February, 2011

I have co-authored a whitepaper on the TechNet Wiki based on a customer project. The paper “Implementing end-to-end ordered delivery using Microsoft BizTalk Server and SQL Server Service Broker” is available here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/implementing-end-to-end-ordered-delivery-using-microsoft-biztalk-server-and-sql-server-service-broker.aspx. Check it out on the TechNet … More » Blog Post by: Tim Wieman

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

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

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

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

The Transient Fault Handling Framework provides a set of reusable components for adding intelligent retry logic into applications leveraging SQL Azure, Windows Azure storage and AppFabric Service Bus. It enables enhancing existing applications with support for retry-aware scopes that greatly improve reliability and reduce the … More » Blog Post by: Valery Mizonov

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...

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

  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

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...

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...

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

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 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...

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...

The following blog post summarizes some of my personal key learnings from a recent customer project where I have successfully been able to leverage Enterprise Library 5.0 (EntLib) on the Windows Azure platform and take advantage of several capabilities provided … More » Blog Post by: Valery Mizonov

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

In this post I’ll walk you through the steps of exposing a ‘Windows Server AppFabric’ hosted workflow service over the Azure service bus.  IIS/AppFabric hosted services are message activated so they cannot be visible on the servicebus until they are activated. So in this post, I’ll use the AutoStart feature of AppFabric to make my [...] Blog Post by: zamd

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’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