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Last week I presented at Cloud and Grid Exchange 2010. I did an introduction to Windows Azure and a demo of Ruby on Rails running on Azure. My slides and links can be found here – but just spotted that the excellent Skills Matter folks have already published the video. Watch the video at http://skillsmatter.com/pod... P.S. I really need to shed a few pounds ...

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to learn about the new features in Visual Studio 2010. Check out the MSDN Events page and find out when the talented folks of the Developer & Evangelism group will be visiting your city to prove to you that /*Life Runs On Code*/. I’ll be attending the Raleigh event June 2, 2010 from 1:00 - 5:00 PM. North Carolina State University, Jane S. McKimmon Conference Center 1101 Gorman St Raleigh North Carolina 27606 United States From the Raleigh Event page: Event Overview ...

Tomorrow (Friday 23/4/2010) I am delivering a session at the Cloud Grid Exchange in London at SkillsMatter (A top training company and superb supporter of development communities). To be perfectly honest – I’m more interested in attending than presenting as the sessions and speaker line up look great. But in the middle of all that I will be doing the following (rather cheekily named) session: Looking at the Clouds through dirty Windows Many developers assume that the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform ...

The Chicago Architects Group will be holding its next meeting on May 18th. Please come and join us and get involved in our architect community. Register Presenter: Scott Seely Topic: Azure For Architects Location: TechNexus 200 S. Wacker Dr., Suite 1500 Room A/B Chicago, IL 60606 Time: 5:30 - Doors open at 5:00 del.icio.us Tags: Chicago Architects Group,Azure,Scott Seely ...

Just getting a few interesting cloud links “down on paper”. I last did one of these on Azure in Feb 20010. Cloud Links: Article on Debugging in the Cloud http://code.msdn.microsoft.... A sample app that demonstrates monitoring and automatically scaling an Azure application in response to dropping performance etc. Basically a console app that checks perf stats and then uses the Service Management API to spin up new instances when needed. Azure In Action book is imminent :) Running Memcached ...

Microsoft just released an example named Microsoft Townhall which was built and deployed on Azure. It uses ASP.NET MVC as its webiste framework and the SQL Azure plus LinqToSQL as its the database and the ORM framework. You can download the source code at the MSDN Code Gallery. Basides the Azure it might be more useful to us to learn how they utilized ASP.NET MVC. Just a very quickly review I found it utilized the Enterprise Library Unity as the main IoC container for controllers, services and repositories ...

Ever since we’ve been using Data we’ve been religious. Religious about the way we represent it and equally religious about the way we access it. Be it plain old SQL, DAO, ADO, ADO.Net and I am just referring to religions in MSFT world. A peek outside and I’d need a separate book to list out the Data faiths. Various application areas in networked computing are converging under the HTTP umbrella with a plausible transition to purist HTTP and in turn REST fuelled by the Web2.0 storm. It was time the ...

I intend to pull together a FREE eBook on the Windows Azure Platform – but I need your help to make it rock! If you have detailed experience of any aspect of the Windows Azure Platform and can spare a few hours of time to turn that into a short article (400 to 800 words) then please get in touch. This is not a big commitment but my suspicion is the end result will make for a cracking good read. I am hoping for a mix – everything from lessons learnt from early adopters to introductions to elements ...

Ah! When you shoot yourself in the foot... a few times... it hurts! That's what I did on Sunday, to learn more about the behavior of the SQL Azure Denial Of Service prevention feature. This article is a short follow up to my last post on this feature. In this post, I will outline some of the lessons learned that were the result of testing the behavior of SQL Azure from two machines. From the standpoint of SQL Azure, they look like one machine since they are behind a NAT. All logins affected The first ...

Alex (http://simpleisbest.co.uk/) does a very good job in covering the new features of .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. His focus is on the developers that have experience in development using previous versions of Visual Studio, more specifically Visual Studio 2008. The following are my views towards his book. 1. Scope / Coverage Even as the book is labeled as introduction, it is covers a broad spectrum of technologies, features and references that are focused into helping a developer quickly decide ...

