Kevin Hoffman

Cloud Hosting Journal on Ulitzer Yesterday a friend of mine was asking me what I've been doing lately in my spare time. When I mentioned that I'd been doing a lot of messing around with Windows Azure, he was naturally curious. After explaining what Azure is, he asked me what the difference was between Windows Azure, a cloud computing environment, and traditional web hosting scenarios. On a really high level, he's got a valid point : With Azure you can develop your application offline locally and then when you're done you can publish it to a remote host. To the casual observer, this looks exactly like what you might do with a web hosting company that provides space on an IIS box and let's you use ASP.NET and maybe even a little SQL server database. The beauty, of course, is that to the end user it doesn't matter. To someone using your website, they don't (and shouldn'... (more)

Leopard Code Sample: A Bound NSCollectionView

Leopard introduces a bunch of amazingly powerful new controls, but one of my favorite new controls is the NSCollectionView. This control works a lot like the FlowLayoutPanel if you're familiar with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). It essentially is a layout container responsible for laying out a collection of subviews. You can either manually create the subview collection, or you can set the content array of the NSCollectionView. This is a really powerful option because if you can set the content array, you can also bind it. For this demo, I've bound the content array of th... (more)

ASP.NET Membership Provider in the Cloud

Azure Cloud on Ulitzer Let's take a look at this pretty common scenario. You're building an ASP.NET application (MVC or otherwise) and you intend to publish it in the cloud and you're using Azure Storage (not SQL Azure) for your underlying data store. You've already hooked your app up with the sample Azure-based Membership provider that comes with the Azure SDK and everything is running along nicely. Your application has quite a bit of administrator-only functionality so, after you've been using it locally for a while you put in some safeguards to block access to the admin area... (more)

iPhone Developer Landscape After the iPhone SDK Announcement

So Steve Jobs has finally announced the availability of the iPhone SDK. It will be available sometime in February of 2008. First, before I go on, I want to counter a lot of the press and blog comments stating that the release of the SDK is a reversal or some kind of about face. If anybody had done their homework, they would know that Steve Jobs himself stated that he wanted to create an environment that supported native 3rd party app development, but that they didn't have it "right" just yet, and that he wanted people to be patient. Obviously, he didn't remember that patience is ... (more)

The Evolution of Cloud Computing - Then and Now

With all of the hype surrounding Cloud computing, Microsoft's upcoming Cloud OS and current efforts around Live Mesh, I thought I would take a trip on the WABAC machine to look at where it all started. Back when I was in junior high school, the best type of connectivity that I could hope for were dial-up Bulletin Boards. Yes, I used a 2400 baud modem. No, I am not older than dirt. We used these BBS' to play games, to post on discussion forums, and occasionally, if the BBS owner was wealthy enough, they'd have multiple nodes (for you young whipper snappers, that means multiple pho... (more)