag