Tag | Azure Posts
Devfish Joe Healy, Brian Hitney, and Herve Rogero presented excellent sessions on today's MSDN Tiki Hut Event about Cloud Computing and Azure. This was an developer focused event, starting out with an overview about structure and platform, followed by working code samples running on the platform, and all needed information to get developers started on development for cloud applications. Participants had Q&A opportunities after each session and made good use of it. I am sure that a lot of developers ...
When I get some time (and hell starts to look a little chilly) I would love to do a more detailed review. But I wanted to get something “out there” as I really like this book and reviews of it seem a little thin on the ground. In brief: Is it a good book? Yes Would I recommend this book to a .NET developer who was new to Ruby? Yes (This is me by the way) Would I recommend this book to a Ruby developer who was new to .NET ? Yes Would I recommend this book to a developer who sometimes does Ruby and ...
[You might want to also read other GuestPosts on my blog – or contribute one?] On the 26th and 27th of March (2010) myself and Edd Morgan of Microsoft will be popping along to the Scottish Ruby Conference. I dabble with Ruby and I am a huge fan whilst Edd is a “proper Ruby developer”. Hence I asked Edd if he was interested in creating a guest post or two for my blog on IronRuby. This is the second of those posts. If you should stumble across this post and happen to be attending the Scottish Ruby ...
LinqPad as we all know has been a wonderful tool for running ad-hoc queries. With Windows 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 Windows Azure Table storage. Steps: 1. Start LinqPad 2. Right Click in the query window and select “Query Properties” 3. In The ...
In Windows Azure platform there are 3 storage we can use to save our data on the cloud. They are the Table, Blob and Queue. Before the Chinese New Year Microsoft announced that Azure SDK 1.1 had been released and it supports a new type of storage – Drive, which allows us to operate NTFS files on the cloud. I will cover it in the coming few posts but now I would like to talk a bit about the Table Storage. Concept of Table Storage Service The most common development scenario is to retrieve, create, ...
One of the biggest questions I routinely get asked is how scalable Commerce Server is. Of course the text book answer is the product has been around for 10 years, powers some of the largest e-Commerce websites in the world, so it scales horizontally extremely well. One argument however though is what if you can't predict the growth of demand required of your Commerce Platform, or need the ability to scale up during busy seasons such as Christmas for a retail environment but are hesitant on maintaining ...
Today at the Unversity of Washington, Steve Ballmer gave a speech on Microsoft’s cloud strategy. Significantly, Azure was only briefly mentioned and was not shown. Instead, Ballmer spoke about what he called the five “dimensions” of the cloud, and used that as the basis for an almost philosophical discussion. Ballmer opined on how the cloud should be distinguished from the Internet.as well as what the cloud will and should enable. Ballmer worked hard to portray the cloud not as a challenger to Windows ...
An hour of small computing time: 0,12$ per hour A Gig of storage in the cloud: 0,15$ per hour 1 Gig of relational database using Azure SQL: 9,99$ per month A Visual Studio Professional with MSDN Premium account: 2500$ per year Winning an MSDN Professional account that comes preloaded with 750 free hours of Azure per month: PRICELESS !!! But was it really free???? Hmmm… Let’s see..... Here's a few things I learned regarding Azure billing policies when I attended a promotional training at Microsoft ...
While I’m playing with Windows Azure I found it’s a little bit hard to find the information about it since it’s new to us. When I was investigated the new CloudDrive feature I almost could not get anything about it except its SDK. Today I found a very good series of posts on ASP.NET community by Jeff Windmer. For now there are the frist 3 posts of his series but I believe he will continue and finish it. Please have a look on his blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/jeff... ...
When Windows Azure was first released in 2008 the only programming languages you could use were .NET languages such as Visual Basic and C# and the applications you built had to run in Partial Trust (Similar to ASP.NET Medium Trust). In the interim we have made a number of changes including allowing applications to run in full trust, native code is now supported (no longer had to be managed code such as C#) and we support FastCGI applications. Which means: Windows Azure supports the Internet Information ...
