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Just a brief reminder that if your company makes commercial software (in other words, you don’t just develop it for your own employees use) then you should check out the FREE technical event my team is putting on next Thursday (25th Nov 2010). We also with have an Xbox 360 with Kinect to give away plus free books and other goodies. I’m currently looking after the Xbox and have so far resisted peaking in… but I make no promises! :-) Note that we have gone for zero breaks with the intention of making ...

Interested in learning Windows Server AppFabric? I hope so. It will be the backbone of the on-premise version of BizTalk in the coming years and based on news out of the PDC it looks like it will be moving to Azure (in some form) as well. There are many resources out there for learning Windows Server AppFabric. However, not all of them are equal and you can spend a lot of time meandering through material without making a lot of progress. Below is my suggested path for coming up to speed on it with ...

In this Issue: Brian Genisio, goldytech, Martin Krüger, Shawn Wildermuth, John Papa, Kunal Chowdhury, Michael Washington, Joost van Schaik, Karl Shifflett, Joe McBride, Bruno Terkaly, Xpert360(-2-, -3-), and Brad Tutterow. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Customized Scrolling in Silverlight using Expression Blend" Kunal Chowdhury WP7: "Windows Phone 7 Development for Absolute Beginners (The parts you care about)" Michael Washington Training: "In the Box – MVVM Training" Karl Shifflett Shoutouts: bspann ...

As you know I’m working in Ethos as an architecture and azure expert. Our company will arrange an azure training plus hands-on labs in December in Beijing office. And I will be one of the trainer which would be very existing. If you are in Beijing and can undersand Chinese (we will use Chinese in the training) and more important, if you are intrested in Azure just like me, please find the training details as follows. The training fee is 300RMB with the seats, computers and dinner. In order ensure ...

In this Issue: Ryan Alford(-2-), Joe McBride, Rob Tiffany, Pete Brown, Charles Petzold(-2-), Alfred Astort, Mark Hopkins, Nokola, Chris Klug, Gergely Orosz, and Adam Barney. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Creating a Metro UI Style Control" Joe McBride WP7: "Ready for take-off? Top 10 things to check when you think you are done with your application" Alfred Astort Shoutouts: Adam Barney posted his "Introduction to the MVVM UI Pattern": Slides and Demo from Iowa Code Camp Damon Payne gave a WP7 presentation ...

Next week (8th to 12th Nov 2010) at TechEd in Berlin there will be lots of great sessions, lots of superb labs, lots of fascinating BOFs and lots of booths – including the awesome and hugely exciting Microsoft Platform Ready booth. I will be linking up with colleagues from across Europe and the USA to make sure we can get the message around the excellent benefits of the Microsoft Platform Ready to as many ISVs* as we can during the week – plus give away some great prizes. If you are attending TechEd ...

The past month or so has been quite busy. Herve and I finshed the SQL Azure book, then spent a couple of weeks preparing for a 3 day deep-dive Azure training class in Dusseldorf, Germany. I must say, the hotel and conference rooms were SWEET! The training went well (not as many attendees as we would have liked, but it was fun nonetheless). We spent 4 days there then bolted to Paris, France for two days to see some of Herve's friends and do some site seeing. We returned home a week ago. However, no ...

Our SQL Azure book is finally done! After months of work, research (and waiting for Service Updates ) the book is finally finished. We spent a lot of time on this book, and we wanted to let you know it is out and ready for reading. It should be available on Amazon and other sites know. For topics, we cover the following: Getting Started with SQL Azure SQL Azure Design Considerations Setting up and Configuring your SQL Azure Environment Security Data Migration and Backup Strategy Programming SQL Azure ...

This is some pre-pdc stuff that caught my eye: Gartner on the Cloud Landscape. Windows Azure fairs extremely well. Scalability survey of cloud platforms. Benchmarking cloud alternatives – interesting stuff. FabrikamShipping SaaS, a complete demo scenario meant to help ISVs to target the Windows Azure platform for developing SaaS solution SQL Azure Best Practices and Code http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pat... SQL Azure Papers http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pat... ...

In the “bad old days” leaving unwanted Windows Azure hosted services running simply meant a big charge on your credit card. Thankfully it now simply means you get a polite email from Microsoft. P.S. I also should follow my own advice sometimes – check out Greybox :-) Dear Eric Nelson, This e-mail notification comes to you as a courtesy to update you on your Windows Azure platform usage. Our records indicate that you have exceeded 75% of your average monthly usage of compute hours during your current ...

It's been a ride! Over six months ago Scott Klein and I started to write a book on SQL Azure. It is now officially out and available. You can find the book on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Pro-S... We used and abused SQL Azure for a few months, used it in projects and pushed some of its limits to understand how it behaves. We present the basics of SQL Azure on a couple of chapters, including what the ...

If you are interested in Windows Azure, just like me, you will find that there are so many documentation, articles, presentation, samples, etc. over the internet and it’s very hard to find the one you need. Now J.D. Meier had posted a documentation named “Windows Azure Developer Guidance Map” which covers almost all materials about the Windows Azure. As Meier said: If you’re a Windows Azure developer or you want to learn Windows Azure, this map is for you. Microsoft has an extensive collection of ...

My team is pulling together a great afternoon on the 25th of this month to help UK ISVs get up to speed on the latest technologies from Microsoft and explore their impact on product roadmaps. The session is intended for technical decision makers including senior developers and architects. Technologies such as the Windows Azure Platform, SQL Server 2008, Windows Phone 7, SharePoint 2010 and Internet Explorer 9.0 will be represented. Check out the agenda and register before all the seats vanish ...

I didn’t go to the Microsoft’s PDC Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC) this year because it was, as far as I could tell, a made-for-streaming video event. As such, I watched the keynote about 24 hours after it took place and used my Media Center PC to watch it on my plasma television. And I have to say, the keynote was worthy of the medium. Not only did the Silverlight Smooth Streaming technology deliver a fine HD image, but the content of the keynote itself, merited a big screen, and necessitated ...

So, while I didn’t get to attend PDC2010, I did get to watch it live at the Microsoft Offices in Johannesburg. It had all the usual things I was expecting, Windows Phone 7 Demo’s, Azure Demo’s and Balmer giving a great pounding impersonation. For me though, the highlight of the whole thing was mention of TFS being made available in the Azure Cloud, with a CTP due early next year. I have been eyeing TFS for a while now but decided against it because of the poor reviews I heard of it in a remote setup. ...

This webcast will look at the implementation of a source control plug in for Visual Studio that uses Azure storage as a repository. The use of Azure table storage and blob storage to store the source files and project, file and check-in information. The implementation provides a very cost effective solution that allows for a source control system without any infrastructure. The webcast is here ...

I had the opportunity to return to the Patterns and Practices Summit this year for the second time. The first time was in 2008, and they managed to plus that experience this year. All of the technology was on track, and par, for what Microsoft has been pushing toward us - 2010 being a huge year for major releases as well as out of band stuff. The presenters did an awesome job presenting and here are/were my favorites for this year. Monday (Workshops) Azure (@ScottDensmore, Eugenio Pace (think Pa-ch`ay) ...

Today (20th Oct 2010) I delivered a 90min session to architect on the Windows Azure Platform. Are you an ISV? ISV = Independent Software Vendors - that is you write some kind of product that you sell to more than one customer. My new team is all about helping ISVs and we have a team blog and brand new twitter account which I will increasingly be found on. If you are an ISV, please fave the blog and follow the twitter account. And if you are an ISV please keep an eye on (and sign up to) http://bit.ly/ukmprhome, ...

I’m looking forward to starting this new webinar series that I’m launching in partnership with Zend about running PHP in general and Zend in particular on Microsoft Azure. My goal, as I’m writing the demos today after posting this, is to go through the Zend Guestbook quick start and then port that to run in Azure and leverage that platform. I’ll be posting the full technical write-up here once I get done. Read the full post at Josh Holmes - Webinar on Oct 20, 2010 with Microsoft/Zend ...

I’ve added another webcast look looking at an application build on the Windows Azure platform. Like the last one on file transfer, this is a hybrid application with components running on premise and “In the Cloud”. The webcast demonstrates the use of Azure worker roles to render a 3D animation. The animation is rendered in the cloud by 16 worker roles running a legacy DOS text-based ray tracer. Queues, blobs and tables in Azure storage are used to manage the render job and on premise applications ...

In this Issue: Dennis Doomen(-2-), Felix Corke, Kunal Chowdhury, Michael Bach, Jeff Blankenburg, Shawn Wildermuth(-2-), Jeff Handley, David Anson, and Colin Eberhardt. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight as an alternative to PowerPoint" Colin Eberhardt WP7: "Architecting WP7 - Part 1 of 10: Navigation Framework" Shawn Wildermuth Themes: "Silverlight 4 theme brush packs" Felix Corke Shoutouts: Robby Ingebretsen never wastes our time, so check out his latest post: The New “App” Sara Summers has ...

Our West Palm Beach .Net User Group will be honored to have Scott Klein, Microsoft MVP and Author of Pro. SQL Azure (APRESS) as our October speaker. Scott will be talking and answering all our questions about Azure. Time has never been better for our Fladotnet West Palm Beach .Net User Group. We are fortunate to have a free meeting location offered to us by CompTec and to enjoy the backing and sponsorship of many top notch companies. This support is enabling us to uphold our founders’ vision: Create ...

It has been over a year since the last time I updated my list of Florida technical communities and a lot has changed since then. Joe Healy, our Florida Microsoft Developer Evangelist, maintains a list for each of the main areas in Florida, but this only covers the .NET-focused groups. Taking what he has started, I have put together a similar list (based on the information Joe maintains) that covers the other technical communities that I know of. If you are part of a technical user group community ...

[Updated 8th Feb with the three LM 2007 room links – enjoy] meet:sip:splank@microsoft.c... meet:sip:splank@microsoft.c... meet:sip:splank@microsoft.c... For many developers Friday is about a beer with colleagues over lunch or maybe leaving that little bit earlier to ...

Yesterday (5th Oct 2010) I delivered a short (45mins) session on the Windows Azure Platform. Big thanks to all who made it to the far side of beyond in London to attend the afternoon session. I think the event turned out rather well with my old team doing a top job as always – ably supported by our CEO Steve Ballmer doing the keynote :-). For folks wondering, Martin Beeby (IE9) is one of the two chaps that took my old role when I moved to the ISV team in August. Are you an ISV? Speaking of ISVs (Independent ...

Over the last number of weeks, I have been involved in a project that required getting IIS log information from an Azure WebRole. The process established was to use Cerebrata’s Diagnostic Manager (I can’t do it justice to tell you how awesome this tool is) to monitor real-time and also to download the information collected through the transfer rate configured for the service. Then once the information had been downloaded, I would then use WebLog Expert to create a nice pdf report of the activity. ...

This code sample demonstrates the following features: • Two new features of IE9 for Windows 7 PC devices: HTML canvas and SVG. • A Windows Phone 7 device application that renders a 3D bar chart. • How to use the Windows Azure platform Dallas services. • How to connect the devices using a Windows Azure cloud service. Code sample download: http://1code.codeplex.com/r... You can see a live demonstration of the IE9 samples. The pages require IE9 beta (http://windows.microsoft.c... ...

One of the things I really wanted to do lately was to get SQL Azure, OData, and Windows Phone 7 working together; in essence, expose SQL Azure data using the OData protocol and consume that data on a Windows Mobile Phone 7 device. This blog will explain how to do just that. This example is also in our SQL Azure book in a bit more detail, but with the push for WP7 I thought I'd give a sneak-peak here. You will first need to download and install a couple of things, the first of which is the OData client ...

Yesterday (28th Sep 2010) I delivered a short (50mins) new session on best practices for the Windows Azure Platform. Big thanks to all who attended – I think we had fun I will expand this post with some additional links when I have a little more time but I wanted to get the main bits in place – oh, and download the free ebook. Slides Windows Azure Platform best practices by ericnel View more presentations from Eric Nelson. Links For more resources and information http://bit.ly/startazure If you are ...

Implementing a Fire Hose for SQL Azure While I was looking around in various blogs, someone was looking for a way to insert records in SQL Azure as fast as possible. Performance was so important that transactional consistency was not important. So after thinking about that for a few minutes I designed small class that provides extremely fast queuing of SQL Commands, and a background task that performs the actual work. The class implements a fire hose, fire-and-forget approach to executing statements ...

I read the Andrew Binstock editorial in the latest issue of SD Times, "PHP debuts, Delphi returns, and C++ tapers off". At first, based on the title, it didn't seem worth reading. But it's short and it was half-time at the soccer match, so... I didn't realize that Embarcadero purchased Delphi (among other items) from Borland years ago. They just released RAD Studio XE (http://www.embarcadero.com/). As mentioned, it supports Delphi XE, a few other interesitng and powerful tools, and RadPHP XE. This ...

Since sometime I have been toying with the idea of publishing developer interviews on my blog. There are a large number of non-Microsoft developers(ie, developers who are not MS employees) who have been doing good work. A lot of them are largely unknown to the worldwide developer community. Some are awarded MVPs, yet are not much known outside their league/ chosen technology. And there are many who haven’t received the MVP award, even though they strongly qualify for it through their relentless support ...

In a previous post I discussed how to build an SSIS package to automate the backing up (COPY) of a SQL Azure database. I assumed that once the SSIS package was built that people would know how to deploy the package and create a schedule for it to run automatically. I have had several people let me know that just building the SSIS package was not enough, that the additional information of deploying the package and creating a job for it is needed. The first step is to compile and build your SSIS project ...

I am back to my developer roots…. . After 10+ years working for Microsoft, I have decided to shake things up a bit. Don’t get wrong, MSFT is a great place to work. And I loved my various roles, especially the Developer Evangelist gig. Talking about cool dev. technology with fun people is a great way to make a living. But for the last couple of years I had strayed from my passion. Which is as a developer. I learned a lot, stayed with my hands in the tools, but I knew I wanted to get back. Then the ...

This webcast is based on a real world scenario using Windows Azure Storage Blobs and Queues to transfer 15 GB of files between two laptops located behind firewalls. The use of Queues and Blobs resulted in a simple but very effective solution that supported load balancing on the download clients and automatic recovery from file transfer errors. The two client applications took about 30 minutes to develop, the transfer took a total of three hours, and the total cost for bandwidth was under $4.00. The ...

Public service announcement :-)

This online conference has now moved to 8th Oct. Steve explains why along with an updated agenda.

Just received confirmation that I am speaking at the Azure Boot Camp in Pittsburgh in January. The actual dates are the 12th and 13th of January at the Microsoft Offices in Pittsburgh. This event is sponsored by Microsoft and ComponentOne. While I am looking forward to speaking and presenting at this Pittsburgh ABC, it is in January. I am trying very hard to convince them to move it to my neck of the woods (Florida) as the weather will be much nicer, but I don't think that will happen. I don't think ...

On October 24th, Microsoft released Service Update 4 for SQL Azure. The major component of this release was the live release of Database Copy functionality, which allows you to make a real-time "backup", or shapshot of your database into a different database. Backup functionality has been at the top of feature requests for SQL Azure for a long time, so this feature is certainly welcome. However, this great feature has some limitations. For example, there is no built-in way to automate a backup. For ...

The last few months have been extremely busy. Herve and I have been heads down working furiously on the SQL Azure book. There is a light at the end of the tunnel finally, we are wrapping up the remaining couple of chapters this week. Along with that, we put on a SQL Saturday event, and continue to run two local SQL Server User Group in the area. However, as if we weren't busy enough, we have run and presented at several Azure Boot Camps around the area, and I have been asked to be the presenter at ...

Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is updated on 2010-09-06. Download address: http://1code.codeplex.com/r... If it’s the first time that you hear about Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, please read the introduction on our homepage http://1code.codeplex.com/, and this Port25 article http://port25.technet.com/a... Windows Shell Extension New Samples How to write a Windows Shell extension using managed code (C#/VB.NET) is an extremely ...

This is a great tool for anyone playing with Windows Azure who would like to avoid surprises on their credit card :-) It has only had 85 downloads – I suspect we see that many folks caught out by a demo/poc being “left on” per week :) Check it out at http://greybox.codeplex.com/ Project Description The GreyBox application is designed to alert a user if their Windows Azure compute services are currently running, or are even simply deployed. Great for Azure speakers and POCs you don't want left running. ...

Just a few randoms on cloud I bumped into: Blogger Jeremy Geelan has come up with the Top 250 Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem and the Top 50 Bloggers on Cloud Computing. Windows Azure Security Whitepaper is live The paper provides a technical examination of the security functionality available from both the customer's and Microsoft operations' perspectives, the people and processes that help make Windows Azure more secure, as well as a brief discussion about compliance New version of Access ...

I just posted details of 2 weeks of FREE training in October delivered via Live Meeting but we also recognise that some folks prefer classroom based training. Hence we have scheduled four two day workshops from September through to April. This two-day intensive instructor-led workshop provides delegates with an early opportunity to gain insight into the nature and benefits of the Windows Azure Platform. Delivered through workshop style presentations and hands-on lab exercises, the workshop will focus ...

Back in May and June I jointly run a highly successful (IMVHO) training programme on the Windows Azure Platform over a six week period for UK developers (Check out some stats/background). We have been discussing how we can take that format forward and I am pleased to say we have our first “spin off”. Namely the “Windows Azure Platform – Accelerated Virtual Training Workshop” which will take place in October. Yippeee. The training will be delivered over a two week period and combines instructor led ...

UPDATE on 14th SEP: Steve has had to move this to Oct 8th At the start of August I made a call for speakers for a multi track online conference on the Windows Azure Platform (which resulted in a great bunch of speakers stepping forward!). However at the end of August I changed job and I am no longer pulling this conference together – that role falls on the shoulders of my replacement Steve (actually I was replaced with Steve and Martin – I always knew I was worth two evangelists if only in weight!) ...

August for some reason has been the busiest month I recall in a while. It has had a good doze of the products I love to work with, and it has given me the opportunity to get into one more, Azure. There has been BizTalk Server, SharePoint, SQL Server and Team Foundation Server and the surrounding tools. But I have been enjoying working with Azure. It’s a nice complexity full of good stuff (so far). In working with a client’s deployment the task came to needing to monitor the implementation. And since ...

I’m not pretty sure how many users are using the standard SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2008 R2 to manage your SQL Azure database. I was one of them until I found the Houston project provided by Microsoft in its SQL Azure Labs. SQL Azure Labs is a place where we can try the latest CTP features of the SQL Azure. They might not be included in the production SQL Azure but I think most of them will be launched in the future. So it’s a good place for us to play with the newest stuff of SQL Azure. ...

Long time didn’t post any articals about the Windows Azure since I was fully busy with our first cloud-based platform – XLR8 (codename: Xalent). Just a week ago my chief architect Ray asked me to try to deploy our platform on Windows Azure. There should something need to be changed and one of them is, on Azure we cannot use the local file system to store anything which was uploaded by the end users. There are two reasons: All files under the web role project will be treated as one package. This means ...

this year I had the pleasure of cramming the following information into my lobes: Book: Schuams Graph Theory - http://www.amazon.com/Schau... - a subset of combinatorics. From my perspective, just use linear algebra - you can bash anything into vectors. some interesting stuff on platonic solids and the 3 color world map. SD - shortest distance SP - shortest path bipartite graph - 2 disjoint sets ...