Tag Archives: cloud

Cloud Development for Community Projects

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How CloudShare has enabled me to contribute to SharePoint community projects

Until recently if you wanted to contribute to an open source or community-based software project in your spare / volunteer time it often meant having to build a full-scale software development environment on your home / personal computer, including substantial CPU cores / RAM / disk hardware and numerous software licenses, with a potential cost of thousands of dollars. Fortunately the recent rapid growth in cloud-based IaaS / PaaS offerings such as CloudShare, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to name but a few, has dramatically changed this situation. Now the software hobbyist or software engineering professional volunteering their time can contribute to nearly any project with no more equipment than a modern web browser.

These cloud-based IaaS / PaaS offerings are a huge boon especially for community projects targeting enterprise software systems such as Microsoft SharePoint Server and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Both SharePoint Server 2013 and the upcoming 2016 versions have hardware requirements that generally exceeded the specs of most home office computer equipment, for example a single server farm with all services requires 24GB RAM. Furthermore, when your focus is on rapidly enhancing a community project then the time and effort to install, configure, tune, and patch server software such as the operating system, database server, and SharePoint Server is an overhead cost that does not directly advance the project.

Why CloudShare?

Two important consideration when I’m volunteering my spare time on an open source or community project are:

  • Ready availability of a pre-configured virtual machine suited to the community project’s technology stack – so I don’t have to spend hours or days building up a standard development environment before I can even begin making my volunteer contribution
  • Rapid provisioning and resumption of the virtual machine – which allows me to eke out useful contributions in spare moments of 20-30 minutes at a time

For my cloud-based custom software development platform I chose the CloudShare Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) product because it offers the best fit for me as an independent software developer.

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Presenting at the Ottawa IT Community on Thu, Nov 7 at 5:45pm

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Come out to hear me present at the Ottawa IT Community on Thursday, November 7th at 5:45pm on the topic of “Cloud-based development for .NET / SharePoint using CloudShare and Team Foundation Service.”

Cloud-based developer environments are a hot topic these days. Why bother hosting, managing and licensing dev project VMs and software yourself when they are often only required for a few months. Explore the possibilities with CloudShare for your .NET / SharePoint development environment and Team Foundation Service for your TFS infrastructure.

CloudShare is offering a door prize for this event: a free one (1) year subscription for an 8GB environment. Be sure to attend for your chance to win.

The presentation will take place at the Microsoft Canada office in Ottawa at 100 Queen Street, Suite 500.

Presenting at the Microsoft Federal SharePoint User Group in Ottawa on Tue, Sept 24 at 5pm

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Come out to hear me present at the Microsoft Federal SharePoint User Group in Ottawa this coming Tuesday, September 24 at 5pm on the topic of “Cloud-based development for SharePoint / .NET using CloudShare and Team Foundation Service.”

Cloud-based platform and software environments are a hot topic these days. Why bother hosting, managing and licensing VMs and software for your development projects and test labs when the VMs are often only required for a few months or a year. Explore the possibilities with CloudShare for your SharePoint 2013 development environment and tools and Team Foundation Service for your source control and ALM infrastructure. We will examine the types of environments and virtual machine templates available and how to create your own custom templates. We will demonstrate how to spin up, configure and manage a SharePoint 2013 development virtual machine, and how to collaborate in a team environment, both with active collaborators who fully control the SharePoint VM and more passive collaborators who are sent their own private snapshot of the SharePoint VM.

The presentation will take place at the Microsoft Canada office in Ottawa at 100 Queen Street, Suite 500. Refreshments and pizza will be provided.