[UPDATED 10th March 2010: Edd produced a 2nd post on using IronRuby with WPF/.NET ] [You might want to also read other GuestPosts on my blog – or contribute one?] On the 26th and 27th of March (2010) myself and Edd Morgan of Microsoft will be popping along to the Scottish Ruby Conference. I dabble with Ruby and I am a huge fan whilst Edd is a “proper Ruby developer”. Hence I asked Edd if he was interested in creating a guest post for my blog on IronRuby. If you should stumble across this post and ...
On Saturday 35(ish) developers met up on rainy day in Birmingham to take part in an Open Space Code day on the Windows Azure Platform. Around 5 of us had experience of Open Space meetings or developing for Azure prior to the day – and I think only two of us had experience of both :-) As I was on point to keynote the day and make sure it was a success, I did turn up with a few concerns matched by a good deal of excitement. My primary concern was that people would expect to be trained – and the Open ...
I’m not 100% sure who first came up with idea of an Open Space Coding Day – but I first heard about it from Alan Dean back in mid 2009 and I‘m working on the assumption it was his idea. It is a good idea. Thank you Alan. On Saturday (27th Feb 2009) I was lucky enough to help deliver one. The day was themed on Azure but otherwise followed a fairly standard Open Space format. For the vast majority of folks present it was their first exposure to an Open Space format event. Wikipedia summarises the format ...
There came a news that the free developer account of azure had been expired end of Jan 2010 which means there’s no way to play with it for free. But I’m lucky that my location is not on their billing list which means I can use and try it till this June. So I think it should be better to explain a bit on how to deploy before it's withdrawn by Microsoft. As I had mentioned many times in the last 2 posts, deploying the azure application would be a little bit different. And I will continue using the ...
Last time we saw some interesting initialization constructs possible with LINQ. Hope some of you have tried it out. If not, it’s never too late. LinqPad is a good friend in need. This time around we’d take a look at two common looping scenarios. 1. Looking up an object by name: Object lookup is commonplace while dealing with collections. Let’s look for an object with a given name. Previously we’d run a for each and come up with something like. public MyObject FindByName(string value) { foreach (MyObject ...
A big thanks to everyone who came along last night (Feb 25th 2010) to the .NET Developer Network and to Guy for inviting me along and being a great host. I had lots of fun and enjoyed it being so interactive. As promised, some links relevant to the conversations during the evening and the many questions. I will also do a post on Monday summarising the many “limits” we discussed on instances, roles etc: New Windows Azure Platform online community in the UK – ning hosted community site for UK fans ...
Although the azure application will be running on the sky we still need to develop it on the ground since we would not be able to fly. In order to make it easy and simple to work with azure on local machine we need to download the Azure SDK firstly. Azure SDK extend Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 RC to enable the creation, configuration, building, debugging, running and packaging of scalable web applications and services on Windows Azure, and it includes all necessary assemblies which ...
The Windows Azure Platform includes a status dashboard as well as RSS feeds for individual services and regions. You get to see the current status: As well as the history of an individual service: As I’m based in the UK, I subscribe to the North Europe feeds for each of the services: AppFabric Access Control AppFabric Service Bus SQL Azure Database Windows Azure Compute Windows Azure Storage Related Links: UK Azure Online Community – join today. UK Windows Azure Site Start working with Windows Azure ...
I previously posted on when you get charged with Windows Azure as it is contrary to many folks expectations. Today (25th Feb 2010) I was pleased to see a new warning on the portal. Note that you only need to delete the deployment not the service. And to delete you must first stop it. Well done team. Related Links: UK Azure Online Community – join today. UK Windows Azure Site Start working with Windows Azure ...
Every so often I Wordle my delicious account to see “where I’m at”. This is a spookily accurate depiction of my online life at the moment :-) Therefore… Related Links: UK Azure Online Community – UK Online community for Azure fans http://www.eurogamer.net/ My favourite online fix for gaming news http://badcompanytwo.com/ My next Xbox 360 game – should keep me busy for many months http://bit.ly/ef4resources All the best Entity Framework resource links in one place :-) ...
