• Anders Hejlsberg: Technical Fellow, Developer Divisions, Microsoft
• Anil Dash: CEO & Co-founder, ThinkUp
• Ben Huh: CEO and Founder, The Cheezburger Network
• Bill Gates: Co-founder, Microsoft
• Jeff Atwood: Co-founder, Stack Exchange
• Larry Osterman: Principal Software Design Engineer Windows Runtime Experience Team, Microsoft
• LaSean Smith: Sr. Engagement Manager, Deloitte Digital 
• Matt Mullenweg: Co-founder, WordPress
• Michah Baldwin: CEO, Graphicaly
• Nancy Phan: Director of Mobile Product Management, StumbleUpon
• Nolan Bushnell: Founder, Atari, Inc.
• Tim O'Reilly: CEO and Founder, O'Reilly Media
• Tod Semple: Developer, Plants vs. Zombies
• Tracey Trewin: Partner Director, Developer Division, Microsoft
• Sebastian Thrun: CEO, Udacity

In this episode, Cory talks with Doug Mahugh of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. about a recent release of the Windows Azure Storage for WordPress Plugin. Windows Azure Storage for WordPress is an open source plugin that enables your WordPress site to store media files to Windows Azure Storage.

Reference Links

• Windows Azure Storage Plugin for WordPress Updated! by Brian Swan
• Windows Azure Storage plugin for WordPress by Doug Mahugh
• Update Released: Windows Azure Storage Plugin for WordPress by Cory Fowler

Mentioned Links

• Interoperability Bridges
• Cloudant Data Layer for Windows Azure
• Windows Azure SDK for PHP

In Morten's words:  "I am building a garden just for me and my clients...I control it...but the security and management of the garden is run by a very large company...they also will make sure that it works!"

Read Morten's blog on http://www.designisphilosophy.com and find him on Twitter @Mor10

Enjoy!
Craig Kitterman
Twitter: @craigkitterman
http://craig.kitterman.net

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. The Web PI also makes it easy to install and run the most popular free web applications for blogging, content management and more with the built-in Windows Web Application Gallery.

This video introduces the advantages of the WebPI and explains how easy it is to install and deploy the Microsoft Web Platform.

The move to WordPress

Keeping Windows Phone 7 FAST

Archiving Tweets

Is that you, Mr Gates?

A second life for SecondLife?

If you’re an existing Windows Live Spaces user, there’s no need to panic! You have six months to make the move over to your new home, and you’ll find tons of support available to help you get there as well as migration tools which will make the move as easy as possible.

I’m sure you’re keen to check out what your new site will look like at Wordpress, but with six months to make the move, why not take some time out to revamp your blog?

One of the great things about Wordpress.com is that there’s a huge population of developers out there creating beautiful themes, and awesome widgets and plugins which extend the features of the core platform – many of which can be used with free Wordpress.com accounts as well as self hosted blogs.

Before pushing the button to migrate, check out some of my favourite features:

1. Wordpress Themes & CSS Editing
   You’ll find over 75 free themes available to radically change the design of your blog. You can change colour palettes, switch between single and multi-column layouts and insert custom header images to truly personalise your blog. If you’re a dab hand with CSS (or want to learn through experimentation), then you can tweak your design to your heart’s content (via an upgrade).
   
   
2. Sidebar Widgets
   Developers have been busy creating hundreds of sidebar widgets for Wordpress, which can be dragged and dropped into your blog’s sidebar to add new features. Photo sideshows, video players, Twitter feeds and a whole lot more are available to add content into your blog.
   
   
3. Works Well With Windows Live Writer
   If you’re yet to discover Windows Live Writer, then this is your opportunity to check it out. WLW is a fantastic post creation and editing tool that allows you to write your posts offline, add images, embed videos, tags and set categories before uploading and publishing live to your blog when you’re ready. Check out Windows Live Writer’s Plugin Gallery too for hundreds of additional features from the developer community. Windows Live Writer is freely available as part of the Windows Live Essentials Suite, and once configured with your Wordpress.com account details will quickly become your best friend. Find out more about plans to integrate Wordpress.com into Windows Live Writer.
   
   
4. Spam Canned
   Blog spam can very quickly turn the fun of writing a blog into an administrative nightmare. Fortunately, Wordpress.com’s Akismet feature blocks spammers from leaving comments and trackback spam on your blog.
    
5. A Fresh Start
   Having moved my own blog a few times, I’ve found it gives you the opportunity to step back, have a good think about your writing, and make a few changes and improvements. Migrating to Wordpress may provide the impetus to take your blog in a whole new direction, or simply make a few tweaks here and there. 

Once you’ve found your feet with Wordpress.com, you may want to go the extra step and host your blog on your own server. Wordpress runs on Windows, courtesy of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, which will install key components such as Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer. If you’re running  IIS with SQL Server or SQL Azure, there’s a patch available to get Wordpress working with your setup too.

Have fun creating your new blog at Wordpress.com.

Web designers and developers can customise how their site looks when dragged to the taskbar, including the icon used, custom colours to be used for IE9’s forward and back button, and coolest of all, your own jump list with links to various areas of your site, which appears when the user right clicks on the taskbar icon.

