I know there’s been a whole bunch of discussion about whether ‘your data’ belongs out in the cloud and all that, and on that front I’m still undecided, but pushing processor intensive modules that act on small transient blocks of data sounds like the perfect test case for a cloud app. More on what that app is to be later.

In the mean time I was looking to find an easy way to get my files onto my Azure connected account’s blob storage. Enter Codeplex Space Block.

This app supports a whole bunch of cloud storage systems, but added Azure support after it’s major release. This means you need to use the link I posted above to download the latest commit, not the latest stable rellease (0.0.2.0).

I brought the app down for two reasons, firstly to get my files up onto the blob quickly and secondly to see a non-trivial example of accessing blob storage from C#.

Points to note:

• In the UI, the Account name is the azure sub-domain you used when creating the blob storage project. In the screenshot above this would have been ninepixels, taken from the URL http://ninepixels.blob.core.windows.net.
• The UI works very much like an ftp program, so no windows shell integration for drag and drop.

The thing I love about monotouch is that it lets me leverage my .Net Skills (not just c#, but how the .Net run time works) and marries it to the low-level iPhone development infrastructure. The hardest part about getting into iPhone development for me was Objective-C, and now I don’t need to go there.

Points to note:

• Obviously since interpretation is not allowed on the iPhone the guys at the mono project had to put together monotouch, which statically links the parts of the .net framework needed into each iPhone app.
• Monotouch is a payed for product.

Free for commercial and non-commercial use. A great idea for sites that heavily use jQuery or ASP.Net Ajax.

Basically it’s a PHP toolkit to get access to the data exposed by ADO.Net Data Services, which exposes data in a RESTful manner.

It obviously takes a performance hit (something like 5 times slower) but think of all the opportunities it opens up. I’m thinking mainly about Windows Phone development using Compact Framework and no longer needing the external Sqlite dll linkage (figuring out which one to use was a nightmare).

Miggie mentions using it in Silverlight apps, which is an awesome idea, or in medium trust ASP.Net servers. The Silverlight use will have to wait till they pull all the P/Invokes out of it, which doesn’t seem to be too far off, as is the possibility for some performance improvements by capitalising on the .Net Framework features instead of being a line-by-line port from C.

Quote from the announcement by Peter Galli at MS:

It is important to note that, under the Community Promise, anyone can freely implement these specifications with their technology, code, and solutions.You do not need to sign a license agreement, or otherwise communicate to Microsoft how you will implement the specifications.

The Promise applies to developers, distributors, and users of Covered Implementations without regard to the development model that created the implementations, the type of copyright licenses under which it is distributed, or the associated business model.

Under the Community Promise, Microsoft provides assurance that it will not assert its Necessary Claims against anyone who makes, uses, sells, offers for sale, imports, or distributes any Covered Implementation under any type of development or distribution model, including open-source licensing models such as the LGPL or GPL.

Full Community Promise over at Microsoft.

Note: as Miguel says in his post, mono implements a whole bunch of .Net technology above and beyond ECMA C# and CLI and those parts (ASP.Net ADO.Net etc) aren’t currently covered by this promise.