To me Azure is a new technology but in fact it's not that new. In the PDC08 Microsoft announced that their cloud computing platform had been released with the name Azure, which stand for the color of the sky. I began to play with Azure recently and will post a series of blogs for what it is and how to use it. But first of all we'd better to understand what's Azure. If we went to the official website of Azure we can find the official definition. The Windows Azure platform offers a flexible, familiar ...
I am currently (Feb 2010) moving lots of Azure samples originally built in Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010 RC. I just realised there is a simple mistake folks can fall into. Easy to do, easy to avoid. When opening an Azure solution originally built in Visual Studio 2008 you will see the Conversion Wizard. Once you click Finish you will see this dialogue box with a default of Yes. Do not click Yes! Instead click No. The reason is simple. As of Feb 2010 the Windows Azure Fabric in Microsoft ...
Just a brief note about events where you can expect to see me over the next few months in the UK (and TBH this post will be helpful reminder to me!) February DotNetDevNet - Thursday 25th February 2010 – talking Windows Azure and SQL Azure Azure Open Space Coding Day Feb 27th – coding on Azure March Qcon London 2010 March 11th – manning the Interop stand CloudCamp London March 11th – just being nice to people :) Cloud Computing Congress March 16th – talking on Azure DevWeek March 17th and 18th – talking ...
While I was on holiday last week we announced Tech Days. Tech Days is shaping up to be something rather good. It is a week-long series of free events run by Microsoft and technical communities to “Celebrate and inspire developers, IT professionals and IT Managers to get more from Microsoft technology” You can attend for 1 day or all 5 days. You can just attend the developer days or mix it up with the IT Pro days. It is entirely up to you. I will be doing my bit delivering sessions on Azure, Entity ...
The process of solving a problem by reducing it into smaller versions of itself is called recursion. This problem solving technique can be a very powerful way to solve certain types of problems that would be very verbose and lengthy using other techniques such as an iterative approach. When implementing a recursive solution one usually has at least two cases: Base Case General Case For a function/method to be called recursive, it usually has a call to itself within its code in the general case, with ...
Cloud services such as Azure from Microsoft and Amazon’s Cloud Services have replaced Web 2.0 as the latest buzz word. It was enlightening to see how companies, including my own, are using these services. Chris did a wonderful job of explaining the evolution of the Amazon services and some of the alternatives that existing. It was also great to get a speaker in front of the group who isn’t from the Microsoft camp. Thanks to those who came out after meeting us at the MSDN Cloud Computing and Azure ...
On Monday 15th Feb 2010 I gave an overview session on Entity Framework 4 for the Developers Group. A big thanks to those who attended and asked great questions. My slide deck from the session: Entity Framework 4 In Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 View more presentations from ericnelson. A related set of screenshots from the demos I gave (or at least, a similar set of demos I did in Oct 2009): Dev305 Entity Framework 4 Emergency Slides View more presentations from ericnelson. Related Links: 101 EF4 Resources ...
Great to see the MSDN Flash Podcast I host has made it onto Zune.net – even if I can’t access it myself as I’m in the UK :-( However a US colleague pinged me about it and sent me the following. Looks rather grand :-) The latest episode was on Azure – and I’m thinking about spinning off a second podcast show just on Azure. Related Links: UK Azure Online Community – join today. UK Windows Azure Site Start working with Windows Azure ...
Today’s briefing by Microsoft on their re-booted mobile platform and strategy was very impressive. The prototype hardware they showed looked great and the UI was attractive, productive and unique; it was not an iPhone knock off. Microsoft seemingly brought to bear what it should have long ago: all the cool technologies and properties it already has. Zune, Office with OneNote, Outlook and Exchange, SharePoint, Xbox, Bing Search and Bing Maps all look to be represented and integrated elegantly, rather ...
As promised in the previous post, here is a first look on Visual Studio 2010 RC. i am sure many of you have downloaded the bits already so this is for those who are waiting yet. VS 2010 RC is an upgrade to the Beta 2 that was shipped last year. This build has been heavily focussed on implementing community feedback and fixing performance issues reported. The start up screen looks as below. A little darker compared to the Beta 2 build. You can read my earlier post on First look on Beta 2 here I didn’t ...
