Bruno Silva

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More about Azure Platform Services

Some highlights from a nice article that I found in my feeds. They are excerpts of the document, text in italic was written by me. Please note that the lines lack some context.

.NET Services

.NET Access Control Service

All communication with the Access Control Service relies on standard protocols such as WS-Trust and WS-Federation. This makes the service accessible from any kind of application on any platform.

Claims-based identity is on its way to becoming the standard approach for distributed environments.
By providing an STS (Securtity Token Service) in the cloud, complete with rules-based claims transformation, the Access Control Service makes this modern approach to identity more attractive.

.NET Service Bus

The Service Bus assigns your organization a URI root, below which you’re free to create any naming hierarchy you like.
This allows your endpoints to be assigned specific, discoverable URIs.
Your application must also open a connection with the Service Bus for each endpoint it exposes.
The Service Bus holds this connection open, which solves two problems.
First, NAT is no longer an issue, since traffic on the open connection with the Service Bus will always be routed to your application. Second, because the connection was initiated from inside the firewall, there’s no problem passing information back to the application—the firewall won’t block this traffic.

.NET Workflow Service

Running (workflows) in the cloud brings some limitations, however.(not all Windows Workflow Foundation activities are available: code activity isn’t).
WF-based applications running in the Workflow Service can only use WF’s sequential workflow model, for example.

Also, running arbitrary code isn’t allowed, and so neither the BAL’s Code activity nor custom activities can be used.

SQL Services

SQL Services is an umbrella name for what will be a group of cloud-based technologies.
(the first one available is SQL Data Services)
SQL Data Services doesn’t provide a standard relational database, nor does it support SQL queries.
LINQ C# syntax, with queries sent via either SOAP or a RESTful approach. The other is to use ADO.NET Data Services

Live Services

A mesh-enabled Web application must be implemented using a multi-platform technology, such as Microsoft Silverlight, DHTML, or Adobe Flash. These technologies are supported on all of the operating systems that can run the Live Framework.(targeting Windows Vista/XP, Macintosh OS X, and Windows Mobile 6).

Microformats and Me

Last week I had a workshop about Microformats with André Luís sponsored by PrimeIT and Sapo. It was very interesting and really answered some of the questions I had about Microformats.

What are Microformats?

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

Which Microformats did I implement in this blog after this workshop?

hAtom

hAtom is a microformat for identifying semantic information in weblog posts and practically any other place Atom (http://www.atomenabled.org/) may be used, such as news articles. hAtom content is easily added to most blogs by simple modifications to the blog’s template definitions.

Since, as André told us, the new feature of IE8 called Web Slices is based o hAtom, by adding the class
hslice next to the hentry class, now I also support Web Slices!

hCard

hCard is a simple, open, distributed format for representing people, companies, organizations, and places, using a 1:1 representation of vCard (RFC2426) properties and values in semantic HTML or XHTML.

xFolk

xFolk (from “xFolksomony”) is a simple and open format for publishing collections of bookmarks. It better enables services for improving user experience and sharing data in web-based bookmarking software.

I was glad to ear that support for Microformats is growing on the web, and the web browsers are becoming Microformats-aware. According to André, Firefox 3 (or 3.1, I don’t remember) already brings an API for Microformats, although there isn’t any support in the user interface. Maybe in FireFox 4 we’ll get it. And as I said before, IE is supporting one of the Microformats.

There are some web browser plugins that make Microformats usable. For FireFox you can get Operator which will add a toolbar like shown in the picture bellow. You can access the contacts, events, bookmarks, etc available in the current webpage.

For Internet Explorer you can get Oomph, but I wasn’t able to use it with my blog… Well, maybe in the future it will work better.

Adding Microformats support  in your blog or website can be pretty simple. It took me about 2 hours in this blog, thanks to a nice base Wordpress theme easily customizable.

GPS Cycle and Google Earth - Keep track of your steps

Probably I haven’t mentioned before, but after my Qtek S200 crashed a few months ago, I’ve bought an HTC Diamond. At first it was a little slow and battery consuming, but 3 days after I bought it, HTC released a new ROM for TMN customers which solved those issues. Great timing I had.

Yesterday I tried a new version of a tool I didn’t know about. It is called GPS Cycle and it uses your built-in GPS receiver to track your position and draw a graph.

But the feature that I really like, is the ability to save your path into a file which can be read by applications such as Google Earth. This way you can review your tracking, if you go for a walk by foot or bicycle , or something like that.

If you enable the geo-referenced photographs in your phone, you can decorate your path with those pictures (with some additional work).

GPS Cycle is available at the XDA Developers Forum. You can enable the geo-referencing in your photos in HTC Diamond using  Diamond Tweak. (Other devices that have builtin GPS have similar tools that change some register keys).

Citizen Card based authentication @ IST

Today I was amazed to realize that my University systems allow you to use the new Portuguese Citizen Card!

I’m pretty sure that almost no one will use this feature, but it is a nice initiative to embrace this new authentication mechanism.