[Suggested twitter tag #selfpacedazure] We (myself and David Gristwood) have been working in the UK to create a fantastic opportunity to get yourself up to speed on the Windows Azure Platform over a 6 week period starting May 10th – without ever needing to leave the comfort of your home/office. The course is derived from the internal training Microsoft gives on Azure which is both fun and challenging in equal parts – and we felt was just too good to keep to ourselves! We will be releasing more details ...

Thanks to everyone who could make it to what turned out to be an excellent SBUG event. First some thanks to: Speakers: Anthony Cooper and Elton Stoneman Host: The various people at Hitachi who helped to organise and arrange the venue. Session 1 - Getting up and running with Windows Mobile and the Windows Azure Service Bus In this session Anthony discussed some considerations for using Windows Mobile and the Windows Azure Service Bus from a real-world project which Hitachi have been working on with ...

I just got back from the JumpIn Camp in fantastic Zurich, Switzerland. I’ll blog about that whole experience shortly. In the meantime, however, I thought I’d get some resources out here that would have been useful last week. Specifically in this post, I thought I’d tackle the Windows Azure 4 Eclipse tooling setup. There are two major things that we need to do. First is to get the » read more ...

Since I decided to understand in more depth how SQL Azure works I started to dig into its performance characteristics. So I decided to write an application that allows me to put SQL Azure to the test and compare results with a local SQL Server database. One of the options I added is the ability to issue the same command on multiple threads to get certain performance metrics. That's when I stumbled on an interesting security feature of SQL Azure: its Denial of Service (DoS) detection engine. What ...

Microsoft TechEd 2010 - Day 3 @ Bangalore Sorry for my delayed post on day 3 because I had to travel from Blore to Chennai So I couldnt write for the past two days. On day 3 as usual we had lot of simultaneous tracks on various sessions. This day I choose the Your Data, Our Platform Track. It had sessions on the following 5 topics : Developing Data-tier Applications in Visual Studio 2010 - by Sanjay Nagamangalam SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance - by Vinod Kumar ...

Just knew from Wang Tao that Microsoft will launch the Web Camp event in many cities to share their technologies and experience on web application building. The topics of this Web Camps would focus on ASP.NET, jQuery and Entity Frameworks and how to build a cool web application based on them which I’m very interesting. And another reason is that, it’s FREE. Please have the detail information and register at http://www.webcamps.ms/, which is built on Windows Azure. And the speaker in Beijing would ...

[I will do some longer posts around my sessions when I get back from holiday next week] Big thanks to all those who attended my 3 sessions at TechDays this week (April 13th and 14th, 2010). I really enjoyed both days and watched some great session – my personal fave being the Silverlight/Expression session by my friend and colleague Mike Taulty. The following links should help get you up and running on each of the technologies. Entity Framework 4 Entity Framework 4 Resources http://bit.ly/ef4resources ...

Great event : Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Launch @ Microsoft TechEd Blore I was really excited on attending the day 1 of Microsoft TechEd 2010 in Bangalore. This is the first Teched that am attending. The event was really fun filled with lot of knowledge sharing sessions and lots of goodies and gifts by the partners Initially the Event Started by Murthy's Session. He explained about the Developers relating to the 5 elements of nature (Pancha Boothaas) 1. Fire - Passion 2. Wave (Water) - Catch the ...

The Slalom Consulting San Francisco Custom Dev Challenge is live at www.slalomchallenge.com!!!!! Slalom Consulting employs world-class technical consultants who take on ground breaking projects. Please take the Slalom Custom Dev Challenge to see how you compare to the level of knowledge we look for in our technical consultants. The online quiz is focussed on General .NET at this time and will be growing to include other technical topics in the future. This application is written in C#, Silverlight ...

Last October I learnt my company wanted to put together a new blog/social networking policy. I decided that out of respect for my employer I wouldn’t blog until this was sorted out. This was perhaps was an easy decision to make as I was separating from my ex-wife at the time and frankly needed the time to concentrate on other things. So now the company has a brand new policy and I’m back into the dating game I thought I would blow off the cobwebs and get back to what I enjoy doing. First and foremost ...