Just getting a few interesting cloud links “down on paper”. I last did one of these on Azure in Dec 2009. Not everyone seems to know that Roger Jennings does a rocking job of collating links on Azure – e.g. Sunday Feb 14th. Recommended read - Using SQL Server Client APIs with SQL Azure Version 1.0 Q&A: Looking Ahead at Microsoft's Cloud Strategy Tim O'Brien, director of Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group, discusses the future of Windows Azure, Silverlight, and developing with .NET. Getting MySQL ...
Context: My Windows Azure account is inaccessible since last morning (IST), its been 24 Hrs since I raised alarm with the support folks and its yet to be resolved. Rant: Now this is not a freebie account we are talking here, I am a Customer as well as a regular "Consumer". Have bills mounting 300$ +. Surprisingly another free account is there and the storage on that is running fine (Till 31st March). Now what have us poor paying folks done to receive such treatment? What about the SLA? I am being ...
If like me your are interested in Azure and want to use Visual Studio 2010, then you probably: Removed Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Installed the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (Which all worked great for me) And then tried to create a new Cloud Service and got this error: “Method not found: ‘System.Collections.Generic... No need to panic. Notice there are two project types – Cloud Service and Cloud. Click on Cloud and notice that there is another step to do – Enable Windows Azure ...
Brian has been busy looking at the integration capabilities of BizTalk, the ESB Toolkit 2.0 and the Windows Azure service bus. There are two webcasts looking at different aspects of this: Extending the Reach: Using a BizTalk Dynamic Send port to send to Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus Extending the Reach: Using a BizTalk ESB Off-ramp to send to Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus ...
I’m thrilled and honored to be doing another speaking tour through Europe. I’m getting to visit a number of countries that I haven’t visited before and some old favorites. I’ll be speaking on PHP, Ruby and other non .NET technologies on Azure. The talk that I’m going to be doing in most places is PHP/Ruby on Azure or Leveraging Azure with Non-Microsoft Languages. For the full abstract and the schedule for when I’ll be speaking where, please read my post at PHP/Ruby on Azure World Tour ...
Something a little different. No mentions of web roles, nodes or queues – but interesting nevertheless. Brad Smith gave Microsoft’s vision of cloud computing devoted to the economic success of Europe. The event was organized by E!Sharp in the Auditorium of the Museum of Art and History, in Brussels, on January 26th. Brad Smith is Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Microsoft Corporation. Brad gives a strong steer on our commitment to (amongst other things): First class Interop Supporting ...
Building on the Windows Azure Command Line Tools blog post, I thought we could kick it up a notch and get PHP running in Azure leveraging the command line tools. The primary thing that we need to do is to copy the PHP bits up with the rest of your deployment and configure the FastCGI handler to know where the PHP interpreter can be found. To see all the steps required, read my post at Hello World Azure in PHP ...
Joannes Vermorel of Lokad Forecasting is a Azure early adopter and a sincere patron ever since I've been lurking around the Azure forums. Always ready to help and come with innovative ideas to utilize Azure resources. Joannes yesterday has posted a long and very well compiled wish-list for the perfect Azure experience that he envisions. Why is this list important? Lokad in general and Joannes in particular shares my idea of a perfect cloud application. Forecasting requires sudden burst of compute ...
I am both a Google docs and Windows SkyDrive user, one thing however that I am always thought would help, especially with SkyDrive, as its essentially a backup tool for me is being able to access through Windows explorer (or FTP would suffice!). Well I have found a little app that does just that!! It’s from Gladinet and the catch line is “Delivering cloud services to your desktop and operating system”, it does connect to other things like Azure blob store and Amazon. You can download a free version ...
On January 1st I switched focus to 100% Azure. My friend and colleague David Gristwood has been firmly focused on Azure through 2009 working with early adopters. We decided to record a podcast talking about what we are up to and how Microsoft UK has been helping early adopters using deep dive labs, workshops and training. We also have a stab at describing the Windows Azure Platform in 1 minute (I hopelessly overrun by 100%) and we finish with an interview between David and Active Web Solutions (AWS). ...
