Oslo

Interview Webcasts from PDC09

Alan Smith — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:30:16 GMT

Tibi has delivered another round of intervenes with some of the presenters at PDC. Vittorio Bertocci, Sara Ford, Ted Malone, Brad Abrams, Ade Miller and Don Box shared their ideas on the latest and greatest technology, and also their visions of the future.

Tibi also interviewed Jon Flanders and Paula Januszkievicz at TechEd in Berlin.

The interviews are here.

Update: It seems there is a permissions issue with Azure Storage Tables at the moment, so you get an error when you try to view videos. Hopefuly this will be resolved soon.

Update: I've fixed the site, the issue was a data center migration making the tables read only, another late night ahead migrating the data and blobs. Life's a riot on the bleading edge :-)

Alan

Who Moved my Cloud?

Alan Smith — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:44:54 GMT

Due to technical issues, (well, me not reading my hotmail account or any Azure blogs actually) I had a slight “outage” on CloudCasts. The USA-Northwest Azure data centres closed, taking my site with it. After a frantic couple of hours (midnight to 2 AM Swedish time) I’m back up and running in a shiny new data centre in USA-Southwest.

The site is now running again at www.cloudcasts.net, but due to the change in the Azure app name, links to cloudtv.cloudapp.net are broken. At the moment I am seeing a big drop off in traffic, so I’m guessing there are a lot of links to the old URLs. If you have linked to the site using cloudtv.cloudapp.net, it would be great if you can update it.

As the old saying goes, developers make the worst administrators.

Interviews at ØreDev and Ze Frank!

Alan Smith — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:31:28 GMT

Tibi and I are winding down after a hectic few days at the ØreDev conference in Sweden. It was a great conference, with a lot of international speakers and attendees, and a good mix of technologies and tracks. One of the highlights was Ze Frank, who was delivering his stand up comedy routine, which was targeted just right for the attendees.

I laid down the gauntlet to Tibi by challenging him to get an interview with Ze, and he accepted and delivered the goods, thanks to Herbjörn Wilhelmsen for chatting with Ze to arrange it. We managed to get a slightly longer “5 Minutes With” interview in which Ze turned the tables on Tibi and asked him questions about conquering a fear of flying and his attitude for dealing with the challenges life can throw at us. It’s very refreshing to have an interview without any three-letter-acronyms.

CloudCasts has also had a busy week, as I’ve posted interviews with Scott Hanselmam, Scott Allen, Julie Lerman, Herbjörn Wilhelmsen and Magnus Mårtensson. We even added some music to the site with a splendid rendition of “The Joker” by Carl Franklin, with Shawn Wildermoth providing the guitar solo. If you are ever in Malmö, I recommend the “The Bishops Arms”, though we could not decide if we should have 8 or 10 Bishops Fingers there. I have another few videos in the can, and will be getting them uploaded over the weekend.

Overall ØreDev 2009 was a great success, big credit to Michael Tiberg for his organization skills and his passion for the event; I’m looking forward to ØreDev 2010 already.

You can see all the ØreDev content here.

Tibi interviews the stars at DevReach in Bulgaria

Alan Smith — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:08:28 GMT

Tiberiu “Tibi” Covaci, the CloudCasts international correspondent was in Bulgaria last week for the DevReach 2009 conference. During a hectic few days he managed to pin down some of the main presenters and technology influencers for his “Five Minutes With…” interview series.

The interviews with Chris Sells, Richard Campbell, Christian Weyer and Carl Franklin have been published with four more to be released later this week. Tibi will also be at TechEd Berlin, OreDev in Malmoe and PDC in Los Angeles, so we can expect to see more of the same over the next few weeks.

The interviews are available on CloudCasts.

If you have any interviews of your own that you would like hosted on CloudCasts, or you would like to spend “Five Minutes with Tibi”, please contact me through this blog.

Webcast – BAML – A DSL for BAM

Alan Smith — Fri, 01 May 2009 04:49:09 GMT

I never really “got” the idea of the need to build a textual DSL when I was first introduced to MGrammar. The light really switched on when I looked into developing a DSL that would make it easier for developers to create BAM activities.

The BAML language only took a couple of hours to develop. I had experimented with simple text based DSLs before, so this was my first “real” language.

I have recorded a 20 minute webcast showing how the language works, and how it can be used. If you want to experiment with it yourself, the language is here.

module BloggersGuides

{

language BAML

{

syntax Main = Activity;

syntax Activity =

ActivityToken

n:NameToken

'{'

p:List(PKI)

'}'

=> { activity { n,{ p }} };

syntax PKI = Milestone | Integer | Decimal | Text;

syntax Milestone = t:MilestoneToken n:NameToken ';'

=> { t, { n } };

syntax Integer = t:IntegerToken n:NameToken ';'

=> { t, { n } };

syntax Decimal = t:DecimalToken n:NameToken ';'

=> { t, { n } };

syntax Text = t:TextToken n:NameToken ';'

=> { t, { n } };

syntax List (Element) =

e:Element => { e } |

list:List(Element) e:Element => { valuesof(list), e };

token NameToken = ('A'..'Z' | 'a'..'z')+;