Microsoft Hellas is holding a very interesting event in two weeks, on Thursday 12th of May, regarding application testing.

If you are interested to learn how to load test your application, how to use lab management using Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server then harry up and register.

As you probably can see I’ve decided to spent a little time renewing my blog. So there are a couple of things that changed.

First I’ve upgraded the engine version to Subtext 2.5.2. This wasn’t painless, my blog engine was pretty old and the migration steps seemed to fail. I didn’t want to loose my data though and thus I persisted and managed with a couple of tricks to finally move my data to the new engine.

Second, the blog is now hosted on a different server. I wanted to move to a server on which I would have more control to do things. So I’ve moved to a dedicated machine where I can VPN/RDP on.

Last but not least, I’ve changed my blog theme to a new one to give my blog a fresh view. The theme was picked up from the Subtext Skin Bonanza 2011 project.

So let me know if you have any problems and drop my a line and let me know what do you think of my new skin.

If you ever created a professional website/application you’ll probably know the value (you’ve probably learned it the hard way as I did ) of stress testing your web applications.

There are plenty of tools you can use in order to stress test your web site, ranging from Microsoft Visual Studio to CMD Line tools. Yesterday I found another one StresStimulus.

StresStimulus is an extension for Fiddler (an awesome and free web debugging proxy) which enables us to create instant load tests with virtual users.

You can record a browser activity (like creating a user), replay it under concurrent load and get the results for the performance of web pages and the entire test.

If you prefer a simple but powerful tool this one is for you.

Yesterday I presented a 200 level session on Windows Azure over Live Meeting. This was the first of a three part series of Live Meetings regarding Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform.

The session covered all of the fundamentals of Cloud Computing, the different types of cloud computing services (IAAS, PAAS, SAAS), and then went on discussing the Windows Azure Platform taking a deeper look into the Windows Azure OS (Computation, Storage, Management) namely Windows Azure.

For those of you that missed it there will be a recording available soon at www.techdays.gr. till then you can download the slide deck I used from my SkyDrive folder.

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Register now here in order to catch for the second one next week.

I recently had a conversation with a client about the future of press and how digital magazines and newspapers are the future of the business. When we talked about that I had a few technologies in mind but nothing like Treesaver.

Treesaver is a JavaScript framework for creating magazine-style layouts that dynamically adapt to a wide variety of browsers and devices. Both content and design is shaped with standards-compliant HTML + CSS and no JavaScript programming is required.

It simply searches for the <article> tags and displays the content inside them, makes browsing them possible with prev-next buttons and auto-generates a "contents" menu.

The JavaScript is under 25K gzipped (pretty important for mobile) and works with most modern browsers (degrades gracefully for others).

Note to self: Keep that in mind, it might come handy

If you’re developing a GPS enabled app for Windows Phone 7 you will surely appreciate the Windows GPS Emulator application.

The Windows Phone GPS Emulator consists of a small WPF application and a WP7 DLL and allows you to create complex paths that you can play back just as if you were driving or walking. With it you can debug your application on the emulator or a real device without leaving the comfort of your home or office.

Once you’ve completed your testing and debugging, you only need to change a single line of code to switch the device back to real GPS.

The download includes:

• The Windows GPS Emulator application
• The Windows Phone GPS Emulator Client DLL
• A simple Windows Phone Test client
• An end-to-end Windows Phone App using Bings maps (a more complex sample)

You can download it from APP HUB

Oh how I wish I had a WP7 phone…

When you work as a freelancer and are a father of two young boys it’s almost impossible finding a place at home where you can concentrate and work. So most of the times you end up at some local Wi-Fi enabled coffee shop enjoying a cup of coffee while tapping code on the keyboard. But what happens if you want to meet and talk with a client?

So you can understand my excitement when I read about Joey’s discovery, Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar, a place in Toronto Canada where you can have a coffee and work or host a business meeting if you have to.

This got me searching through the internet to see if something similar was available in Greece and so that you know there’s actually a similar place in Athens Greece and it’s called coLabWorkspace.

Although this place has a different business model from a coffee shop (coffee is free but you’re charged by the hour) and although it’s pretty expensive (in a coffee shop you can order coffee and sit there for hours, while in coLab you pay by the hour) can be used for the same purpose as the place in Canada.

I just wish there were more places like that in Athens, cheaper and preferably near my place.

Have you seen this? Check it out on codeplex !!!

The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is a free, centralized code sample library provided by the Microsoft Community team. The goal is to provide typical code samples for all Microsoft development technologies.

The team listens to developers’ pains in MSDN forums, social media and various developer communities and write code samples based on developers’ frequently asked programming tasks. Additionally, there is a free code sample request service you could take advantage in order to request specific code.

Check out the video…

If you’ve started developing websites using HTML 5 you will surely like this.

W3C announced the official logo of HTML5 where you can insert into your HTML 5 built  websites.

Besides the HTML5 itself, there are also logos for the features and principles HTML5 is built around like semantics, offline and storage, CSS3 and more.

Other than the logos in multiple formats (including vector), there is an online badge builder provided where you can customize the icons to be used, select its orientation and get an embed code to start using instantly.

Today we celebrated the new year in a special community event held at Microsoft Offices. First we had our usual discussions looking back at the community activities and then went on discussing what we could do more in order to engage more with the community. Finally we cut two cakes and two lucky guys woke out with an XBOX 360 with Kinect (unfortunately I wasn’t one of them).

I was able to stream and record most of this event through my tablet’s 3G network connection. The quality isn’t the best due to the connection speed, still you can still get a glimpse of what went on, even if you couldn’t make it today.

Watch live video from techaholics on Justin.tv