Hege, my girlfriend, finally have a new site! Well, the site has actually been online for a couple of weeks now, and have been ready for almost a year! The site is a customized "Personal Web Page Starter Kit", with a blog module, a "chat box", a guestbook, and some cool Flickr! Integration. The site is available up on http://www.hege.rokenes.com/, so be sure to pay it a visit and drop her a note in the guestbook/chat box.
The Flickr! integration we've done is basically a mobile blog. When Hege takes a picture she can send it as an MMS message to her secret Flickr! e-mail address. All message received to this address is posted to her Flickr! site with a custom "mobile" tag. By using an RSS feed with all "mobile" tagged pictures, the XmlDataSource and the DataList control we managed to display mobile photos directly on her blog.
The reason it took so long to get the site online, was partly that we needed to get our virtual "personal project" server up and running on the new GreIT AS (my old company) server. Another "obstacle" was learning how to manage and deploy SQL 2005 databases.
Just before Christmas the SQL Servaer team released the "SQL Server Hosting Toolkit" on Codeplex. This toolkit consists of two major parts, a client side wizard and a server side Web Service. So you as an and user can install the toolkit and get a wizard that integrates nicely with all Visual Studio versions. The Wizard lets you generate both create and insert scripts for a database, and at the end of the wizard you can choose to save the file as a .SQL file and execute it your self, or you can choose to submit the query to a server running the "SQL Server Hosting Toolkit". The server part is a web service that accepts the SQL script and executes it against the server. This way hosting companies can offer their end users an easy way to upload both schema and data with out opening ports in the firewall.
My personal experience with the SQL Server Hosting Toolkit have been great. The script executed perfectly against the server database, and all the data (including binary data) was inserted as expected. If you want to learn more about how you can use the toolkit Scott Guthrie has a good walkthrough.
Another interesting aspect of the toolkit is the licensing. The application is licensed under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL), one of Microsofts new licenses that's part of their shared source initiative. Microsoft currently have three licenses under this initiative:
The Ms-PL is the least restrictive license and let's you create derivatives of the code, change it, distribute it etc. For instance is the client side JavaScript libraries in Microsoft AJAX framework licensed under the Ms-PL license. Mono guru Miquel de Icaza have some comments on this over at his blog. Another important AJAX technology is the AJAX Control Toolkit, which is licensed under the Ms-CL license. This license let's you create derivative works, but if you distribute them in source form you have to distribute them under the Ms-CL license.
The Ms-RL is the most restrictive, which basically just lets you read the code for reference, but not compile or alter it in any way.
The second thing that makes the SQL Server Hosting Toolkit interesting is that it shows how Microsoft is becoming more agile in meeting customer and developer demands. Instead of backing this toolkit into the official SQL Server release cycle, and having us wait a long time to get the functionality, they release it as a separate open source project. The same can be said about Microsoft AJAX framework. They released a fully supported 1.0 release now, instead of waiting for Visual Studio Orcas.