I was on a 5 hour flight today from San Francisco to Charlotte, NC, and I noticed a couple of interesting changes to our world…

First out, this was a fairly modern aircraft, and I noted that the “No smoking” sign next to the “Fasten Seat Belts” sign was finally gone! It has been forbidden to smoke on airplanes for quite a long time now, (or to tamper with, disable or destroy the smoke detectors in the restrooms ;-) ), and I don’t see smoking making a big comeback any time soon, so I was wondering when they were going ...

Getting an absolute path from a relative one has been made very easy and pleasant by .NET. Just feed the relative path to the "Page.ResolveUrl" method and that's it!

One thing that was left out by .NET though is how to get an absolute URL from a relative path? With social networks on the rise, passing around your links has become more important than ever. There are many ways to do this, but all have their drawbacks. I will show you a static method that I use that solves just about all cases.

To get an absolute URL for your ...

 RIA Services provides a Authentication Domain Service template to use for enabling windows or forms authentication in your Silverlight application.  Most of the out-of-the-box setup works fine if your project has everything in a single assembly, but when building larger scale applications that may use a RIA Services Class Library, there are a few extra steps you'll need to take for everything to work correctly.

You'll know there is a problem finding your AuthenticationContext if you get this error:

The DomainContextType is null or invalid and there are no contexts generated from AuthenticationBase<T> 

If you are setting up your WebContext ...

I came across a neat Utility, codename Project Houston. It is a web based SQLAzure admin tool, that allows you to work with SqlAzure databases much as you would with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and regular SQL Server databases.

It is a CTP right now and can be found here: https://www.sqlazurelabs.com/houston.aspx. I found it pretty handy.

Houston, we do not have a problem!

In the midst of figuring out SqlAzure, I found a handy article showing how to export data from a regular SQL Server database into you SQLAzure database.

I had already created the SQLAzure DB, and the tables (I just generated scripts from my original database, and ran them from SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2008 RS (note, you need R2 to work with Azure), until they passed with no errors. I had to get rid of most of the options in the WITH statement, and the [PRIMARY] designations below:

CREATE  TABLE [dbo].[ConferenceInfos](
    [Id] [int]  IDENTITY(1,1)  NOT  NULL...

Today, we embarked on our journey into the Cloud, more specifically the Windows Azure Cloud. This journey goes hand in hand with our venture into the Mobile market. Mobile apps and Cloud services make a perfect match. The devices roam across the face of the planet, running a variety of Operating Systems, from the Apple iPhone and iPad devices in all their incarnations, to the slew of Android machines hitting the market, and now the upcoming Windows Phones.

Falafel Software is writing software for all these environments, and now we are also writing services for them as well. We will ...