Partner Otaku

The Eclipse tools for Silverlight project, aka eclipse4SL, is an eclipse plug-in that enables Eclipse developers to use the Eclipse IDE to create applications that run on the Microsoft Silverlight runtime platform. It also enables collaboration on Silverlight projects between Eclipse (Java) developers, .NET developers, and web designers on both the Windows and MAC operating systems.

http://www.eclipse4sl.org/

In partnership with Marco Tabini and Associates (MTA) (php|architect; CodeWorks; php|tek), we are excited to announce the launch of The Great PHP on Windows contest. Do you have what it takes to win? Of course you do .

You are encouraged to leverage existing open-source libraries and applications, including blogs engines, forums, photo galleries and other platform/components as part of your submission.

For complete details visit http://phparch.com/win

The Quick Summary:

• Write a new application designed to run in PHP on Windows using IIS—or make a significant contribution to an existing open-source project along the same lines
• The best application, selected jointly by a panel of experts and by our readers, will win a grand prize
  which includes a 52″ Digital HD home entertainment system, as well as an all-expenses paid trip to php|tek 2010 in Chicago. Runner-up prizes include 2 XBox 360 Ultimate and subscriptions to php|architect.
• Not familiar with Windows? No worries—we have partnered with Applied Innovations to give you absolutely free hosting on a pre-configured virtual machine for the duration of the contest.
• Registration and submissions for the contest will be accepted October 19^th, 2009 through February 28^th, 2010 and with judging and public voting will occur March 1^st – 31^st.
• For the duration of the contest, Applied Innovations will provide free web hosting to all participants (shared) and a free VM to the first 60 participants who register.
• Contest is open to all U.S. residents excluding MTA, Applied Innovations, and Microsoft employees and affiliated individuals. (MTA is the official sponsor with AppliedI and Microsoft as promotion entities.)

The contest is open to residents of the United States only—but you can still win by voting, no matter where you are.

 Good Luck!

We announced the WebsiteSpark Program for professional Web Developers and Designers at no upfront cost!  If you have 10 or fewer employees, learn more and sign up if you qualify! Website Spark is also making news. Here’s a link to a couple of articles in PCWorld and Tech Crunch.

I’ve outlined the program below, but please go to the site for additional details.

What does the program provide?

WebSiteSpark provides software licenses that you can use for three years at no cost.  Once enrolled, you can download and immediately use the following software from Microsoft:

• 3 licenses of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• 1 license of Expression Studio 3 (which includes Expression Blend, Sketchflow, and Web)
• 2 licenses of Expression Web 3
• 4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 R2
• 4 processor licenses of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
• DotNetPanel control panel (enabling easy remote/hosted management of your servers)

The Windows Server and SQL Server licenses can be used for both development and production deployment.  You can either self-host the servers on your own, or use the licenses with a hoster.  WebsiteSpark makes it easy to find hosters who are also enrolled in the program, and who can use your licenses to provide you with either dedicated or virtual dedicated servers to host your sites on.

In addition to software, WebsiteSpark provides partner opportunities to grow and build your business (including customer referrals through our partner programs).  It also includes product support (including 2 professional support incidents) and free online training for the products.

Who can join the program?

WebSiteSpark is available to independent web developers and small web development companies.  The only two requirements to join the program are:

1. Your company builds web sites and web application on behalf of others.
2. Your company currently has less than 10 employees.

If you meet these requirements you can visit the WebsiteSpark website and sign-up today. 

As part of the enrollment process you can pick either a network referral partner (for example: a hoster or an existing Microsoft partner), or enter a referral code that you have received at an event or from a Microsoft employee.  If you send mail to webspark@microsoft.com you can get a referral code quickly.  You can then use that code to enroll in the program on the WebsiteSpark website.  Once enrolled you can immediately download and use the software, as well as begin to participate in the network/partner opportunities.

If you have any problems enrolling, you can also send me mail (wesy@microsoft.com) and I can connect you with someone who can help. 

What happens after the 3 years?

WebsiteSpark is a 3 year program.  There is no obligation to continue to use any of the software after the three years is over, and there are no costs for the three years other than a $100 program fee at the end of the three years.

At the end of the three years, WebsiteSpark participants can optionally choose to purchase all of the software in the WebsiteSpark program via a $999/year package.  This includes 3 copies of VS Professional, 1 copy of Expression Studio (including Blend and Sketchflow), 2 copies of Expression Web, and 4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 and 4 processor licenses of SQL Server Web edition that can be used for production deployment.

Alternatively, if you want to purchase only the production server licenses, you can take advantage of a $199/year offering that includes both 1 Windows Web Server processor license and 1 SQL Server Web edition processor license.  You can buy the quantity you need of this package at $199/year each. 

Summary

The WebsiteSpark program joins the other two successful “Spark” programs we’ve previously launched – BizSpark for startups, and DreamSpark for students.

