Hi everyone, thanks for checking the site and to those who attended my talk at CodeGarden10 on scalable hosting in the cloud with Amazon EC2.

I’ll be updating this post with my slidedeck and a public AMI that you can use to get started with Umbraco and cloud hosting at the end of the conference.

In the meantime, have a great rest of the conference (if you’re here) and speak to you soon!

As of right now, Twitter in my industry sphere is going mad over not just the iPhone OS 4.0 annoucement, but as part of it Apple’s revision to their developer license agreement. Apple now insists that any applications allowed in the AppStore must henceforth be written in coding languages stipulated by Apple, and they cannot be produced in a third-party application which translates other code to those languages.

There are many points around whether or not this harms competition, but I don’t want to dwell on that here. My point is a little different: Apple just pulled the rug from under a valuable media partner in Condé Nast US. Why? Because Apple’s announcement not only scuppers the likes of MonoTouch, but it derails Adobe’s upcoming release of Flash Pro CS5 too, with its much-vaunted compile-to-iPhone functionality. It’s this media angle which I think is a particularly repulsive part of their move, because it’s not just ‘pesky Flash developers’ who want easier access to write apps for the iPhone and iPad. It’s publishers, too.

Nearly two months ago Condé Nast US went public with a (rather cringeworthy) video of their iPad plans. The article states “tablet”, but make no mistake – check the URL – this was iPad through and through. I should know; I used to work there. Despite its clear naivities in effective finger-based navigation as so deftly pointed out in the Engadget coverage, and whether or not you agree with the timing, Condé Nast announced that day not only a clear and sensible strategy but a key partnership in their adoption of Steve Jobs’ magic pill: joining with Adobe to write the application in AIR, meaning they could publish to the iPad as well as other formats – without wasting investment on two identical products for competing devices being made and filled with content every month.

The saviour of media?

With typical aplomb, Apple has pitched itself recently as the champion of publishers whose traditions are vested mainly in print. For a long time many of these publishers – typically now some of the most entrenched and embattled – have been bourgeois Gentleman’s clubs accustomed to having their pockets lined by the hard work of unpaid interns, with magazines flying off the shelf and a queue of fresh blood to keep the seats warm if any staff should decide they want a fair salary. But as has been documented well, best in fact by some of the nimbler online publicitions, that position has become threatened in the past five years. Headcounts have had to be frozen; great and under-paid journalists have been made redundant. Largely to protect the salaries of the upper management from dipping below £500k, sure, but it’s enough for them to have been chilled into some form of reaction.

Earlier this year Steve Jobs went on a crusade to win them over; a mission to convince them that he could show them how they could make up for time and all their missed opportunities. “Music labels love iTunes, I can do the same for you!” et cetera, et cetera. The likes of the NYT and Wall Street Journal, even the AP, have clearly seen promise and have welcomed their new partner. He’s convinced them that he has the iPad-shaped key to save their content business.

After all, content is king, no? Well as this deftly-hidden, unannounced aspect to their latest fanfare shows, actually it’s Jobs who is King. He may make a few publishers a bit of cash on the side, but in his personal crusade against a lumbering Adobe, he just cost one very important media partner a lot of money in wasted effort.

We can only hope that the attention drawn by the Emperor’s new clothes doesn’t convince some of our great institutions to make their swan song an iTunes exclusive.

I just noticed the Umbraco logo front-and-centre on the Microsoft /web JumpStart page.

Nice. That is all.

Getting a development machine set up is a fine art of patience and a good memory. I personally recommend Ninite which is frankly awesome, followed by Visual Studio in its various flavours, followed by the Web Platform Installer.

However, with so many tools, frameworks, patches and add-ons to install it can be easy to miss something.

Even more frustrating, sometimes it can even be easy to install things in the wrong order.

Silverlight debugging: Get the right Tools

Specifically for Silverlight, it can appear as if you have all the necessary pre-requisites to create and debug Silverlight applications in Visual Studio 2008 SP1, but in fact your breakpoints are never hit.

You have the Silverlight project templates installed, you’re happily mixing and matching Visual Studio and Expression access to your project tree, but when compiling and running your project, Visual Studio either flatly ignores your breakpoints or reports that the symbols haven’t been loaded and that the breakpoints won’t be hit.

