April, 2011

After an amazing amount of very fruitful work, today we are announcing our offering of cache in the cloud via the release of Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service. The Caching service is an explicit, distributed, in-memory cache service that helps … More » Blog Post by: Jaime Alva Bravo

I am working on a project where I am responsible for the transport layer. We’ve rolled an internal only first rev of the solution out and I thought I’d share some early lesson learned. For the transport layer itself after … More » Blog Post by: Christian Martinez

Humans Go to Control Panel / Programs / Programs and Features / View Installed Updates Use the Search Box to search the updates for KB2495593 KB2478063 Or if you prefer, search the list your self Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1 - Runtime Update Look for .NET Framework 4 Extended Look for Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Extended (KB2478063) Click on the Help Link to see what you get with this update Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1 – Design-time Package for Visual Studio...

Recently, at the MIX conference we announced the release of a new version of the Access Control service and the upcoming release of the Caching service. Today we are excited to announce that the Caching service has been released as a production service . The Caching service is a distributed, in-memory, application cache service that accelerates the performance of Windows Azure and SQL Azure applications by allowing you to keep data in-memory and saving you the need to retrieve that data from storage...

Sometimes when using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) you need to create a custom WorkflowServiceHostFactory.  There are a couple of main reasons why you would want to do this. To configure the WorklfowServiceHost in some way like adding an extension To do some other type of initialization work when auto starting a service This morning I was working on the WF4 Batch Processing Example (now Workflow Services and Auto-Start sample) to update it with things I’ve learned in the past few months...

If you want to read the AppFabric Monitoring Database from a Web Application your web app will have to have permission to login. If you try to run a web app that does not have permission you will likely see this Cannot open database "AppFabricMonitoringDB" requested by the login. The login failed. Login failed for user 'IIS APPPOOL\DefaultAppPool'. You have two choices. Run the Web Application in an AppPool using an identity that has permission to login Grant permissions to the...

Just found Daniel Cazzulino@Clarius has packaged some of my work in a reusable NuGet package. Pretty cool… http://nuget.org/List/Packages/netfx-Microsoft.IdentityModel.Swt Blog Post by: zamd

I can’t count how many times this has bitten me…  You create a new Workflow Service.  You create a client app, add a service reference and boom! There is no context attached to the incoming message for the service and the current operation is not marked with "CanCreateInstance = true". In order to communicate with this service check whether the incoming binding supports the context protocol and has a valid context initialized. For some strange reason, our default Workflow Service...

Nog een paar dagen en het is weer DevDays tijd. Maar waar ben ik te vinden tijdens de DevDays? Ten eerste sta ik als op de web development stand voor Ask The Expert voor de sessions. Dat is altijd leuk om te doen en het verbaast me soms met wat voor problemen je mensen kunt helpen. In het verlden heb ik zo al eens een probleem in een managed C++ app via terminal server bij iemand thuis op kunnen lossen, niet echt mijn expertise maar het lukte wel Verder hoop ik naar de nodige sessies te kunnen gaan...

Registration is open for SoCal Code Camp in San Diego, June 25th and 26th. You can submit sessions here: http://www.socalcodecamp.com/sessions.aspx I’ll be doing three Azure sessions: Windows Azure Architectural Patterns Windows Azure Overview   Windows Azure: What’s in it for Startups and ISVs? This is always a great event, hope to see you there! Blog Post by: Brian Loesgen

I’m really looking forward to being at the SOA and Cloud Symposium in Brazil next week, as well as CloudCamp. I’ll be doing two sessions at the conference, “ Windows Azure Architectural Patterns ” and “ The Windows Azure Cloud Service Roadmap ”. I’ll also be on at least one panel, and can’t seem to go to a CloudCamp without getting involved somehow. I’m looking forward to catching up with some friends there, and taking some well deserved time off traveling around, including a full week at world heritage...

Today (4/20/2011) 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...

The April Update of Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is available now, you can get it here . From the site: The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content including hands-on labs, presentations, and demos that are designed to help you learn how to use the Windows Azure platform, including: Windows Azure, SQL Azure and the Windows Azure AppFabric. The April 2011 update of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit has been updated for Windows Azure SDK 1...

Lots of people like to use in inversion of control container, usually shortened to IOC, to inject dependencies into classes. The are lots of reasons for doing so but in the end they mostly boil down to separation of concern which makes thing more modular and thereby easier to reuse and unit test. When you start doing so manually injecting dependencies into a types constructor is easy enough but after a while this tends to become tedious and getting an IOC container to do this for you is a lot easier...

This post provides insight into some of the undocumented details of the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus connection quotas. In particular, it answers the following questions: Under what circumstances will you receive the QuotaExceededException when establishing Service Bus connections? What … More » Blog Post by: Keith Bauer

Some time ago I blogged about how to get the SqlWorkflowInstanceStore working with SQL Azure. In order for this to work we had to make a few changes to the SqlWorkflowInstanceStoreSchema.sql script and as a result we ended up in a working but officially not supported scenario. And while this worked just fine with the Windows Azure 1.2 SDK there was a change in the Windows Azure 1.3 SDK which resulted in each deployment being seen in a new service deployment. This last change even happened if no change...

Are you sometimes frustrated by WF/WCF? Let’s just be honest for a moment… all of us are frustrated by WF/WCF at times.  Even those of us who work on the product can probably think of a hundred ways we would like to make them better.  However, we can’t fix everything or change everything that we would like to change because we also face the reality that we have a limited amount of time and resources to make changes. When I get frustrated about something, I log a bug in our bug database...

Get instant access to real-time stock quotes for U.S. equities traded on NASDAQ, NYSE, NYSE Alternext and over-the-counter (OTC) exchanges. Quotes are provided by the BATS Exchange, one of the largest U.S. market centers for stock transactions. Each real-time quote includes trading volume as well as open, close, high, low and last sale prices. For developers of websites and software applications, XigniteBATSLastSale offers a high-performance web service API capable of scaling to meet the requirements...

One rather large pain point with distributed systems is versioning.  There are things you can do that make this problem better and things you can do that make it worse.  The worst thing you can do is pretend that this problem does not exist. Myth: Loosely coupled systems don’t require versioning Every piece of data that flows between things in a distributed system has both syntax and semantic .  Syntax can be communicated with schema, contracts and the like.  Syntax tells you...

From the great minds of Hanu Kommalapati , Bill Zack , David Pallmann comes a new rules-based tool that can scan your existing .NET app and alert you to any issues you may have in migrating to Windows Azure. Great work guys! You can get it at http://wams.codeplex.com/ Blog Post by: Brian Loesgen