Stonking good news. The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC) is now available to all MSDN Subscribers. It will be available to my dad (who is not an MSDN Subscriber) on Wednesday (Feb 10, 2010). Even better, my dad (and you) can take advantage of the go-live license to deploy code into a production environment. If you are a subscriber, download now. More detail over on Jason Zanders blog. P.S. If you are a UK developer interested in Azure head over to http://ukazure.ning.com ...
Putting my last attempt at creating a business on the shelf... Passed to second round of grant funding but ultimately did not receive grant. We were looking to submit GHS for the first round of federal grants being offered for HIT Regional Extension Centers. Bio.... Green Health Solutions Inc. (GHS) a non-profit, minority owned Health Care Information Technology Company, will support President Obama's goal of strengthening the quality, affordability and security of the United States health care system ...
There are a few applications that I’m playing with in Windows Azure that are reliant on MySql for various reason. For example, I’m working with a group that is doing Joomla development and it’s completely dependent on MySql. Mostly this is due to using MySql native drivers rather than using a database independent layer such as ADO.NET in .NET or PDO in PHP or leveraging database specific features that are only found in MySql. Regardless of the reason, for me to run these applications in Windows Azure, ...
[In the UK? Why not join http://ukazure.ning.com] Awareness of the existence of the Windows Azure Platform TCO and ROI Calculator remains pretty low based on some conversations I have had lately at events. It is available in both online and offline versions and aims to help measure the potential savings of product development or migration to the Windows Azure Platform. Lets take a quick example of a brand new car insurance site (Based on my depth work with… car insurance sites!). In brief: We will ...
[Advert: Interested in Azure? Based in the UK? Be amongst friends -> http://ukazure.ning.com/] I just stumbled upon some work by my US colleagues and CodeProject to create a competition around deploying applications on the Windows Azure Platform. Looks to me like it is open to UK developers – hence I would encourage you to have a shot at winning and bringing the prizes back to Blighty. Give Windows® Azure a try in February and you could win an HP TouchSmart laptop (approximately $1000 USD value) ...
[Advert: Interested in Azure? Based in the UK? Be amongst friends -> http://ukazure.ning.com/] [Check out my other QandAs] A common question I get is “Do I get charged compute hours for every role type in my service?” The short answer is “Yes you do”. Now for the longer answer… Every role type is created as at least one Virtual Machine instance on the Windows Azure Platform – more if you have instance count > 1 for a role. In this hosted service example I have 2 WebRoles and 3 WorkerRoles with ...
There are times that you just need to leverage the raw power that you can get from the command line. For example, if you are trying to script something or if you are on a machine that is not all tooled up with Visual Studio, Eclipse and the like and, believe it or not, there are times that it’s just a lot easier to get stuff done without an IDE in the way. Great news is that we’ve got a couple in the Windows Azure SDK called CSPack and CSRun that work wonders. To that end, I created a little tutorial ...
On January 7th 2010 I kicked off a survey on Cloud Computing and the Windows Azure Platform (Now closed). I promised to share the results which I will do over four posts. This is the third of those four. Part 1: Is Cloud relevant? Part 2: How well do you know the technologies of Microsoft, Amazon, Google and SalesForce? Part 3: What are your plans for using the Windows Azure Platform? Part 4: My analysis Which of these Windows Azure Platform technologies have you already evaluated or plan to evaluate ...
[Advert: Interested in Azure? Based in the UK? Be amongst friends -> http://ukazure.ning.com/] Fellow UK Azure Evangelists David just published an interesting interview with Factonomy on why they went with Azure. Just putting it on http://ukazure.ning.com/ .. once I’m sure about the embed code :-) ...
As part of Microsoft UKs Azure Awareness Week in February (2010) we have three training workshops for partners taking place. I have added them over on the new Fans of UK Azure community site. Don’t delay – I expect the places to vanish quickly! February 23 Tuesday Reading Free One day Accelerated Training Workshop for Partners February 24 Wednesday Reading Free One day Accelerated Training Workshop for Partners February 25 Thursday Edinburgh Free One day Accelerated Training Workshop for Partners ...