It’s easy to configure IE9 customisation settings for your site by inserting a few lines of code in your header. For example, here’s the code used here at Channel 9 to configure the taskbar icon and jump list links:

<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Coffeehouse;action-uri=/forums/coffeehouse;icon-uri=/styles/images/favicon.ico"/>
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Browse All Content;action-uri=/Browse;icon-uri=/styles/images/favicon.ico"/>
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Shows;action-uri=/Browse/Shows;icon-uri=/styles/images/favicon.ico"/>
<link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon" href="/styles/images/favicon.ico"/>

For more on IE9’s customisation options, check out MSDN. If you’re running a Wordpress site and you’re feeling a little lazy (I’ve got my hand up here), a new plugin is available which makes life even easier.IE9 Pinned Site allows you to configure IE9’s customisation settings in Wordpress’ admin area, and will slot in the code for you.

Pinned Sites is just one of a swathe of new features available in IE9 – whether you’re a browser, writer, site admin or developer, make sure you check it out.

For example, a tag using several of the options would look like this:

[sl-bingmaps background="transparent" width="100%" height="300" NavigationVisibility="1" CopyrightVisibility="1" LogoVisibility="1" ScaleVisibility="1" ZoomLevel="5" Mode="Aerial" StartLocation="48.8756271_2.3493838" Pushpin="48.8756271_2.3493838" Culture="fr_FR"]

or:

[sl-bingmaps background="transparent" width="100%" height="400" NavigationVisibility="1" CopyrightVisibility="1" LogoVisibility="1" ScaleVisibility="1" ZoomLevel="17" Mode="Aerial" StartLocation="51.50809105417733_-0.07589511573314667" Culture="en-GB"]</p>

In order to use this plugin, you’ll need to first create a Bing Maps Key here. For further instructions, check out Kebeck’s post.

“You can create dynamic maps that allow your visitors to pan and zoom, or static maps that don't have those features,” it reads. You can choose from Road maps, Aerial maps, Aerial maps showing the road labels, or a 3D Birdseye map.

To use the plugin, you just add a shortcode to your post like this, for example:

[bingMap location="Buenos Aires, Argentina" zoom="13"]

Or a more complex shortcode using all the available attributes may look like this:

[bingMap location=”Seattle, WA” width=”250” height"=”250” title=”Bing Maps Rocks” type=”dynamic” maptype=”AerialWithLabels” zoom=”15” pp1=”Seattle, WA”]

To use the plugin, you’ll first need a free Bing Maps Key. Then you can download and install the plugin from here.

The site offers helpful articles about using themes, plugins and Windows Live Writer to compose posts, a link to support forums and a great article about why the bleep (yes, that’s what it says) Microsoft is doing this.

To get started with Wordpress on SQL Server or SQL Azure, you need to download the SQL Server distro or patch. Then you can check out the Getting Started page to get everything properly set up.

The first plugin lets you easily change the title and tagline of your blog (by default, it reads “Just another Wordpress.com weblog”). While that’s handy, the coolest part about this plugin is that it integrates with Twitter so you can use your current Twitter status as the blog’s tagline. Only status messages that are not @replies or those that contain links will be used.

The second plugin is designed to help you manage blog comments from within Windows Live Writer. Comments are categorized as “New,” “Approved,” and “Spam.” New comments are those awaiting moderation. Below each comment listed in this view, you can click links to approve, spam, or delete the comment as desired. You can also click to view the blog post in case you want to respond to the commenter on your site.

The third and final plugin is a bit more complex. It lets you add custom fields to your blog. In Brandon’s example he has added fields like City, Language, Mood, and Music. After the initial setup, the dialog box will show the custom fields across the top as links you can click on. From that point forward, every time you publish via WLW, you can select from the available custom fields and include them in your blog post.

All three plugins are available for download here.  Developers can also access the source code here. And if you haven’t installed Window Live Writer yet, you can download it from here.

Using the officially listed plugin’s code as a base (and giving proper credit), Tim created a new and updated version of the plugin.

With this plugin installed, you can input into your post data the following:

1: [silverlight: <app>, <width>, <height>, <initParams>, <minVer>]

Where:

• app is the URI to your Silverlight application (XAP)
• width/height is obvious
• initParams will map to the initParams of your application
• minVer maps to the minRuntimeVersion required for your app

The only parameter required is <app> and all others are optional and have defaults which you can change via the plugin settings:

The plugin is now listed in the official WordPress plugins directory – just search for “Silverlight.”

The Oxite platform supports all the blogging features you would expect including pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting, optional comment moderation, gravatar support, RSS feeds at any page level, and support for the MetaWebLog API. That last bit means that there’s no trouble integrating Oxite with Windows Live Writer, a must-have for any serious blogger.

Oxite is also more than just a simple blogging tool – it’s a true content management system. You don’t have to create blog posts with this platform, you can instead use it to create pages and even child pages. It also easily supports multiple blogs on one site as well as the ability to keep separate sites’ data in one database.

Oxite is currently available as an alpha release and is licensed under the OSI-approved Microsoft Public License. To see how Oxite works, check out the Channel 9 video. To play with the source code and help contribute to the project, click here.

To enable tags in WLW, do the following:

1. Download the latest version of Windows Live Writer.
2. Download the File wlwmanifest.zip from Wordpress Trac.
3. Unzip and upload all the included files with directories into your blog' root directory.
4. Update or Add your Blog in WLW from the "Weblog" menu in WLW.
5. Re-open WLW and, at the bottom, you'll need to click on the double up-arrow to expand the rest of the menu, which is hidden. This menu gives you access to all the metadata for your post, and now the keywords tags (WP tags) are available for you to enter in comma-separated list.