Hello (cruel) World

Disclosure: I received a review copy of Programming Amazon EC2 from O’Reilly. I read somewhere that Programming Amazon EC2 is a title for people looking to adopt Amazon’s cloud platforms while avoiding a large amount of trial and error. I’ve been wanting to play around on this platform for a long time but have been a little intimidated by the myriad of terms and acronyms used to describe the available tools and configurations at my disposal. I fit firmly into the demographic that wants to get up and running with Amazon but doesn’t have the time to learn in this manner. The book is a pretty quick read and is packed full of useful information. Despite a couple of issues this is the de facto guide to Amazon’s web offerings and should (and will) act as a bible for anyone embarking on such a project. This book will undoubtedly save me countless hours in my future endeavors with these services and will pay for itself in no time. I highly recommend it. While this book had a far narro...

I’ve been excited to play around with IIS Express since Scott Guthrie’s announcement . I recently loaded up VS2010 SP1 and decided it was time to play around with IIS. The promise is wonderful – a  lightweight but rich version of IIS – including SSL, URL Rewrite, media support, etc. - that doesn’t require elevated privileges to run and can even run on Windows XP.  After installing IIS Express through the Web Platform Installer things went awry. From the reading I had done on the subject it seemed like the express version would be a quick and easy alternative to the full blown IIS, but unfortunately configuration is (right now) a bit of a PITA requiring IIS Express config file editing, net shell configuration changes and quite a bit of trial and error. I was expecting IIS Express to be a portable solution – but now see that it is going to be a bit of a pain to get configured how I like it when I move PCs or reimage my box. A certain amount of this is necessary due to the el...