Kevin Hoffman

Cloud Hosting Journal on Ulitzer Yesterday a friend of mine was asking me what I've been doing lately in my spare time. When I mentioned that I'd been doing a lot of messing around with Windows Azure, he was naturally curious. After explaining what Azure is, he asked me what the difference was between Windows Azure, a cloud computing environment, and traditional web hosting scenarios. On a really high level, he's got a valid point : With Azure you can develop your application offline locally and then when you're done you can publish it to a remote host. To the casual observer, th... (more)

Does Google Translate Suck?

Before I get into the main part of the blog post, I want to preface this whole thing by saying that I am well aware of the problems of doing language translation by a machine. It's an inherently difficult problem. My issue here isn't so much with Google Translate as it is with the public perception of Google. I've read a few reviews of Google Translate and seen some blog posts. The genera... (more)

ViewState is the Froo-It of the Dev-Il

The other day I was running Microsoft's malicious software removal tool and, to my shock and horror, it did not remove all of my ASP.NET applications that make use of ViewState. I'm sure it's just an oversight and Microsoft will be releasing a patch for that soon... if there is one application that could be called malicious, it's an app that uses ViewState. Before I get into the rant prop... (more)

Live Framework Developers Get Boned

I was just flipping through my daily RSS feeds when I stumbled on a gem from the Live team, which you can read here . This is a fairly confusing post, but this is basically what I've been able to interpret from it: What we know as the Live Framework, that many of us have been developing with for nearly a year (bits released PDC 2008) will be disabled/deactivated/removed as of September 8t... (more)