We Octo Mule fanboys assisted at Mule Summit 2011 in Paris. The summit was quite confidential. This made the interactions with MuleSoft technical staff even richer. CTO and founder Ross Mason was here one more time. It was a pleasure to have such technical speakers. Last year we focused on Mule 3 new exchange architecture (FR). Meanwhile MuleSoft largely improved its ESB with new features. This year we will focus on what makes Mule ESB a reliable Enterprise solution.

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Since 2010, gamification has been a hot topic. Worshiped or hated, everybody talks about it. The subject has been discussed previously on our blog, from both a technical and a marketing point of view (read the articles: I’ll write code that writes code for food and Gamification: let’s play). Friendly reminder for those who have missed it: gamification is the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications. Its implementation results in increased loyalty and engagement from the users. In France we start talking about it but initiatives are scarce. The first one to cross my mind is MobExplore, which is generally described as “The French SCVNGR”. They both are mobile applications enabling to create scavengers or other types of games and challenges at specific places.

To understand what is really happening in the gamification’s world, we have to take a look on the American side and focus on the speakers, the providers and the skeptics.

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As the Apache Hadoop ecosystem grows while its core matures, there are now several companies providing business-class Hadoop distribution and services. While EMC, after it acquires Greenplum, seem the biggest player other companies such as Cloudera or MapR are also competing.

This article introduces Datastax Brisk, an innovative Hadoop distribution that leverage Apache Hive data warehouse infrastructure on top of an HDFS-compatible storage layer, based on Cassandra. Brisk try to reconcile real-time applications with low-latency requirement (OLTP) and big data analytics (OLAP) in one system. “Oh really ?”
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This article will describe how to make use of Azure Blob Storage in order to add an “electronic vault” functionality to your application. This post follows the first one which made the introduction to Azure and described how to deploy existing application to Azure. Let’s recall the architecture of the application and see the changes which will be made while adding the connection to Azure Blob Storage.

The application is already deployed to Azure, it is hosted by a Web Role and uses Azure SQL as its main data storage. Azure Blob Storage will be added to the application in order to create an “Electronic vault” for each user. Both the client as well as the server will have the possibility to interact with the Blob Storage.

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One of our latest  research and development projects has been an online banking application, which we use to demonstrate the latest tendencies in .NET development.

When it came to deployment, we could not find a suitable machine to publish the application. But wait, these days that’s not a problem any more. When you need to deploy a new application you can just publish it to the nearest cloud!

The choice obviously came to Azure platform. The question was just how painful the deployment will be? Will it take days before we adapt the application to run on the platform?

Actually the process of change was much more fluid than we thought and within an hour we were able to set up the necessary parts and run the application on the cloud.

But Azure offers much more than just a runtime platform for your web applications. It offers also several types of storage. One of these is Azure Blob storage.

And so after the painless deployment we thought: And what if we used Azure Blob storage to implement one of the new functionalities which was on our to-do list and which perfectly suites this kind of storage?

Hence this blog post which describes our experience with Azure and which will have two parts.
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This question is always flying around when you start with Test Driven Development (TDD). It can come from two different sources : either we didn’t followed it “by the book” – and it punished us, or we are trying to use TDD on an existing code. For both cases, you will have to rethink your design.
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This year, all the sessions of the main conference room (and thus all the keynotes) will be broadcasted in live on the website now !

You’ll have the choice to watch the sessions translated or not.

Please find below all the USI sessions that you can watch in live or not today and tomorrow:

June 28th:

• Simon Sinek’s Keynote
• The birth of a word, Deb Roy
• Military operations of the 21st century. Battle field digitisation, Henri Bentegeat
• Is our history written in advance? Feedback on the impact of demography on our society? Pierre Sabatier
• Ray Kurzweil’s Keynote
• Alexandre Dayon’s Keynote
• The end of relational data bases? Olivier Mallassi
• Juridic aspects of the Cloud Computing : learning to browse in safety, Benjamin May
• What kind of mobile strategy for companies? Jean-François Grang et Olivier Martin
• LinkedIn, Yassine Hinnach
• Wolfgang Von Rüden’s Keynote

June 29th:

• Michel Serres’s Keynote
• Beyond the “generation Y”, cutural diversity and its opportunities for companies, Benjamin Chaminade
• Is the scientific labour organization of the industrial era, applicable to the digital era? Vincent Lextrait
• André Compte-Sponville’s Keynote
• Stephen David’s Keynote
• Brain-computer interfaces, Dr Geoffrey Mackellar
• Connecting all the objects? Why? rafi Haladjan
• Pattie Maes’s Keynote

Live USI

There is one major flaw you must have encountered whilst working with Silverlight for a while: its incompatibility with unit tests! Unless you’ve been using Silverlight solely for drawing circles and rectangles, surely you must have tried to use the Silverlight Toolkit unit test project template to try to put some TDD in your project ! …most probably you were disappointed by it because it’s fairly poor…

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