The video of my interview with the awesome Josh Holmes is now available

Following up some of my recent posts on the Jump In Camp I recently attended. The video has been available for a short while but I thought it would be good to also post in here. For those who enjoy a good laugh my beer bottling skills are demonstrated around 5:17 in… any offers of beer bottling employment are gratefully received!

The video itself is brilliantly edited and gives a great overview the time we spent in Switzerland.

Day 3 of the Jump In Camp brought about a few nice surprises of its own, most of all some of the really cool things that Microsoft has been working on.

I must admit that I had never really taken Silverlight seriously before and often wondered why we needed another browser plugin ala Flash to do interesting things (note: I’ve personally never liked Flash). The talk from Corrado Cavalli gave me some interesting food for thought.

It was interesting to hear that it could also be used to develop applications for the Windows Mobile 7, slightly disappointing though was the lack of support for other mobile handsets, I would love to see a real iphone killer in the ability to create an application that could run on Windows 7, S60 series and also Google Android. From what I remember Silverlight covers 2 of these platforms but currently has no plans to offer Android support. I am hoping that one day it will be available (here’s looking at you Microsoft / Google ;–))

Next up was possibly one of the fastest presentations I have ever seen, up stepped  Alex Weinstein to give us an overview of some of the things they had been working on in Microsoft Live Labs. If you don’t know what live labs is take a look at the Live Labs website.

The project which really caught my eye from Alex’s presentation was Pivot I will have to admit it pretty much blew my socks off when I saw what it could do, just how easy it was to understand interpretations of large amounts of related data was amazing, I would encourage all developers to give it a spin as its hard to put into words everything it can do. I can safely say when I get a few moments I will be curling up with my Windows 7 Machine and exploring just what I can get out of some of the large data sets I have.

The final talk of the day was from Claudio Caldato about SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) SDK for PHP this is quite an interesting business reporting tool which allows you to embed the power of SQL Server reports into your PHP application, you can control the options for the report directly from your application and would be really interesting for an application which needs reports from an e-Commerce application for sales data as an example. There is some scope here for some kind of integration with osCommerce which I will be investigating as time allows.

The remainder of the afternoon was spent doing some more coding and exploring more of what we had learnt about earlier in the day, I also spent some time with Ashay Chaudhary getting more details on how to best utilise SQL Server and the SQL Server Driver for PHP extension. It was quite interesting just how easy it was to get SQL Server compatibility in a PHP application which hadn’t supported SQL Server before, some more work on that would be required in the coming weeks.

Next it was time for our surprise dinner, it wasn’t until then we discovered we would be spending the evening in a brewery, I can speak quite soundly that contrary to popular opinion, Microsoft can organise a p*** up in a brewery, the night was awesome and a great time was had by all.

The evening also allowed me to prove my prowess in beer bottling and impart some wisdom on just how not to bottle pressurised beer into a bottle. The video of the event will be posted shortly where you can see my skills in all their glory!

Another day over and all that was left was to drink some more beer and learn how to play a russian card game called Durak where the plan is to beat up whoever is on your left, after a few beers it becomes quite difficult so I decided to call it a night in the early hours, ready for another 8.30am start!

One of the topics at the front of my mind at the moment is PHP 5.3 and how I should be handling it with applications I write on a day to day basis.

It has not escaped my attention that a number of frameworks are requiring PHP 5.3+ some noticeable ones that I use or intend to use are

• Pear2
• Doctrine 2.0
• Symfony 2.0
• Zend Framework 2.0

With this comes a number of new features such as namespaces (view a complete list of changes in the Migration Guide) which I would love to start using in my own code. Whilst most of the code I write is fully forward compatible with PHP 5.3 taking advantage of the new features is where I would like to be aiming.

For the commercial applications where I am (or the customer is) in control of the environment this is a pretty simple thing to achieve. Where it becomes more difficult is when you want an application to be installable anywhere as shared hosting companies are still a long way behind.

I can understand the reasons for this as they have potentially thousands of end users to support with all sorts of different applications installed which could potentially break. It does leave application developers in a bit of a pickle though, wanting to take advantage of the latest features whilst still appealing to the large user base which open-source software attracts. I am sure most people remember the GoPHP5 campaign.

I thought I would throw some questions out there to the community to see if anyone has any thoughts:

1. How can the migration path for shared hosting companies be made easier?
2. If you were writing a new open-source application would you go purely 5.3+?
3. Do you know of any other open-source applications requiring 5.3+?

Any feedback is gratefully received.

Day 2 is where things start to get interesting, after a brief introduction by Yuriy Zaytsev on the hopes for the camp we got underway.

First up was Josh Holmes with an overview of Windows Azure

Scaling Big While Sleeping Well

View more presentations from Josh Holmes.

Whilst I had briefly looked at Windows Azure before I never really took the time to understand what it was, the overview from Josh was enlightening and made me realise that in my brief look earlier I had totally missed the point of Windows Azure.

I had foolishly grouped all cloud platforms into a single group along with Amazon EC2 when in fact Windows Azure is much more than that. Where are EC2 is almost like a dedicated server in that you control (and have to maintain/upgrade/patch) the entire software stack, Windows Azure removes all need to deal with patching of operating systems and runtime libraries leaving you to concentrate on your application.

I will be digging deeper into Windows Azure in coming blog posts.

Next up was Faith Allington with IIS / Windows Deployment. This demonstration took me a little by surprise as I had not heard of the Web Platform Installer or Web Deploy. It had also been about 6 years since I’d even dared to try and get PHP working with IIS so I was intrigued by how easy it would be since before it was a real pain in the ass.