In this Issue: Alan Mendelevich, Siyamand Ayubi, Rudi Grobler(-2-), Josh Smith, VinitYadav, and Dave Campbell. Shoutouts: Jordan Knight has a demo up of a project he did for DigiGirlz: DigiGirlz, Deep Zoom and Azure, hopefully we'll get source later :) Jeremy Likness has a must-read post on his Ten Reasons to use the Managed Extensibility Framework I put this on another post earlier, but if you want some desktop bling for WP7, Ozymandias has some: I Love Windows Phone Wallpaper If you're not going ...

Technorati Tags: Rituraj,Connectivity Issues with SQL Azure Troubleshooting SQL Azure Connectivity How to resolve some of the common connectivity error messages that you would see while connecting to SQL Azure A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the server. (Provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.) System.Data.SqlClient.SqlEx... Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation ...

Get cloud ready with Windows Azure The cloud is everywhere and here at Microsoft we’re flying high with our cloud computing release, Windows Azure. As most of you saw at the Professional Developers Conference, the reaction to Windows Azure has been nothing short of “wow” – and based on your feedback, we’ve organized this special, all-day Windows Azure Firestarter event to help you take full advantage of the cloud. Maybe you've already watched a webcast, attended a recent MSDN Event on the topic, ...

In Web Applications, we often come across requirement of sending and receiving emails through our application. So same can be for the applications hosted on Azure. So Do you want to send email from an application hosted on Azure? CloudMail is one of the possible answers. CloudMail is designed to provide a small, effective and reliable solution for sending email from the Azure platform directly addressing several problems that application developers face. Microsoft does not provide an SMTP Gateway ...

That fine chap http://twitter.com/serialseb is pulling together an interesting evening of fun on the Wednesday in London and I for one will definitely be there. Lots of goodness to learn about. If you are a .NET developer who still isn’t looking at Open Source, then the 14th is a great opportunity to see what you are missing out on. Current program: OpenRasta - A web application framework for .net An introduction to IoC with Castle Windsor FluentValidation, doing your validation in code CouchDB, ...

A big thanks to all who attended my two sessions on SQL Azure yesterday (29th March 2010). As promised, my slides and links from the session. SQL Azure Overview for Bizspark day View more presentations from Eric Nelson. Related Links: UK Azure Online Community – join today. UK Windows Azure Site Start working with Windows Azure SQL Azure maximum database size rises from 10GB to 50GB in June TCO and ROI calculator for Windows Azure SQL Azure Migration Wizard ...

Microsoft is continuing to make significant investments in Datacenter technology and is focused on solving issues such as long lead times, significant up-front costs and over capacity. Enter the world of modular Datacenters and ITPACs – IT Pre-Assembled Components. In simple terms – air handling and IT units which are pre-assembled (looking somewhat like a container) and then installed on concrete bases. Each unit can hold between 400 and 2500 servers (which means many more virtual machines depending ...

Enterprise Library popularly known as EntLib is a collection of Application Blocks targeted at managing oft needed redundant tasks in enterprise development, like Logging, Caching, Validation, Cryptography etc. Entlib currently exposes 9 application blocks: Caching Application Block Cryptography Application Block Data Access Application Block Exception Handling Application Block Logging Application Block Policy Injection Application Block Security Application Block Validation Application Block Unity ...

Going through a VS 2010 IDE Features. We will explore each feature in subsequent posts. The post are documented as being reviewed by me. Breakpoint Labeling Breakpoint Searching Breakpoint Import/Export Dynamic Data Tooling WPF Tree Visualizer Call Hierarchy Improved WPF Tooling Historical Debugging Mini-Dump Debugging Quick Search Better Multi-Monitor Support Highlight References Parallel Stacks Window Parallel Tasks Window Document Map Margin Generate from Usage Concurrency Profiler Inline Call ...

