February, 2011

If you’re looking to leverage the Windows Azure Service Management REST API to determine if a hosted service namespace is available, and to subsequently create the hosted service through your own interface and/or tools, then you will want to be … More » Blog Post by: Keith Bauer

Read this blog post by Vittorio Bertocci , one of our Windows Azure AppFabric evangelists, regarding the most recent updates to the Identity Developer Training Kit and the first release of the MSDN-hosted Identity Developer Training Course . If you are already using the Access Control service, or would like to get started, these would be very useful resources. You can start using our CTP services in our LABS/Preview environment at: https://portal.appfabriclabs.com/ to get a feel for the features...

  Below are links to the PowerPoint sheets and the sample I used for my webinar yesterday evening. The session itself was recorded and will be available soon, link to follow.   PowerPoint Sample   Enjoy!   www.TheProblemSolver.nl www.dotnetevents.nl Blog Post by: Maurice

The next maintenance to the Windows Azure AppFabric LABS environment is scheduled for February 28, 2011 (Monday). Users will have NO access to the AppFabric LABS portal and services during the scheduled maintenance down time. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience. When: START: February 28, 2011, 10 am PST END: February 28, 2011, 4 pm PST Impact Alert: The AppFabric LABS environment (Service Bus, Access Control, Caching, and Portal) will be unavailable during this period. Additional impacts...

So, I recently had to give a presentation at an internal training event and among the many things we promised to discuss and show was a scenario bridging cloud and on premises technologies. The content of that presentation is Microsoft … More » Blog Post by: Christian Martinez

In the first post we discussed the 3 main concepts that make up Windows Azure AppFabric: Middleware Services, Building Composite Applications, and Scale-out Application Infrastructure . In the second post we started discussing the Middleware Services that already available in production: Service Bus and Access Control service. Focus on Caching In this post we will discuss the Caching service. The Composite App service will be discussed in the next post as part of Building Composite Applications ...

I’ve been working with AppFabric lately and one of the things I like to do is use PowerShell to get a sense of the current state of my workflows. Unfortunately, I don’t like the format of the output as I find it hard to read.  You can see an example of the default output here. What I want is a nice succinct table.  So, I fiddled around a bit with PowerShell’s format-table command and was able to get my data looking like this: The command is pretty simple. I use the Property parameter to...

One of the advantages of using AppFabric (AF) Cache is that the Hardware requirements for the server nodes are not very powerful since fundamentally, it requires is enough RAM to store the cached objects and enough processing power for the … More » Blog Post by: Jaime Alva Bravo

Read this blog post to learn about this new Windows Azure Platform free trial offer. This new offer includes various platform capabilities such as compute, storage, SQL Azure, as well as 2 AppFabric Service Bus Connections and 100K AppFabric Access Control transactions, per month. This offer is valid until June 30th, 2011. To see full details of the new Introductory Special and to sign up, please click here . To see a list of all offers, please visit the offers page . Make sure to sign up and start...

Introduction The Windows Azure platform provides storage services for different kinds of persistent and transient data: Unstructured binary and text data Binary and text messages Structured data In order to support these categories of data, Windows Azure offer three different … More » Blog Post by: Paolo Salvatori

We have some *free* Azure training coming up March 15 – 17 in Irvine CA.This is a 3-day instructor-led workshop.   Windows Azure Platform - Training Workshop Abstract The Microsoft Developer & Platform is pleased to announce a Metro Workshop event focused on Developers covering the Windows Azure Platform, for Microsoft partners and customers. Delivered through workshop style presentations and hands-on lab exercises, the workshop will focus on three key services of the Windows Azure Platform...

We are starting a webcast series featuring ISVs that are using the Windows Azure Platform. Our first webcast “ Managing Your Website on the Azure Cloud: Benefits for IT & Business Leaders ” will feature SiteCore. SiteCore provides a content management solution for enterprise websites. To register to the webcast follow this link: https://www.eventbuilder.com/microsoft/event_desc.asp?p_event=k67q797n You can read more about SiteCore’s Windows Azure Platform based solution at: SiteCore’s website...

Prior to the release of the Windows Azure 1.3 SDK, Web roles hosted your application in IIS Hosted Web Core (HWC).  While there were certainly ways to extend HWC, for the most part you were stuck with a single application bound to no more than a single HTTP or HTTPS endpoint.  This model enabled only [...] Blog Post by: Wade

When you create a new WorkflowConsole application you will see a line of code like this 1: WorkflowInvoker.Invoke( new Workflow1()); Looks innocent enough right? If you were only going to invoke this activity once this is not a problem.  But what if you were going to invoke this activity thousands of times? Suppose you wanted to use the activity in a WCF Service? What would the performance characteristic be? You need to understand what happens when you create and invoke an activity. There is...

If you take a good look at the latest Release Notes for the Windows Azure AppFabric CTP February Release – or if you jump directly into the new SDK and try to programmatically configure the Caching client – you’ll quickly discover that the DataCacheSecurity class now requires a System.Security.SecureString instead of a string. The reason [...] Blog Post by: Wade

I’m excited to tell you about the Windows Azure AppFabric CTP February release.  There are a number of enhancements and improvements coming with this release, including: New Silverlight-based LABS portal, bringing consistency with the production Windows Azure portal. Ability to select either a 128MB or 256MB cache size. Ability to dynamically upgrade or downgrade your [...] Blog Post by: Wade

I remember at PDC08 when Kenny Wolf was introducing WF4 he said a workflow is kind of like a college student.  Most of the time it lays around sleeping (and drinking beer) and occasionally it wakes up (when an assignment is due) and does a pulse of work and then goes back to sleeping and drinking beer.  Kenny called this a “pulse of work”, I like to call it a Workflow Episode. When you run a Workflow the activities will run until one of the following happens The workflow completes The workflow...

SAML 1.1/SAML 2.0 is the default token format when using ACS as the authentication service for your website. In this model, your website talks to ACS using WS-Federation protocol and what it normally gets back is a Saml token. This scenarios is fairly straight-forward as WIF natively supports WS-Federation protocol & SAML1.1/SAML 2.0 token formats. [...] Blog Post by: zamd

Today we released the Windows Azure AppFabric CTP February release which introduces updates to the Caching service, and a new and improved Silverlight based portal experience. This release builds on the prior Caching CTP October release, and introduces the following improvements: Ability to choose from a set of available cache sizes and provision a cache of the chosen size Support for upgrading or downgrading between caches from the available sizes dynamically based on your requirements Added client...

This would hopefully be a multi-part series showing some tricks to enable claims-based-security in Silverlight 4.0. Silverlight 5.0 would have a much better story around claim-based-security as mentioned here. In this first post, I’ll give you a high level overview of the solution. The main idea is to use the ‘WCF Routing Service’ in the [...] Blog Post by: zamd