I was pleasantly surprised however that Microsoft had been spending quite some time making the deployments easier and the tools they showed us made deploying even complicated applications incredibly simple.

By creating some simple XML files you can easily create an installation package which can handle everything from installing dependencies (MySQL for example), creating databases, configuring permissions and actually dealing with your own application configuration all from a simple Windows based UI.

This makes installing PHP applications a breeze which is an awesome thing for all the open-source PHP applications out there. Again I will be digging deeper into this cool technology in a later blog post and will also cover how we got osCommerce working via the Web Platform Installer with just a few hours work.

After some coding and lunch we back back into the thick of it with a presentation from Maarten Balliauw on SQL Azure

Windows Azure Storage & Sql Azure

View more presentations from Maarten Balliauw.

One of the interesting things which came out of this is that you can move your application from running on SQL Server Express (Free) to SQL Server Full Version and even to SQL Azure all without changing your database layer. The only thing which needs to be changed is the connection string for SQL Azure.

Once again it was back to some coding and quite a lot happened quite quickly. There were a few issues getting the Windows Azure for Eclipse tools working properly but once we managed to navigate over the initial issues progress quickly ensued.

After a couple of hours coding it was time for a quick break and then some fun for the afternoon. This took the guise of “Alpine Olympics” in the farm next to the Spa we were staying in.

The events which we took part in were

• Milking a Cow (Plastic not real fortunately)
• Ski-ing
• Cow-pat Golf
• Horseshoe Throwing
• Crossbow Shooting
• Blow Darts

The afternoon was a great team building exercise and allowed us plenty of time to get to know the other attendee’s in much greater detail. After all teams had completed all 6 events it was time for the awards ceremony, unfortunately my team didn’t win but we all got to share in the celebration drinks. Then it was time for a shower and dinner at which again the food was simply amazing.

After consuming what must of been an entire lamb by myself along with a few glasses of wine and good conversation it was time to hit the sack for the next morning we were starting at 8.30.

During my recent trip to Switzerland for Jump in Camp I was discussing blogging and how I found it too time consuming to get the longer blog posts written using an online interface. Then Josh Holmes informed me about a really cool tool he uses called Windows LIve Writer.

This is a desktop tool which integrates really nicely with a number of different blogging platforms including Wordpress which I am using for my blog. I have now been using this for a few days to write various blog posts and I have to admit its pretty awesome!

I would recommend it for anyone who wants to blog efficiently and easily whilst offline, a simple button click when you have connectivity and the post is submitted to your blog using XML-RPC.

The only thing missing is a module for Drupal 7 and if this isn’t forthcoming I may put some code where my mouth is and contribute a plugin so Drupal users can also benefit from this really cool tool.

The first day of Jump in Camp involved the short trip from London Heathrow to Zurich, after arriving at the airport nice and early I checked in and spent an hour wandering around the departures lounge before meeting up with Juozas.

Then came the short 90 minute flight with BA which I have to say was quite pleasant, by the time we had taken off and been served the drink and biscuits I had just enough time to catch up on the latest episode of Lost – Season 6 before were were ready to land.

Upon arrival we were first greated with a short train ride between terminals, which is generally quite normal these days except for some strange reason every now and again the train would make a kind of Mooo’ing sound. If anyone has any suggestions as to the significance / reason of this I would love to hear them!

After collecting our luggage we were met in arrivals by the lovely Nicole Zahnd and taken to a small fenced off area where beer and snacks were provided whilst we waiting for our mini-bus to take us to the Panorama Resort & Spa Feusisberg.

After a short ride of 40 minutes or so we arrived at the hotel (photo’s coming soon) and completed checkin before the buffet dinner, it was here we had time to meet the other participants and have a good chat over food and wine. The food I have to say was really good and the sorbet type dessert with the spoons which only just fitted inside the glass was very popular with everyone I think.

Quite an interesting discussion was had about how people without children could annoy their friends and family who do have children with the most annoying toys, its fair to say it left me with some great idea’s for my nieces’ next birthday ;–)

Soon came time to retire in preperation for the exciting things that awaited us the next morning (8.30 start)…

More about that soon!

One of the first things I wanted to get online was a post about an exciting event which I attended recently.

I was one of the lucky developers to be chosen to attend a Microsoft “Jump in Camp” in the beautiful surroundings of Lake Zurich, I was promised interesting discussions and a good time, and I have to admit both were provided in ample measure.

Over the 4 days a number of topics were presented and discussed, these involved

• Windows Azure
• Web Platform Installer
• Windows Azure Storage platform
• Azure SDK for PHP
• SQL Server
• Silverlight
• Microsoft Live Labs Pivot
• SQL Server Reporting Services for PHP

But the camp wasn’t just a talking shop, we also had time to get down to the serious business of coding some of these things into our respective projects, I will post more details on each of these things separately in the coming weeks.

I would like to thank everyone who organised and attended the camp, over the 4 days I met talented people, undertook some strange challenges and learnt more about the steps Microsoft are taking to work towards interoperability between differing technologies than I could ever of imagined.

I hope they do something like this again as I believe its a very important and productive way to get face-to-face time with the key open-source projects and people within Microsoft for the benefit of the most important people for us all “the users”.

Welcome to my new and improved blog, its been a while since I offered any of my random thoughts to the world, so please consider yourself fore-warned.