Some standard solutions

A lot of Googling takes you to answers around the following, none of which have actually applied to me recently:

• Ensure you are running from a http:// address rather than a file:// address
  • In summary, do this by creating a separate Web application in your solution and then adding a link from it to your Silverlight project to ensure VS launches your browser pointing at a web server rather than the filesystem.
  • Debugging is disabled by default when going to local filesystem-based URLs.
• Ensure “Silverlight” debugging option in your website project Properties > Web tab is checked
  • Some solutions even point to unchecking, then rechecking the option in order to kick VS into recognising the breakpoints.
• Manually attach to the browser process, since VS may have attached to the wrong instance.
  • This especially seems to hit IE8 users where Silverlight apps are reputedly launched in a separate process to the main HTML.
• Ensure you have “Silverlight” attachment type listed in the “Attach to process…” dialog box and that it is selected.
  • For example, attaching to iexplore.exe but selecting “T-SQL” as your attachment type will obviously not let you hit any Silverlight breakpoints.

One other solution: install Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (again)

For me, the biggest single problem is flatly ensuring you have installed the Silverlight Tools installed after everything else.

With all the various installers, it’s actually possible to end-up with a fully functional Silverlight development environment, including all the GUI clues, but with debugging being an impossibility. How to diagnose it? Check if you have the Silverlight option in the debugging types:

Without this type listed in the “Attach to process…” dialog, Visual Studio will give you no other clue that it won’t be able to hit breakpoints – even if you have “Silverlight” listed as a debugging option in the website properties.

Installing the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio SP1 ensures this is in place. Then you can go back through the other items in the checklist

Some useful related links:

• Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio SP1 mentioned above (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=143571)
  • Alternatively you can download the standalone Silverlight SDK from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=157102.
• Silverlight Toolkit (http://silverlight.codeplex.com)
  • Not to be confused with the required developer tools, this is an awesome open-source set of examples to get your started with Silverlight.
• Silverlight + WCF RIA Services (http://www.silverlight.net/riaservices/)
• The “Getting Started” page from Microsoft (http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/)

Thanks to Microsoft and Xeed, I’m heading to the MIX10 conference which is running March 15th-17th.

I’m a little concerned by something though: everyone who I’ve told I’m in Las Vegas for a whole week has reacted with horror, sympathy and commiserations. A few days is fine, apparently – because you come home to recover. A whole week? Not so much apparently. Great! I’m there from the 12th till the 20th because actually, thanks to lastminute.com, I got a direct flight and a cheaper package than if I was only going for a few days. Now I’m starting to wonder if it would have been better to go for less time and pay to come home and sleep…

Anyways, on to MIX. One reason I’m looking forward to it (and maybe one reason why Microsoft have invited me) is I’ve already been working on a Silverlight UI for media services as part of the MimeCloud project Pete and I have set up. I’m looking at some exciting ways of getting that into a handy package on a mobile device for reporters and journalists in the field, having made a bet that Silverlight would be on WPS7. I’ll also be playing a role in giving people an introduction to Umbraco CMS, at both the free pre-party dinner and at almost every other thinkable opportunity.

Here’s some of the sessions amongst many that grab my attention, give me a shout if you’re going to be there!

SILVERLIGHT PERFORMANCE ON WINDOWS PHONE

BUILDING LARGE-SCALE, DATA-CENTRIC APPLICATIONS WITH SILVERLIGHT

CONNECTING YOUR APPLICATIONS IN THE CLOUD WITH WINDOWS AZURE APPFABRIC

THE HAAHA SHOW: MICROSOFT ASP.NET MVC SECURITY WITH HAACK AND HANSELMAN

WHAT’S NEW IN MICROSOFT ASP.NET MVC 2

BUILDING AND DEPLOYING WINDOWS AZURE-BASED APPLICATIONS WITH MICROSOFT VISUAL STUDIO 2010

p.s. I forgot to say – my good friend, ex colleague and MimeCloud partner Pete Miller is going too so come find us if you’re interested in our open-source digital asset manager

Doesn’t sound like the normal kind of Microsoft connection, does it? “Free and open-source”. But that’s exactly what I’ve been working on recently with them on a project to which I alluded already.

It’s about time I blogged about it.