The process to add an HTTPS endpoint is a 3 step process. Configure the endpoint Upload the certificate to the Cloud Configure the SSL certificate (and then point the endpoint to that certificate) Reference – http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/... - Ritesh Technorati Tags: Ritesh,Windows Azure,Endpoints,https ...

Technorati Tags: windows azure,roles,stuck,initializ... If you have worked on Windows Azure you are bound to have faced this gnawing and dreaded issue – Your Web/Worker role goes from ‘initializing’ to ‘busy’ to ‘stopping’ but refuses to get ‘ready’. For those of us who have resorted to merciless desktop vandalism over this, there is still hope. In his post MSFT’s Toddy Mladenov summarizes few plausible reasons for this - 1. Missing runtime dependencies (DLLs) 2. Incorrect platform ...

[Did I overdo the use of FREE in the title? :-)] April 12th to 16th is Microsoft Tech Days – 5 days of sessions on Visual Studio 2010 through to Windows Phone 7 Series. Many of these days are now full (Tip - Thursday still has room if rich client applications is your thing) but the good news is the development community in the UK has pulled together an awesome series of “fringe events” during April in London and elsewhere in the UK. There are sessions on Silverlight, SQL Server 2008 R2, Sharepoint ...

This past Thursday, Microsoft announced that Windows (7) Virtual PC (WVPC) and its XP Mode feature would no longer require hardware assisted virtualization (HAV). That means any PC running Windows 7 Pro, or higher, can now run this software. And that’s a great thing because, as I noted in a post almost five month ago, determining whether a given PC you might be planning to buy actually offers HAV can be extremely difficult. That meant even dedicated, sophisticated PC users, with a budget for new ...

Sorry for the rather lengthy post here. I get asked this all the time so I decided to post it…Visual Studio 2010 editions will be available on April 12, 2010. Product Features Professional with MSDN Essentials Professional with MSDN Premium with MSDN Ultimate with MSDN Test Professional with MSDN Debugging and Diagnostics IntelliTrace (Historical Debugger) Static Code Analysis Code Metrics Profiling Debugger Testing Tools Unit Testing Code Coverage Test Impact Analysis Coded UI Test Web Performance ...

Interested in getting up to speed on Windows Azure? Then check out this FREE boot camp, all across the US this spring. What is a Windows Azure Boot Camp? Windows Azure Boot Camp is a two day deep dive class to get you up to speed on developing for Windows Azure. The class includes a trainer with deep real world experience with Azure, as well as a series of labs so you can practice what you just learned. ABC is more than just a class, it is also an event in a box. If you don't see a class near you, ...

I just heard that we still have spaces for this event happening next week (29th March 2010). Whilst the event is designed for start-ups, I’m sure nobody would notice if you snuck in :-) Just keep it to yourself ;-) Register using invitation code: 79F2AB. Hope to see you there. The agenda is looking pretty swish: 09:00 – 09:30 Registration 09:30 - 10:15 Keynote ‘I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now....’– John Taysom, Active Seed Investor 10:15 - 10:45 The Microsoft Vision for Cloud Computing ...

At QCon in March we had a sample Azure application implemented in both Java and Ruby to demonstrate that the Windows Azure Platform is not just about .NET. The following is an interesting interview with Rob Blackwell, the R&D director of the partner who implemented the application. UK Interoperability Team Interviews Rob Blackwell, R&D Director at Active Web Solutions. Is Microsoft taking interoperability seriously? Yes. In the past, I think Microsoft has, quite rightly come in for criticism, ...

At QCon in March we had a booth focused on interoperability out of which came the idea to create an application implemented in both Java and Ruby on Rails, running on top of the Windows Azure Platform. Nothing fancy, just an application to capture attendees view on Microsoft and Interoperability. It was implemented by Active Web Solutions, long time fans of Azure. Wroth a quick squint :-) Check out the related links below for info to get you up and running. Check out The Java version http://ukinterop.cloudapp.net/ ...