Coming at a time when the current economic climate is still tough, WebsiteSpark will help support developers and companies by providing the business resources, training, and software necessary for companies to get started and grow successful businesses on the Microsoft Web Platform.

Visit www.microsoft.com/web to learn more about the Microsoft Web Platform, as well as download and install the new Microsoft Web Platform Installer V2 we released today – which makes it really easy to quickly provision web servers and web development machines.  You can then browse and download and use open source web applications from the Windows Web Application Gallery.

We’re very pleased to announce the launch of the Web Platform Installer 2.0! 

Since we released Web PI 1.0 Beta, just a year ago, we have seen phenomenal success and customer appreciation for simplifying how you find and install the Microsoft Web Platform.  With this RTW launch of our 2.0 product we feel excited and confident that we have a solution that our partners, field, and communities can use to make getting the Microsoft Web Platform easier than ever.

• What’s new?  Highlights of the 2.0 release include: installing popular community ASP.NET and PHP applications, localization into 9 languages, and the expansion to include more scenarios around Media, Dev Tools, and Enterprise.
• Gotta have it!  1 MILLION downloads.  Over the past 12 months we have seen over 1 million downloads of Web PI, over 4.6 million downloads of Platform products and over 840,000 downloads of Web applications. 
• What are people saying?  “Saves so much time and hassle!” “one stop shopping” “attraction to the Web Platform installer was straight forward”

Install the Web Platform Installer RTW today and let us know what you think! 

I attended Cal Evans – “Five Things I Wished They Told Me” at Codeworks SF today.  I liked the presentation because it gave me insight about the PHP community. There were 22 people attending the session and I would speculate that the room included inexperienced and experienced PHP developers. The session certainly provided the framework (small “f”) to better understand the PHP community. I like the format and I can easily see how this can be carried over to other languages/frameworks. I’ve pasted an edited version of my notes below, so if I have made omissions or errors they are the fault of the author not Cal .

Frameworks

• Learn a Framework
• Frameworks exist for a reason
• Prototype however you want, but build production systems on a framework
• Frameworks are just tools – use one that works for you.

Frameworks – The Big 3

• Zend Framework
• Symfony
• CakePHP

Frameworks – The Second Tier

• Solar
• CodeIgniter (issue: it’s based on PHP 4 and 5. Code  forked as Kohana which is migrating purely to PHP 5)
• Agavi – starting to get traction in the community

Frameworks with Benefits

• Content Management
  • Drupal
  • Joomal
  • WordPress
• E-Commerce
  • Magneto
  • OSCommerce
• Qualities to Look for in Frameworks:
  • Community (Zend, Cake and Symfony have ery large communities) – active IRC, mailing lists, twitter etc.
  • Completeness – does it provide all the tools that are needed
  • Documentation (ie. Zend framework)
  • Unit Test Coverage 
  • IP Ownership (who owns it? Be aware of IP and ask the question – are you comfortable with it)
• Choose the Best Tool for the Job
  • Ex. If you are Symfony programmer – and a customer says "I need a blog" should I code one or implement WordPress?
  • Ex. WordPress is a framework with benefits – lots of hooks to the api’s or plug-ins etc.
• PHP is not <language x>
  • PHP is not Java
    • No Compiler
    • Both object and procedure based
    • No main()
    • No application server
  • PHP is not perl
    • PHP started as a series of scripts in perl
    • PHP is loosely typed
    • PHP is easier to read
  • PHP is not C#
    • PHP is cross platform
    • PHP works with multiple web servers
    • Not built for a specific framework (ie. ASP.NET)
  • PHP is not <insert favorite language>
    • PHP is no better or worse than any of these languages
    • PHP is the only language developed to solve web based problems
  • PHP is not <insert favorite language>
    • PHP is easy
    • PHP is complex
    • Great tool because you can start with the easy and get complex
  • Learn where to get help
    • Conferences
      • Php|tek (beg – adv.)
      • Dutch PHP Conference (very advanced )
      • ZendCon (targeted at directors, team leads, player coaches) Business Oriented
    • Value of conference is building relationships
  • Infrastructure & Support
    • Understanding is needed at levels of the stack (NOS, Web Server, etc.)
    • Support Choices and Comfort Levels
      • Vendor/Enterprise Support
      • Community Support
      • Updates

Yesterday Microsoft release a new open source project that bridges PHP and .NET using REST.  If you’re interested in getting more information please follow this link to codeplex.

I’ve embedded an impromptu video of Hank Janssen from Microsoft who presented this session at PHP|tek. It’s not the greatest sound quality, but worth checking out. Thanks go to Brian Gorbett for recording.

ARCHITECT COUNCIL | Pragmatic Patterns for Architects

“Cloud computing will supersede traditional IT”, “SOA will enable business agility”, “my way or the highway”, etc. We’ve all heard this type of proclamations before, as many look to the “next big things” in technology to exact sweeping changes and solve many issues; truth is, technologies and tools aren’t as instrumental in influencing progress, as the design and discipline in applying them to specific issues. When used appropriately, technologies and tools can be powerful enablers that bring about change.