I’m helping out in my spare time (which is thinning out amongst moving house and offices) on a collaboration between Microsoft and some great guys who are big in the Umbraco UK community. The project has come about quite by chance, for me anyway. I simply got a Skype IM from Warren Buckley asking if I could make a meeting at Microsoft about Umbraco ideas, and that was about it.

So, invite accepted and time having passed, I turned up at the MS offices in London with some concepts I’d thought up on the tube. Warren explains in his blogpost how the meeting came about, through various fortuitous connections, but I had come late to the party and didn’t really know much – other than Microsoft wanted to fund some new Umbraco packages.

I had been expecting this to be a secretive affair, keeping my ideas amongst myself and the Umbraco guys before sharing properly with the Big Corporate Giant – I mean, this was Microsoft, right? The Redmond behemoth that’ll sell your gran without asking and then charge you a fee?

Well, as it turned out I was a bit presumptive. Myself, Warren, Darren Ferguson, Tim Saunders, and Adam Shallcross all piled into a very funky meeting room and sat wondering where this would go. Will Coleman, Platform Strategy Advisor, and Mark Quirk (UK Head of Technology, Developer & Platform Group), proceeded to win us over in about 5 minutes flat.

As Will described, Microsoft wants to shake off some of its shackles and get lightfooted, and make genuinely friendly connections with the open-source communities. Starting with Wordpress, Drupal and most importantly Umbraco, they want to help by doing some seed funding of plugins and packages. The results and code can be released back into the community and, in a somewhat fair exchange, more people get a chance to see a new side to what the MS toolset can do.

So what has happened since?

Well, at that and subsequent meetings we agreed on a core set of ideas and packages on which to focus. Darren has done some great work using Silverlight to make Umbraco’s media library more accessible, and I’ve worked on its architecture. I also invited Pete Miller into the fray too so we can both help bring some of the experience from Condé Nast and our MimeCloud project where media is concerned. Tim and Ismail are working on an interesting combination of a key-value table datatype in Umbraco, together with a Silverlight UI for data manipulation. And there are a few other ideas up our sleeves to finish this month.

One aspect of building up awareness around this project is that we’ll all be blogging regularly and Microsoft will be spreading some link love far and wide. We’ll also be doing some screencast / video posts in the coming weeks around how we’ve used the tools.

I think it’s a nice project for Umbraco. A few new packages will appear on the Our repository, and Umbraco gets another pat on the back from a huge brand.

One other thing: Will is also likely to come along to CodeGarden10, as part of a Microsoft attendance there, which will be cool. He’s a nice bloke and I’m sure will really look forward to everyone at the conference doing what we did incessantly: jibe him about Google Docs and ask him for free copies of Windows…

The other week I had an idea on the Underground whilst crammed in during rush hour. I was face-to-face with a stinker of some fella’s armpit and my brain decided to change the subject.

I started thinking of Umbraco package ideas.

Just to be clear, my inner monologue doesn’t always go “Visual Studio! To the bat cave!” when faced with a mass of people – I have an excuse: I’m working on a Microsoft project at the moment, and the goal is to help the Umbraco community by working on some specific free packages. Every chance I’ve had, I’ve been thinking of exactly what I’d like to do to extend Umbraco with Microsoft products, especially with the focus of giving some useful tools to developers and end-users.

Not all of these ideas were any good, of course. And one was for Wordpress, so that was out. Awkward. Some of them were also a little out of scope too, focussing on Microsoft products that are already selling just fine for example. But it has definitely been refreshing to take a step back from 4.1 and start thinking around package development and “products”.

The thing is, some of those ideas that were out of scope still have legs even if there isn’t yet a budget. So in my spare time I thought I’d get stuck into my favourite.

I’ve started work on a Visual Studio 2008/2010 add-in which allows developers to configure Umbraco from within the IDE.

In particular, it will allow for the creation and editing of the document type structure, without switching into the browser. It’s coming on quicker than I thought and I should have something in March to release as a first beta.

With a bit of luck I’ll be able to get some MS help one way or the other, and I know Benjamin is keen on collaborating too as he’s been thinking along similar lines, so watch this space – Umbraco could be about to get even quicker from 0 to website.

I still reckon that Wordpress idea was cool though: “a plugin to replace all of Wordpress with basically something else”. Cracker.

