On August 4th, I married the love of my life!

I’m currently in Canada with my very beautiful fiance getting decorations ready for our wedding on August 4, 2012 (this Saturday) at Palmer Park in Port Perry, Ontario. I’m so excited! Nervous to, but mostly excited! I love her so very much, and now she’ll be my wife  !

I’m migrating MySQL from a standalone instance to running on Rackspace’s Cloud Database product. This change will happen over time. Expect your site to be moved over. This does mean a host name change. Customers who need the new host name will get it. Username and passwords should be the same. You can access phpMyAdmin at the same place. Just choose “Reaktix Cloud – MySql 1″ for the new server, and “Reaktix Cloud   – Standalone” for the old server.

So today was my first day trying out Entity Framework’s Code First mechanism. I have to say, I actually like it. Some notes for other people getting started with it:

• The easiest way to get started is to use “convention over configuration”
• For entity classes, they should be a POCO. For your ID field, it should be the name of the class with “ID” appended. If the entity class is “TestEntity“, your ID field should be “TestEntityID“.
• When creating the DbSet<T> getting in your DbContext subclass, name the getter the same as the database table name. For instance, if your database table is named TestEntities, and it corresponds to the entity TestEntity, your getter should be something like public DbSet<TestEntity> TestEntities { get; set; }
• Name your DbContext subclass the same as your connectionString in your App.config / Web.config file. For instance, if your DbContext subclass is TestDataContext, name your connection string TestDataContext as well, for instance like: <add name=”TestDataContext” connectionString=”Data Source=.;Database=TestEntityFrameworkDatabase;Integrated Security=true;” providerName=”System.Data.SqlClient”/>

Makes it nice and easy. No other configuration needed in code or any config files. No database metadata files, etc…

All of the Linux Reaktix Cloud servers are now running Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Penguin.

Some highlights:

• Apache 2.2.22
• PHP 5.3.10
• MySQL 5.5.22
• phpMyAdmin 3.4.10.1

Our platform stack also includes Python 2.7, Ruby 1.9, and Mongo 2.0. Reaktix also has Windows Server 2008 R2 with .NET Framework 2.0 available. Interested in using our cloud hosting offering? Let us know! We’re a fully managed hosting provider, you just provide the content. We can even do the development for you as well.

It appears that Microsoft understands that people may be upset with the drastic changes coming in Windows 8. Today, Microsoft extended support of Windows 7 until the year 2020!

Reminder: Windows XP support ends in 2014.

So, it appears that Adobe is transitioning Flash from a tool used by web developers to a tool for app developers. With Adobe AIR, you can build from a single source code, an app that runs on the desktop, iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Blackberry Playbook, Windows 8 Metro, Android phone, etc…

Very few other technologies come close (.NET/Mono can be used to build it with mostly the same code base, with a different UI layer)

The future of app development will be interesting.

I’m now officially a MediaMind employee on their Rich Media team