One of the things we hear a lot working with the community is a desire for more guidance about how to use the technology instead of just talking about features and functions.  To address this, our team has put together a series of live webcasts on June 9^th – 11^th which will focus on guidance and patterns for some of today’s hottest topics. 

DAY 1 – June 9, 2009 at Noon PST

Patterns for Moving to the Cloud

Larry Clarkin & Wade Wegner

Everything that you read these days seems to suggest that you should be moving to the cloud. But where do you start? Which applications and services should be moving to the cloud? How do you build the bridge between on-premises and the cloud? And more importantly, what should you be looking out for along the way? In this session, learn architectural patterns and factors for moving to the cloud. Based on real-world projects, the session explores building block services, patterns for exposing applications, and challenges involving identity, data federation, and management. This session provides the tools and knowledge to determine whether cloud computing is right for you, and where to start.

DAY 2 – June 10, 2009 at Noon PST

Building Silverlight & WPF Applications with Prism

David Hill

Prism provides guidance, via design patterns, to help you build robust, flexible and modular Silverlight and WPF applications. These patterns support unit testing, separation of concerns, loose coupling and the ability to share application logic between Silverlight and WPF applications. Prism includes source code for the library itself, extensive documentation, and a sample application that shows how the patterns work together in a real-world application. It also includes a Visual Studio add-in to help you easily share code between WPF and Silverlight. This session provides an overview of Prism, and shows how you can use Prism to design and build composite Silverlight applications.

DAY 3 – June 11, 2009 at Noon PST

Patterns for Parallel Computing

David Chou

With recent advances in cloud computing, service-oriented architectures, distributed computing, server virtualization, multi-core processors; we are now seeing parallel computing techniques being implemented across the spectrum. It’s moving towards mainstream applications such as internet-scale web applications, massive data processing, graphics rendering, but the myriad of choices also present a number of questions on when and how to utilize parallel computing. This session explores the architectural patterns and trade-offs between different forms of parallel computing including: approaches for utilizing them to improve application performance, optimizing the use of existing infrastructure, and applying concurrency towards day-to-day enterprise information processing needs.

WEBCAST AGENDA

REGISTER

To register, please click on the link below for each day:

We will email you with the LIVEMEETING information and log-in detail a few days before the actual event. We will use the email address you provide in the registration. Thanks!

SPEAKER BIOS

Larry Clarkin – SR ARCHITECT EVANGELIST, Microsoft

Wade Wegner – SR ARCHITECT EVANGELIST, Microsoft

Architect in the Developer & Platform Evangelism division at Microsoft, tasked to collaborate with organizations in the advanced and emergent areas of enterprise architecture, SOA, Web 2.0, and cloud computing, as well as to support decision makers on defining technology adoption strategies. You can reach Wade at his blog http://www.architectingwith.net/ or through twitter at http://twitter.com/wadewegner.

David Hill – PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT, Microsoft Patterns & Practices Team

David Chou – ARCHITECT, Microsoft

Architect in the Developer & Platform Evangelism organization at Microsoft, focused on collaborating with enterprises and organizations in many areas such as cloud computing, SOA, Web, RIA, distributed systems, security, etc., and supporting decision makers on defining evolutionary strategies in architecture. Drawing on experiences from his previous jobs at Sun Microsystems and Accenture, David enjoys helping customers create value from using objective and pragmatic approaches to define IT strategies, roadmaps, and solution architectures.

One of Windows Azure’s goals is to provide support for a variety of languages including Java, PHP and Ruby.  If you are a PHP developer, and are interested in testing the PHP SDK for Windows Azure please click the link to the PHP SDK home page – PHP SDK for Windows Azure – Home.

PHPAzure is an open source project to provide a software development kit for Windows Azure and Windows Azure Storage – Blobs, Tables & Queues

Here are some resources that maybe useful to you in getting started:

One of the biggest requests we get is for designer and developer training for WPF and Silverlight. So the series that helped designers and developers in cities across the US will soon be available online.

XAMLFest Online is a five day event hosted by msdev.com. It is delivered by both recorded sessions and over Live Meeting. Five sessions covers WPF, Silverlight and the Visual Studio and Expression tools. The sessions focus on real life line of business solutions.

In order to attend, attendees must register for each event. Recorded sessions will be available May 25. Live events are offered for designers in the morning (9 am Pacific, noon Eastern) and for developers (1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern) in the afternoons the week of June 1. Just because you are a developer though, you can learn the designer tools and expand your skill set. Designers can learn what happens on the back end systems in the developer sessions. You’ll have access to proctors and question and answers during the live sessions.

Sign up for all sessions online. You’ll need to sign up for each session to participate. Once you register, you’ll have access to the source code that will give you a jump start on your next user interface project.

If you’re interested in signing up please click here and here’s a brief summary of the sessions.