Tonight I traveled for 3 hours (roughly 300 kms) to attend the DevEast meeting in Moncton, NB. And in my mind it was worth it.
In the most unusual place I've ever sat and listened to a presentation, I joined 8 others at AJs Pizza Place to listen to Derek Hatchard run through two presentations that's he's planning to give at DevTeach Toronto next week.
Leveraging the Amazon Platform
Covered the various types of services that Amazon has made available. Derek talked about S3 (Simple Storage Service) their file hosting service, mentioned their Simple Queue Service but most of his demos covered EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). If you need virtual environments launched when you want them this is an option for you. Plans start around 10 cents an hour per image (virtual machine) and you can create an instance from the preconfigured images that Google has made available (all flavors of Linux along with apache and mysql from what I saw) but you can also upload your own image to S3 and then create instances based on it. Derek showed some of the command line utilities that are available as well as how you can create a .NET application to setup your images. One thing that was note, if you're planning to run an image with mysql, if the image is shut down or crashes there's no method of retrieving your data since you cannot simply restart the image from where it left off. So don't use this if you plan to keep your data !
Extending IIS7 with Managed Code
We didn't have much time for this presentation but it was interesting to see how you can extend IIS fairly easily by writing modules. He discussed how to modify the web.config as the application.config (not sure on this one) and how the majority of the IIS settings are now set through these files. At the end he also briefly talked about how to add what I would call property pages for settings that your modules can have but that you need to make these available not only on the server but also to clients since IIS 7 can be administered remotely.
That's the quick overview of things. it's midnight and I've been on the go since 6am. Time for some sleep !!!
Print | posted on Tuesday, May 06, 2008 12:29 AM