Coming to Kansas City April 8th and 9th is the Microsoft Azure Bootcamp. This event looks very promising for those developers who are looking into Azure for themselves or their companies. It covers the wide range of topics required to understand what Azure really is and is not. Space is limited so if you are considering Azure, register for this event today.Agenda:Module 1: Introduction to cloud computer and AzureHow it worksKey ScenariosThe development environment and SDKModule 2: Using Web RolesBasic ...

The 3 differences are: References to the Windows Azure specific assemblies: Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diag... Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Serv... and Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Stor... Bootstrap code in the WebRole.cs/vb file that starts the DiagnosticMonitor as well as defines a default behavior of recycling the role when a configuration setting change occurs. The addition of a trace listener in the web.config file: Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diag... Amit Technorati ...

ArtinSoft and Gizmox are now offering a revolutionary solution to address need of Migrating VB 6.0 application to Web and further to Azure. With ArtinSoft’s vast migration experience performing Visual Basic 6.0 migration projects, and Gizmox’ cutting-edge Visual WebGui platform, you can now upgrade your VB6 code not only to the .NET Platform, but straight to web-based cutting edge technology using ASP.NET Ajax and Silverlight. How to does it works: Geeta Technorati Tags: VB 6.0,Gizmox,Geeta ...

ASP.NET MVC 2 Features ASP.NET MVC 2 adds a bunch of new capabilities and features. Some of the new features and capabilities include: § New Strongly Typed HTML Helpers § Enhanced Model Validation support across both server and client § Auto-Scaffold UI Helpers with Template Customization § Support for splitting up large applications into ‘Areas’ § Asynchronous Controllers support that enables long running tasks in parallel § Support for rendering sub-sections of a page/site using Html.RenderAction ...

Message Buffer is WCF queue in the cloud (although currently it does not provide all features of WCF queue). With on-premise WCF, you can take advantage of MSMQ, so that a message is sent to MSMQ by one endpoint, and another endpoint can get the message in a later time. The message is usually a SOAP message so that you can generate a client proxy and invoke the service operations just as invoking a normal WCF operation. Message Buffer is similar, but it also provides a REST API for you to work with ...

A neat trick on how to measure your database size in SQL Azure. Here are the exact queries you can run to do it: Select Sum (reserved_page_count) * 8.0 / 1024 From sys.dm_db_partition_stats GO Select sys.objects.name, sum (reserved_page_count) * 8.0 / 1024 From sys.dm_db_partition_stats, sys.objects Where sys.dm_db_partition_stats.o... = sys.objects.object_id Group by sys.objects.name The first one will give you the size of your database in MB and the second one will do the same, but break it ...

From now on, you only have to download the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio and the SDK will be installed as part of that package. What’s new in Windows Azure SDK Support for developing Managed Full Trust applications. It also provides support for Native Code via PInvokes and spawning native processes. Support for developing FastCGI applications, including support for rewrite rules via URL Rewrite Module. Improved support for the integration of development storage with Visual Studio, ...

Sometimes there may arise a need to match an instance one is watching in the Development Fabric UI back to its process. The following blog post explains the process to do the same: http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/... Tinu Technorati Tags: Tinu ...

As we all know, there are a number of ways you can connect to your SQL Azure Database. One of the quick options is to try to connect to SQL server is SQLCMD. To start the SQLCMD utility and connect to a named instance of SQL Server Open a Command Prompt window, and type sqlcmd -S myServer\instanceName. Replace myServer\instanceName with the name of the computer and the instance of SQL Server that you want to connect to. Press ENTER. The sqlcmd prompt (1>) indicates that you are connected to the ...

LinqPad as we all know has been a wonderful tool for running ad-hoc queries. With Azure Table storage in picture LinqPad was no longer in picture and we shifted focus to Cloud Storage Studio only to realize the limited and strange querying capabilities of CSS. With some tweaking to Linqpad we can get the comfortable old shoe of ad-hoc queries with LinqPad in the Azure Table storage. Steps: 1. Start LinqPad 2. Right Click in the query window and select “Query Properties” 3. In The Additional References ...