March, 2011

The following post is not about my trip to Scottish Highlands in 2005 even though it was fun having been able to spend a few days with “Nessie”. I just thought I would share some observations from a recent customer … More » Blog Post by: Valery Mizonov

Today (3/31/2011) the Windows Azure platform AppFabric has updated the IP Ranges on which the AppFabric nodes are hosted. If your firewall restricts outbound traffic, you will need to perform the additional step of opening your outbound TCP Ports and IP Addresses for these nodes. Please see the 1/28/2010 “ Additional Data Centers for Windows Azure platform AppFabric ” posted which was updated today to include the new set of IP Addresses. Windows Azure platform AppFabric Team Blog Post...

Due to upgrades and enhancements we are making to Windows Azure AppFabric, the AppFabric Portal, located at http://appfabric.azure.com , will be locked for updates for a few hours. During that time you will not be able to create, update or delete any namespaces. There will be no disturbance to the services themselves, nor will there be any breaking changes as result of the upgrades. When: START: April 7, 2011, 9 am PST END: April 7, 2011, 9 pm PST Impact Alert: You will not be able to create, update...

I don’t remember anyone ever actually asking me this, but I found myself wondering the question while rustling up a quick rehosting app. Foreach<> activity lets you change the TypeArgument dynamically via the property grid. But FlowSwitch<>...( read more ) Blog Post by: The .NET Endpoint : Attached Properties

Today I’m starting on another spike project.  So far there are only questions to investigate, no answers.  I’m sharing my plans with you because I believe doing so might help some of you and I’m hopeful that you might share your insights with me as we seek to solve this problem together. But aren't you solving versioning in the next release? Why yes – if you saw my session at PDC10 – Windows Workflow Futures you know that we are working on solutions for the next release.  However...

If you are a C# developer using Workflow you might not know how VB does type conversion. Imagine this simple example.  I’ve got some classes which use inheritance 1: public abstract class Shape 2: { 3: public int Top { get; set; } 4:   5: public int Left { get; set; } 6: } 7:   8: public class Circle : Shape 9: { 10: public int Radius { get; set; } 11: } 12:   13: public class Square : Shape 14: { 15: public int Length { get; set; } 16:   17: public int Width { get; set;...

A recent customer engagement prompted me to share details regarding a comparison of the REST API’s used to manage the Windows Azure Queue Service and the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). As expected, these services both provide similar types of … More » Blog Post by: Keith Bauer

ComponentArt is leader in delivering Silverlight based tools for building rich Dashboards. ComponentArt's Data Visualization technology allows you to present, navigate and visualize your data like never before.Check out the dashboards built on public domain data from DataMarket. Blog Post by: Sudhirh

I have just published a short screencast that demonstrates how to get started with the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7.  This toolkit is designed to make it easy to build phone applications that use cloud services running in Windows Azure. In this screencast you will learn: Where to download the toolkit How to [...] Blog Post by: Wade

Recently somebody asked me how a workflow could invoke another workflow that is loaded as XAML from a file or a database.  This is a common request so I’ve added an activity to Microsoft.Activities to support this. Download the Source for this example from MSDN Code Gallery – WF4 - How To Invoke a Child Workflow as XAML Scenario: Load an Activity from a XAML Text File and Invoke It Given A child activity deployed as XAML text in a file which will run to completion when invoked (no bookmarks...

In the previous posts in this series we covered the challenges that Windows Azure AppFabric is trying to solve , and started discussing the Middleware Services in the post regarding Service Bus and Access Control , the post regarding Caching , and the post regarding Building Composite Applications . In this post we will discuss how the AppFabric Application Infrastructure is optimized for cloud-scale services and middle-tier components, which enables you to get the benefits of cloud computing. These...

I have read so many weird things about running a WCF service in a worker role using a BasicHttpBinding that the process might as well take its place alongside Nessie, The Yeti and the Lightweight Framework as things only some … More » Blog Post by: Christian Martinez

In part 1 I talked about a simple approach to combine WCF Routing service and claims-based security and I got some questions about the sample code and routing service configuration. In this post, I’ll explain some additional scenarios and would provide link to the source code. In my original post I used following very simple [...] Blog Post by: zamd

I am tremendously excited to announce the release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7.  This toolkit is designed to make it easier for your to build phone application that leverage cloud services running in Windows Azure.  Our team has been diligently working on this toolkit for months, and I think you’ll like [...] Blog Post by: Wade

Due to upgrades and enhancements we are making to Windows Azure AppFabric, the AppFabric Portal, located at http://appfabric.azure.com , will be locked for updates for a few hours. During that time you will not be able to create, update or delete any namespaces. There will be no disturbance to the services themselves, nor will there be any breaking changes as result of the upgrades. When: START: March 31, 2011, 9 am PST END: March 31, 2011, 9 pm PST Impact Alert: You will not be able to create, update...

Alik Levin, from the Access Control service content and documentation team, has written these great step-by-step instructions on how you can use the service for federated authentication using Windows Live ID and Google accounts in your Windows Azure ASP.NET application. Read the step-by-step instructions, and find a number of great resources related to the Access Control service in these posts: Securing Windows Azure Distributed Application Using AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS) v2 – Scenario...

I often hear from people that they want to try out the Virtual Machine Role (VM Role for short) but cannot find it in the Windows Azure portal.  This is because it is still in beta and requires you to request access – and receive acceptance – into the program. Fortunately, we make it very [...] Blog Post by: Wade

Did you know that you can try out the Window Azure Platform free for 30 days?  Even better, did you know that you can do this without entering a credit card?  Yes, pretty sweet. Here’s what you’ll get: Windows Azure – three small compute instances, three GBs of storage, and 250,000 storage transactions SQL Azure [...] Blog Post by: Wade

How should you use WF4 and WCF with ASP.NET?  For this post I’ve created a really simple workflow and WCF service that delay for a specific amount of time and then return a value.  Then I created an ASP.NET page that I can use to invoke the workflow and WCF service to test their behavior The Workflow Definition First off – let’s get one thing straight.  When you create a workflow, you are creating a workflow definition .  The workflow definition still has to be validated, expressions...

Steve Yi explains how SQL Azure Pricing works. Blog Post by: Sudhirh