January, 2011

I am thrilled to announce that we have released a January 2011 update to the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit & Training Course. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit & Training Course includes a comprehensive set of technical content including hands-on labs, presentations, and demos that are designed to help you learn how to use [...] Blog Post by: Wade

As I blogged about here , CodeCamp Fullerton is this weekend. I signed up for 3 sessions. My friend, author and Azure MVP David Pallmann will also be doing Azure session there (as well as many others). The way the organizers have laid things out on Saturday is a thing of beauty if you’re an Azure person. You can basically camp out in room UH246 at 10:00am and get the “Brian and David” show all day long. Saturday - Room UH 246: 10:00am - Brian - Windows Azure Overview 12:15pm - Brian - Windows Azure...

One of the most common workloads I hear about from customers and developers is video encoding in Windows Azure.  There are certainly many ways to perform video encoding in Windows Azure – in fact, at PDC 2009 I was joined by Mark Richards of Origin Digital who discussed their video transcoding solution on Windows Azure [...] Blog Post by: Wade

Recently, in October 2010, at our Professional Developers Conference (PDC) we made some exciting roadmap announcements regarding Windows Azure AppFabric, and we have already gotten very positive feedback regarding this roadmap from both customers and analysts ( Gartner Names Windows Azure AppFabric "A Strategic Core of Microsoft's Cloud Platform" ). As result of these announcements we wanted to have a series of blog posts that will give a refreshed introduction to the Windows Azure...

One of the main benefits of identity federation for you as an end user is that you don’t need to maintain / remember tons of Usernames and Passwords for all those disparate systems that you deal with. You can do with just one Username and Passowrd which will enable you to logon to multiple systems. You may say…”OK, so what is the big deal?, I will have the same Username and Password for all my systems, Emails, Website etc.”, well it’s not the same thing… By keeping...

Identity Federation as the name suggest, is a process of relating multiple identities such that disparate systems can be integrated seamlessly. To put it in simple words, Identity federation is a concept of ensuring that a user does not have to manually logon to multiple systems to accomplish a given objective, it enables you to navigate through the systems by logging on only once. For example, imagine you are planning your next vacation and you logon to your favorite travel agent’s website...

When: START: Thursday 27, 2011, 3 pm PST END: Thursday 27, 2011, 4 pm PST Impact Alert: Customers of Service Bus CTP in LABS environment will experience intermittent failures for the duration of this maintenance. Action Required: None The Windows Azure AppFabric Team Blog Post by: netsqlservicesteam

We recently published this case study on Advanced Telemetry , a startup that offers an extensible, remote, energy-monitoring-and-control software framework. The company migrated its telemetry solution to the Windows Azure Platform in order to expand into new vertical markets without having to incur the costs of investing in server infrastructure. As part of their solution the company used Windows Azure, SQL Azure and Windows Azure AppFabric. AppFabric Service Bus is used by the developers in order...

Ever wanted to have something running in the background servicing your Web Role in Windows Azure? Maybe you want to preload often read but seldom written values from SQL Azure or you’d like to download content in the background on … More » Blog Post by: Christian Martinez

Introduction In the first article of the series we discussed how to exchange messages with an orchestration via a two-way WCF Receive Location using the Duplex Message Exchange Pattern. This form of bi-directional communication is characterized by the ability of … More » Blog Post by: Paolo Salvatori

I recently built an application where I wanted to write some arbitrary text onto a video.  I was using Expression Encoder 4 and had a difficult time finding some examples and documentation, aside from some basic MSDN documentation on the MediaItem class.  I was eventually able to figure it out, but it took a little [...] Blog Post by: Wade

The AppFabric CTP services in our Labs environment preview the future enhancements and capabilities that we are planning to release in the near future. In order to better serve our customers who are using the CTP AppFabric services we created a new forum: Windows Azure AppFabric CTP Forum . The new forum launched last week and has already attracted questions and views. If you are using the AppFabric CTP services be sure to use this forum as a valuable resource to get help. Through the forum you will...

There are several reasons… you need an identity so that the service provider is able to uniquely identify you and provide the right level of service. You need an identity so that the systems can provide access to your information only. You need an identity so that the system can provide you the privileges you are entitled to. I can keep adding, but you get the picture... Blog Post by: Benny Mathew

The most common and still widely used method of representing / establishing identity in the digital world is through UserName and Password. Although there are other forms such as Biometrics (Fingerprints, Iris Scan, etc.), Digital Signatures / Tokens, Smartcards etc. Blog Post by: Benny Mathew

Think of it as a set of characteristics or attributes of an individual entity (person, object etc.) that are distinct and persistent and could be used to differentiate it from other (similar) entities. In layman’s language it is what makes a person or a thing unique and different from the others. Blog Post by: Benny Mathew

After a long period of inactivity, decided to get active again on the blogosphere. This time however, it’s not (just) going to be on BizTalk , (I’ve lately been through some “Identity crisis”… so) you will see me talking about how to protect your identity, get help through “Identity Federation”, asserting your identity, using “Proxies” etc. Also thought of creating a new Identity for myself here , instead of trying to regain my lost identity...

This morning while reviewing sample code I ran across the collection activities.  Working with these activities is fairly straightforward but there are some issues that you should be aware of that can impact the behavior of your workflow. These issues are familiar to .Net developers because they impact the basics of object equivalence and how the collection classes behave. However many workflow developers are building workflow activities that are meant to be used by non-developers. For this...

As shown previously it isn’t hard to run Workflow Services on Windows Azure. In fact all we need to do is add a bit of extra configuration and we can work as normal. However normally when I am hosting long running workflows in IIS I always add a SqlWorkflowInstanceStore  to store the workflow state when it is not running so we can survive the inevitable IIS AppDomain restarts. Unfortunately this isn’t quite as straightforward as I had hoped.   SQL Azure != SQL Server The important thing...

“The important point is that our test can’t control what that dependency returns to our code under test or how it behaves (if we wanted to simulate an exception, for example). That’s when we use stubs .” – The Art of Unit Testing - Roy Osherove, Yesterday morning I received an email from Ryo in Belgium who asked for help in unit testing a workflow. Ryo had read my previous posts on Microsoft.Activities.UnitTesting .XamlInjector and wanted to use it to test his workflow...

Read this article on InformationWeek to learn how customers are benefitting already today from cloud computing. More specifically, this article highlights one of our customers, NVoicePay, that makes use of Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus and Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control, as well as SQL Azure, as part of their solution. Here is a quote from the article on the benefits of using cloud computing: CTO Shaun McAravey predicts NVoicePay will be handling $250 million in annual invoice payments...