Expected Beta 1: End March 2010

Today Pete and I reached a milestone with a project we’ve been working on in our spare time for a while. Within the last week we’ve decided to go public and will be spreading the word far and wide over the next month.

We got the CodePlex project sorted, and first checkin batch done for our open-source digital asset management system called MimeCloud.

The link to it on CodePlex is at mimecloud.codeplex.com, the mimecloud.com domains redirect there for now.

It’s not finishet yet; we’ve a fair few weeks to go until the first Beta, and we’re just starting to invite collaborators now that the core architecture is formed. But it’s going to be awesome, and I hope a lot of people will benefit from it. For a start, we’re going to a build a package so you can use it in Umbraco CMS

Here are a few snippets from the project homepage:

What is MimeCloud?

• MimeCloud is an open-source media asset library built for lightning speed and scalability
• You can use MimeCloud to:
  • Manage the images and video on your blog or website (Wordpress or Umbraco? No problem!)
  • Replace the image management module of your website’s CMS with something more powerful, extensible, and easier to use
  • Manage usage rights information on your digital media archive (publishers? Hello!)
  • Attach metadata in multiple languages to the same image, video or asset
  • Quickly upload 1 or 1000 assets in a batch, with resizing and thumbnail generation on the fly
• The project was founded by Alex Norcliffe and Peter Miller

What platform does MimeCloud use?

• MimeCloud builds against Microsoft .NET 3.5SP1, and consists of the following pillars:
  • Robust datalayer built on Microsoft SQL Server and Lucene.net
  • Extensible API in both WCF and RESTful forms exposed using IIS
  • Several clients including a full-featured Silverlight image manipulation and batch upload tool, and an ASP.NET MVC administration tool for basic upload and library searching
  • Storage of assets can be via FTP, HTTP upload, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure – whatever you prefer

What’s a Media Library? Is this Digital Asset Management? I just want to upload images to my site

• No worries – just because MimeCloud can cope with millions of images and videos doesn’t mean it’s difficult to use, or resource intensive.
• You can have MimeCloud installed on a simple blog in minutes, and use it every now and then, and it will still have cost you nothing (unless you want to donate)

Does it only handle images?

• Not at all! We called it MimeCloud for a reason – the entire system is pluggable and supports anything describable by a MIME type. Out of the box we have support for images, videos, PDFs, Microsoft Office, and if there is a filetype you need that isn’t yet supported you can write a provider to tell MimeCloud how to handle it.

I finally got my Descriptive CacheManager Framework up on CodePlex.

I devised this in 2007 as part of a personal project, it’s code that I’ve maintained since, and it’s been in use on very high traffic sites of over 40 million pageviews per month in the past three years – so it’s pretty battle-hardened.

It’s 2010 and the time has come to share the code with the community!

What’s it for?

The Descriptive CacheManager Framework allows you to take a simple, different, and more effective method of caching items in ASP.NET. The developer defines descriptive categories to decorate their objects, rather than arbitrary timeout values, which are then used by the framework to determine an overall policy based on its knowledge of all items under its supervision.

It can also:

• Replicate cache items to other web servers in your load balanced setup (even those outside of the same network)
• Allow cache items to survive application restarts

All without replacing the famously good underlying ASP.NET cache itself.

The CodePlex project for it is here. Check it out and let me know what you think!

I’ll be doing a series of posts here and updates to the CodePlex project with demonstration configuration files in the coming week. Do get in touch if you want to know more information!

Today was cracking for a number of reasons: I got a bunch of stuff checked-in to the Umbraco 4.1 branch, made it to Umbraco’s 5th birthday event on the Thames in London, met up with a tonne of interesting people all variously involved in implementing Umbraco solutions around the UK, and did a talk with Pete Miller on scalability and cloud hosting.

The event itself was, by all accounts, a great success. Adam Shalcross (Cogworks) and Warren Buckley (Xeed) did a great job of organising it all, so much so that the venue had to be changed to fit the amount of people who wanted to go.

Here’s the video of our talk. The first part of my intro I think I was still recovering from 4 days’ food poisoning on which I’ll blame my propensity for saying “erm”, but I like to think I settled down eventually…

Alex Norcliffe & Peter Miller from CondeNast – Cloud computing & scalability from Paul Marden on Vimeo.