Archives
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Reflecting on DrupalCon Denver
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Deploying Drupal at Scale on Microsoft Platform
I find that every conference I attend is a humbling experience. There are just so many knowledgeable people that I’m constantly reminded of how much I don’t know. The pre-conference training at DrupalCon Denver was no exception (and the real conference hadn’t even begun!). In the Deploying Drupal at Scale on Microsoft Platform training yesterday, Alessandro Pilotti delivered a densely packed training session that, once again, left me feeling humble. Alessandro’s breadth and depth of knowledge about running PHP applications on Windows (and Drupal in particular) is truly impressive.
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Azure Real World: Migrating Drupal from LAMP to Windows Azure
Last month, the Interoperability team at Microsoft highlighted work done to move the Screen Actors Guild Awards Drupal website from a Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) environment to the Windows Azure platform: SAG Awards Drupal Website Moves to Windows Azure. The move was the result of collaboration between SAG Awards engineers and engineers from Microsoft’s Interoperability Team and Customer Advisory Team (CAT). The move allowed the SAG Awards website to handle a sustained traffic spike during the SAG Awards show in January. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with some of the engineers who helped with the move. In this post I’ll describe the challenges and steps taken in moving the SAG Awards website from a LAMP environment to the Windows Azure platform.
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What is Microsoft Doing at DrupalCon Denver?
Microsoft will be at DrupalCon Denver next week, and I have the good fortune of being one of the Microsoft representatives that will be attending. The program looks great – it’s packed with great speakers and sessions, and there are lots of fun events planned. I’m excited about going for those reasons, but also because I’m curious about how this conference will be different than the last DrupalCon I attended (DrupalCon San Francisco, 2010). At that conference, I was frequently asked “What is Microsoft doing here?” You can read more about that in the post I wrote after the conference, What was Microsoft Doing at DrupalCon? (be sure to read the comments), but suffice it to say that I hope the fact that we will be at a Drupal conference (as a sponsor, no less) isn’t as surprising as it was then. And, because of that post, I’m going to Denver with great interest in the community reaction to us today. Essentially, I said that our commitment to Drupal would (and should) be judged by our continued involvement with and contributions to the community. Now that two years have passed since my last DrupalCon, I hope that our actions do speak to our continued involvement and contribution.
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What SQL Server 2012 Means for PHP Developers
Last week, Microsoft held a virtual conference to announce the availability of SQL Server 2012. The conference included a number of events (speakers, videos, training activities, etc.) that focused on the new functionality available in this release. Now that most of the fanfare has died down a bit, I’d like to take a look at what some of that new functionality means for PHP developers. Combined with the release of the Microsoft Driver for SQL Server for PHP, I think the SQL Server 2012 release makes some big improvements in developing PHP/SQL Server applications.