Brian Swan's Blog
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This Week’s Link List (April 8, 2011)
Once again, lots going on this week. I found the two articles about Zitec deploying their PHP social networking application to Windows Azure to be especially interesting. And, of course, topics for math geeks are near and dear to my heart…maybe I should make “For the math geek” a regular category? Enjoy…
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Interview with Mark Brown, Senior Product Manager for Microsoft Web Platform
I recently had a chance to catch up with the very busy Mark Brown, Senior Product Manager for the Microsoft Web Platform. I’ve had the good fortune of working with Mark in my day-to-day work as well as at a couple of conferences (DrupalCon SF and JumpIn! Camp Redmond), but lately he’s been heads-down focused on WebMatrix. I wrote about WebMatrix in its beta stages and purely from a PHP-developer point of view (here and here), but I know it has come a long way since then. In this interview, Mark talks about what WebMatrix has evolved into and what it will take to make it successful. However, what I found most interesting about the interview is the perspective Mark shares about Microsoft’s engagement with open source technologies and communities…
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This Week’s Link List (April 1, 2011)
I missed posting my weekly reading last week, so this week’s list is longer than usual. Lot’s of interesting news around PHP-Microsoft interoperability and PHP on Azure as the PHP on Azure contest heats up. Enjoy…
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Java Access to SQL Azure via the JDBC Driver for SQL Server
I’ve written a couple of posts (here and here) about Java and the JDBC Driver for SQL Server with the promise of eventually writing about how to get a Java application running on the Windows Azure platform. In this post, I’ll deliver on that promise. Specifically, I’ll show you two things: 1) how to connect to a SQL Azure Database from a Java application running locally, and 2) how to connect to a SQL Azure database from an application running in Windows Azure. You should consider these as two ordered steps in moving an application from running locally against SQL Server to running in Windows Azure against SQL Azure. In both steps, connection to SQL Azure relies on the JDBC Driver for SQL Server and SQL Azure.
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This Week’s Link List (March 18, 2011)
A shorter than usual list this week as I didn’t have as much time to read, but the quantity is eclipsed by the importance (and in some cases, weight) of some of the news…
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Windows Azure Command Line Tools for PHP and web.config Files
Last week, Ben Waine blogged about a problem he ran into when using the Windows Azure Command Line Tools for PHP to deploy a Zend Framework application to Windows Azure. As I investigated the problem further, I was able to generalize it and offer a work around, which is what I’ll explain in this post. (My work around is essentially the same as Ben’s, but my hope is that explaining it in the context of the generalized problem you will be able to avoid headaches when deploying any application to Azure, not just Zend Framework applications.)
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Architecture of the Microsoft JDBC Driver for SQL Server
I recently began investigating the Microsoft JDBC Driver for SQL Server (see my Getting Started with the SQL Server JDBC Driver post for more information). In this post I’ll continue that investigation by looking at the architecture and history of the driver. While the information in this post may not all be immediately useful when building Java applications, I found it interesting to learn.
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This Week’s Link List (March 11, 2011)
As evidenced by the number of “Just for Fun” links, this wasn’t my most productive week (but it was fun). Now, I didn’t spend all my time playing…I read lots of intelligence-enhancing posts…I just hope some of it sticks…
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Interview with Julian Egelstaff, Technical Architect at Freeform Solutions
I recently had a chance to catch up with Julian Egelstaff, Technical Architect at Freeform Solutions. Julian attended last year’s SQL Server JumpIn! Camp where he worked with Microsoft engineers and other participants to add SQL Server support to Formulize, a PHP application that lets you to quickly create forms and reports in your website. Julian is the co-founder of Freeform Solutions, has 10 years of PHP development experience, and is a Zend Certified Engineer.
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SQL Server Driver for PHP Connection Options: Encrypt
This short post adds to my series on connection options in the SQL Server Driver for PHP. I’ll go into a bit more detail on the Encrypt and TrustServerCertificate options than the driver documentation does. I’ll start with three important points related to these options, then I’ll go into a couple of hypothetical situations that should shed more light on what these options actually do.