May, 2011

My team had an incident recently where an ISV’s application went down at a very inopportune time. Upon looking into it, we found that they only had a single role instance running. So, it seemed like a good idea to do a post to remind people that you need at least two role instances running in order to have high availability. Cloud providers, including Windows Azure, run on commodity hardware. Hardware WILL fail. At Microsoft, we have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in place about accessibility of...

I have found that when you set your app to use .NET Framework Platform Update 1 Visual Studio adds something to your configuration file.  It is trying to do the right thing and here is what you get. < configuration > < startup > < supportedRuntime version ="v4.0" sku =".NETFramework,Version=v4.0.1,Profile=Client" /> </ startup > </ configuration > Great, but then when I try to run the app on my machine which has .NET Framework Platform Update...

While working on signing assemblies you may run into a problem I encountered this morning so here goes… Problem XamlBuildTask fails when referencing a Delay Signed assembly To see this in action try the following Create a Workflow Console Application (WorkflowConsoleApp1) Create an Activity Library (ActivityLibrary1) Reference ActivityLibrary1 from WorkflowConsoleApp1 Set ActivityLibrary1 to Delay Sign Build and you will get this error Build error occurred in the XAML MSBuild task: 'Could not...

I recently returned from a trip to Brazil, it’s been a long time since I did a travel-related post (I’ve still been traveling, just not blogging about it). This was a trip-of-a-lifetime (one of several I’ve had!) stuff. I was in Brasilia, Olinda, Recifi and Fernando de Noronha. This post is specifically about the 7 days I got to spend at Fernando de Noronha, on a dive trip. It’s an island about 300km off the coast of north-eastern Brazil. It’s a marine and wildlife sanctuary. There are two flights...

In my previous post on WorkflowServices, CanCreateInstance and Silverlight I shared with you some of the pain that I went through in building my first Silverlight / Workflow Services app.  Much of this pain was just because I have not done a great deal of work with Silverlight and WCF.  In this post I’m going to give you some advice based on what I learned in building my Tech-Ed 2011 State Machine demo application. Tip: Get Microsoft.Activities and use SilverlightFaultBehavior My colleagues...

May CTP of Service Bus introduced tons of new messaging capabilities including Queuing and Topic based pub/sub messaging. Check out Clemens post for an overview. The usage of Service Bus messaging entities (Queues, