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SIMPLEST WAY TO BUILD BUSINESS APPLICATIONS FOR THE DESKTOP, WEB AND CLOUD Micrososft Visual Studio LightSwitch gives you a simpler and faster way to create professional-quality business applications for the desktop, the web, and the cloud. LightSwitch is a new addition to the Visual Studio family. Visit this page often to learn more about this exciting product. QUICKLY CREATE PROFESSIONAL-QUALITY BUSINESS APPLICATIONS With LightSwitch, you can build custom applications that rival off-the-shelf solutions. ...

[This email uses the word fab too many times] I am just back from a fab “two centre holiday”. First up was Cumbria, mainly the fells rather than the lakes. Absolutely beautiful. Rained every day :-) Next up was the North York Moors. Absolutely beautiful. Rained every day :-) Definitely recommend the format – although maybe with less rain :-) Which brings me to my change of job which started this week (Aug 2010). The last two years were fab Back in July 2008 I switched from being an ISV Architect ...

I admit it… I am a software podcast junkie – it started with Dot Net Rocks, and has progressed till I now listen to more than a dozen podcasts actively, but what I am finding more and more is that the general .Net podcasts seem to all follow the flavour of the month posts… So this week everyone is talking about LightSwitch, last week it was Windows Phone 7, before that Azure… all flavours of the month, all introducing new things, and usually some high level 10000 meter view of a new technology… So ...

I’d say this one of the coolest offerings for most Businesses and their Developers these days from Microsoft. Coming from a Dev Shop that uses a lot of Microsoft Products on a daily basis, its nice to have access to this vast collection of their Software & Tools over the course of a given year, through the Microsoft Developer Network. But it doesn’t stop with just their Software Catalog on MSDN. In a lot of cases you also gain access to try out even much more than just their Software. How about ...

Did you know that when you connect to SQL Azure, a KERBEROS authentication is performed? However, when using SQL Server Management Studio, or any other client, you are forced to use a SQL authentication mechanism. While I was digging in the system tables, I realized that my SQL Azure connection was being reported as a KERBEROS authenticated connection. If you run this statement on your SQL Azure database... select session_id, auth_scheme from sys.dm_exec_connections ... this is what you get: session_id ...

Las aplicaciones de Windows Azure se ejecutan en los centros de datos de Microsoft y son accedidas a través de Internet. Different kind of applications can be built on Windows Azure: · An independent software vendor (ISV) could create an application that targets business users, an approach that’s often referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS). ISVs can use Windows Azure as a foundation for a variety of business-oriented SaaS applications. · An ISV might create a SaaS application that targets consumers. ...

Cloud services platforms are still in their infancy considering the size of the market, but big players like Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, and Google have made significant investments for the future in offering cloud services in some form or the other. In this section, I will outline the offerings of some cloud services providers: Amazon Web Services Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world, and to support its daily operations, Amazon has one of the most advanced data centers in the world. Processing ...

Understanding Cloud Architecture Fundamentally, cloud architectures are based on creation of large data centers with a management fabric defining clear abstraction between server hardware and operations systems. The management fabric automates the deployment of virtualized operating systems images on server hardware. In its simplest form, a typical cloud data center consists of a bank of server hardware and massive storage for storing fully functional operating system images. The management fabric ...

En el artículo anterior se definieron los conceptos de la Nube y Cloud Computing, y se repasó rápidamente la evolución de tecnologías que favorecieron el surgimiento de dicho paradigma. En el presente artículo se definirán los diferentes conceptos “*aaS” relacionados con el concepto de cloud computing (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.). SaaS digamos que ya es un término hasta cierto punto conocido, pero ¿y los demás? Eso es lo que se aclarará en este artículo. Los servicios de computación en la Nube, así como ...

In this Issue: Viktor Larsson, Roger Peters, Kirupa Chinnathambi, Kyle McClellan, Jag Reehal, Dinesh Sodani, David Rousset, Jeff Fansler, Paul Sheriff, Jeremy Likness, Mohamed Mosallem, and Jonathan van de Veen. Shoutout: The Visual Web Developer Team Blog posted Hot Fix Released for the Issue of Visual Studio 2010 Crashing When Switching to the Design View From SilverlightCream.com: Snipping databound properties Viktor Larsson has discussion of code snippets up in his latest post. He's specifically ...

[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/E... In my previous post, Cloud Services and Command-Query Separation: Part 2, I walked through a sample Command-Query Separated service bus solution using readily available cloud services for communication. In this one, I'll look at some of the implications of shifting systems integration to the cloud, compared to an on-premise ESB. The focus here is mainly on Amazon Web Services, but I'll cover Azure with a dedicated sample project. Cost & Non-Functional ...

Hey, Windows Azure and SQL Azure is free for one month. Unfortunately, its only for US Developers. But anyways, good news for US folks though. Also Microsoft is offering free phone, chat and email support through their Front Runner for Windows Azure Program. Windows Azure One Month Pass USA. Happy Azuring..... -Vishal Mody ...

Just found this information at the Windows Azure Team Blog. But it only for the US developers. (Why! Geo-location Discrimination?) Anyway, it’s said the first 500 would get it. For more information please go here. Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License ...

I have decided to try and put together a top notch online conference delivered predominantly via UK based speakers, inspired by the very enjoyable and useful community driven MVC Conference http://mvcconf.com/ (see my write up) What I need now is top notch session proposals from folks who know what they are talking about and ideally are UK based. Which means – you! Possibly :-) The plan is: The conference will take place 10am to 5pm UK time, delivered using Live Meeting and recorded for on-demand ...

At VSLive today, I had the pleasure of introducing Microsoft Corporate VP Jason Zander. And he had the pleasure of introducing Visual Studio LightSwitch. Pleasure is a theme here, because the product, to me at least, looks great. LightSwitch is a .NET based environment, hosted in Visual Studio, that allows developers to build business apps. Quickly. It harkens back, with pride, to tools of old, like VB6 and FoxPro, that made data, and data maintenance UIs, first class citizens. These tools also treated ...

Today at VSLive! we announced Visual Studio LightSwitch (link not quite up yet). LightSwitch is intended to be the simplest way to build business applications for the desktop and cloud. It provides the tools to rapidly develop professional applications from pre-built templates in a simplified development experience. It is intended to be used by professional developers. Top level features: Applications are built in Silverlight Pre-built templates Support for SQL Server, Sharepoint and SQL Azure Applications ...

In this Issue: African Geek, Michael Washington, Sl.ayer, David Rousset, Einar Ingebrigtsen, Rob Miles, Ben Gracewood, jbaird, Davide Zordan, Shawn Wildermuth, Vikram Pendse, Xianzhong Zhu, and Mohamed Mosallem. Shoutout: Jesse Liberty has a great post up of his 12 Absolutely and Insanely Essential Utilities For Programmers From SilverlightCream.com: WP7 Fluid Move Behaviors African Geek has been away from blogging for a bit, but he's back with some fluid Movement behaviors in WP7 ... check out the ...

Recently in preparation for a project, I was pointed to the Azure MMC. This is a great tool, while the portal gives you the capabilities that come with managing the creation and basic upkeep of the environment, the MMC tool gives you the option of looking at metrics and understand performance elements of what you are running and running against in terms of performance. Give it a download and then try it out. When you download, it is an executable files that will deploy a project. When that deployment ...

CTP1 of Microsoft® Project Code-Named “Houston” is now available. This is a lightweight and easy to use database management tool for SQL Azure databases. It enables you to swiftly develop, deploy, and manage data-driven applications in the cloud. Project “Houston” provides a web-based database management tool for basic database management tasks like authoring and executing queries, designing and editing a database schema, and editing table data. All implemented in Silverlight. Getting Started For ...

Siguiendo con el proceso de implementar una solución simple en Azure, vamos a crear una aplicación Web basada en ASP.NET, vamos a empacar esa solución y luego llevarla a Azure para luego entrar y utilizarla. En esta demostración veremos como: 1. Creando la aplicación Your browser cannot play this video. Learn how to fix this. 2. Compilar y generar la solución Your browser cannot play this video. Learn how to fix this. 3. Configurando Windows Azure Your browser cannot play this video. Learn how to ...

El primer paso a completar es el tener una cuenta en Azure, hay que tener muy claro que esto representa algo que va a significar en costo y cargos por utilizar los servicios. Lo que haremos es ir a www.azure.com . Veremos una página como esta El siguiente paso es acceder a la cuenta de la siguiente manera, haciendo click en Account llegamos a la siguiente página… 1. Si ya se tiene cuenta en alguno de los servicios, pues se hace click en las opciones de la derecha. 2. Si no se tiene cuenta, entonces ...

[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/E... In my previous post, Cloud Services and Command-Query Separation: Part 1, I looked at the design of a service bus in the cloud based on Command-Query Separation. In this post, I'll walk through a sample solution meeting the design, using Amazon Web Services. Sample Cloud Service Bus Solution I've worked through an implementation of this using Amazon Simple Queue Service and Amazon SimpleDB - it's on github here: Cloud Service Bus sample solution. ...

[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/E... Overview Cloud services available from Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services both offer message queues and data storage, combinations which enable a very simple SOA solution based on Command-Query Separation. Consumers and service providers communicate through the cloud message queuing service, using a pair of queues. One queue is public, where the service provider listens for request messages which can be sent by any consumer. The second queue ...

In this Issue: Tony Champion, Vikas, Larry Larsen, Dimitris - Ilias Gkanatsios, Gergely Orosz, András Velvárt, Rishi, John Papa, David Rousset, David Anson, and Ozymandias. Shoutout: The Swiss MSDN Team Blog announced “Building a Newsreader Application using Silverlight for Windows Phone 7” Hands-On Lab – Now updated for July BETA Developer Tools Laurent Bugnion posted an MVVM Light Hotfix for Windows Phone 7 developer tools beta Fons Sonnemans posted a video of his WP7 game Sudoku for WP7 on YouTube... ...

Yesterday (22nd July 2010) was mvcConf – “the Virtual ASP.NET MVC Conference”. This was an ambitious undertaking by the community to deliver a three track, 20+ session conference for FREE using Live Meeting. And… it worked great. A big well done to everyone involved. It was particularly interesting to me and my team as we are hoping/planning to do similar online conferences in UK time around technologies such as the Windows Azure Platform and Windows Phone 7 – and attending yesterday gave me the ...

My boss Marc posted a summary of my team – or in his words “a round up of where our crack team of highly-visible ninjas will be concentrating their efforts on your behalf”. In total we are now eight. Ok, nine if you count Marc. Although IMHO seven is a much nicer number but I digress (thankfully I finally no longer associate the number 7 with the movie Se7en – it has taken a while but the recent run of Magnificent Seven movies has helped!). I have a change of focus as we enter a new Microsoft FY. ...

Uno de los temas que esta de moda es hablar de “Cloud”. Para los que hemos estado involucrados en Internet por ya algun tiempo, pues ese era el nombre o talvez para ser mas preciso el simbolo con el que hacemos referencia a Internet, una nube. Bueno, veamos que es esto de Cloud … En principio basico el tema de Cloud se refiere a, eso si nos apegamos al marco de referencia, un sistema distribuido, que ofrece continuidad de servicio y que tiene la capacidad de balance tambien. No es el solo hecho de ...

If you were listening to the waves generated by Microsoft at its Worldwide Partner Conference you probably realized that the announcement of offering Windows Azure in a box (a big, big box) is an interesting move. WAPA, or Windows Azure Platform Appliance, is the latest announcement of Microsoft's cloud offering. It basically consists of the complete Azure offering in chunks of expandable mini data centers (hundreds or thousands of servers at a time). So while that's not for your personal home computing ...

“At WPC today (12th July 2010), Bob Muglia announced an exciting new addition the Windows Azure platform, called the Windows Azure Platform Appliance. When the appliance is released for broader availability, it will allow partners and large customers to host their own dedicated versions of Windows Azure and SQL Azure. For developers, this means that your Windows Azure applications can be hosted on-premises, in a partner’s data center, or in the public cloud without change.” This is not a bundle of ...

The interesting thing about the Windows Azure Platform is there is never a shortage of new stuff to explore. UK based sharpcloud save $500,000 with Windows Azure Azure Portal gets Guest OS Auto Upgrade Mode You can either manually select the operating system that you want to have deployed to your nodes via a drop down box or allow automatic mode to upgrade to the latest operating system as they are released. Steve Marx has written a Windows Azure application called Swingify that allows you to upload ...

First off, thanks to Jeff & John for creating geekswithblogs.net, and to whomever else I might not know about who maintains it, and to all of the other bloggers for everything I've learned from them the past several years. I've been blogging like a madman lately to earn a geekswithblogs.net T-shirt (Oh please, please let it have a picture of a CareBear!), and have three questions for my fellow geeks: 1) Is there a way to configure your blog to get email notification when someone comments on a ...

If you are receiving an error trying to connect to SQL Azure from Management Studio (SQL Server 2008 R2) and the error code indicates Error:53, most likely you are running into the following issue. Note that, the rest of the post assumes that you have the proper server name / credentials and have configured your IP Address range in the SQL Azure administration portal. The above error clearly indicates that the connection couldn’t be opened. One of my colleagues faced this issue and we were pretty ...

I've attended Australian Remix10 and below is a list the points, that I've learned and/or want to read more about. The materials of US MIX10 conference are here http://live.visitmix.com/ Windows Azure ( pronounced [azh-er] http://dictionary.reference... - sounds great from hosting costs/redundancy, but how much work is required to change existing asp.net application with SQL backend to support Azure. http://www.azuresupport.com... ...

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Since the commerical availability of Windows Azure, there were a few releases of Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio that had shipped. Now, there is an updated version of Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio available. It is available as Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.2 (June 2010) and can be downloaded from here This includes support for Visual Studio 2010 RTM as well as Visual Studio 2008 SP1. Other features include Cloud Storage Explorer, .NET 4 support and few other new ...

IntelliTrace is a new and very interesting feature of Windows Azure Tools SDK, June 2010 release. It, along with its other features, enables debugging of application in the cloud. This feature is available in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate only. IntelliTrace provides an enhanced picture of the application compared to the traditional debugging. Traditional Debuggers provides the current state of the application with very limited information of the events occurred in the past. While, IntelliTrace ...

I just found a free 96 pages ebook available from Eric Nelson about the windows azure platform. Looked through it very quickly and I thought it would be a very good book to learn the overall of Windows Azure, SQL Azure and the software archtecture which will be deployed on Azure. You can download it here. Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License ...

Shards (defined as a collection of databases acting as one) are starting to take serious traction in the database development world because they offer something that was unavailable previously: asynchronous data fetching. It is fair to say that developing multi-threaded applications can be difficult. Shard technologies remove many of the complexities required to fetch data from multiple databases asynchronously. In this blog I will discuss a specific case in which performance was improved significantly ...

This past Monday, June 21st, The New York City Council Committee on Technology in Government held a hearing on its proposed legislation, known as Introduction 029-2010, that would require all City agencies to publish their data online, in “raw” form. The data would be available to private citizens who wished to analyze it, hobbyist developers who wished to work with it, and commercial entities looking to utilize it internally or create products that use and add value to it. Such initiatives have ...

Developers have been exploring the possibilities opened up by the Windows Azure Platform for Cloud Computing. This book pulls together great articles from many of those developers who have been active with the Windows Azure Platform to hopefully help others become successful. There are twenty articles in this first volume covering everything from getting started to implementing best practices for elastic applications. The book is available in many forms at http://bit.ly/azuretrenches... It has ...

This question has come up a lot in recent weeks as early adopters move from prototyping with the platform to actually needing to deliver real applications. Whilst fundamentally you are using the same approaches and best practices for the Windows Azure Platform as you would use for a Web application or service (A good IIS7/ASP.NET based architecture is likely a good Windows Azure Platform architecture), there is still plenty of differences which impact on architecture. The good news is we are now ...

On Monday (21st June) we had our last Live Meeting for the 6 weeks of Windows Azure training virtual training we have been running out of Microsoft UK. Monday pretty much hit the mark of what we were after for the final day – good technical content mixed with a fair old sprinkling of fun. As a reminder, Adrian lost 3-1 in the “Students vs the SME” homework battle. Admittedly I was determine to make sure Adrian lost :-) This may sound a little corny, but I did want to thank all those who took part ...

From their website … Web Edition: Up to 1 GB relational database = $9.99 / month Up to 5 GB relational database = $49.95 / month** Business Edition: Up to 10 GB relational database = $99.99 / month Up to 20 GB relational database = $199.98 / month** Up to 30 GB relational database = $299.97 / month** Up to 40 GB relational database = $399.96 / month** Up to 50 GB relational database = $499.95 / month** Data transfers = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB - ($0.30 in / $0.45 out / GB in Asia)* * No charge for ...

In this Issue: Zoltan Arvai, Antoni Dol, Jeff Prosise, David Anson, and John Papa. Shoutouts: Rob Davis has a World Cup Football Stadium tour in Silverlight, Azure, and Bing Maps up: The World Cup Map... cruise around this... tons of features. The Silverlight Team Blog reports that NBC sports is streaming the US Open in Silverlight Adam Kinney announced Expression Studio 4 Launch keynote videos are available From SilverlightCream.com: Data Driven Applications with MVVM Part III: Validation, Bringing ...

One of the “warts” on Windows Azure development has been that once your application was deployed to the cloud, if things went wrong it was pretty tough to figure out the root problem. I knew for sometime we had a solution coming for Visual Studio 2010 users and I couldn’t wait to tell folks about it once it became public. I planned to do a detailed post subsequent to briefly mentioning it when I talked about the 1.2 SDK release. However … other stuff just keeps on getting in the way. Hence I have ...

WordPress is enormously popular for blogs and full websites thanks to an awesome eco system which has built up around it, the simplicity (relatively) of getting it up and running plus the flexibility to “bend it” in all sorts of directions. When I say bend, check out the following which are all WordPress sites My “back up blog” http://iupdateable.wordpres... My groups “odd site” :) http://ubelly.com My favourite “cheap games” site http://www.frugalgaming.co.uk/ WordPress users typically run their ...

This is (almost) a straight copy and paste but represents an important announcement worthy of a little more “exposure” :-) Starting August 1, 2010, we will release a new SQL Azure Development Accelerator Core promotional offer. This new offer will give you the flexibility to purchase commitment quantities of SQL Azure Business Edition databases independent of other Windows Azure platform services at a deeply discounted monthly price. The offer is valid only for a six month term. You may purchase ...

Like many others signed up to the Windows Azure Platform, I received an email overnight detailing the upcoming database size changes for SQL Azure. I know from our work with early adopters over the last 12 months that the 1GB and 10GB limits were sometimes seen as blockers, especially when migrating existing application to SQL Azure. On June 28th 2010, we will be increasing the size limits: SQL Azure Web Edition database from 1 GB to 5 GB SQL Azure Business Edition database will go from 10 GB to ...

Finally after weeks of hard work the World Cup Silverlight player is ready to watch the spanish team in action. This Silverlight Player use Smooth Streaming technology, enables adaptive streaming of media to Silverlight and other clients over HTTP. Smooth Streaming provides a high-quality viewing experience that scales massively on content distribution networks, making true HD 1080p media experiences a reality. The player integrates leading social networks such as Microsoft Live Messenger, Twitter ...

I’m very pleased to report I have managed to slip past the quality police and get to speak for the third year in a row at the excellent Software Architect conference in London. Which makes it the only “long running” conference that I have a 100% record on speaking at year on year which gives it an extra special significance. How much longer before I am found out :) This conference attracts some great speakers including the likes of Kevlin Henney, Neal Ford and Tim Ewald (oh – and me). If you are ...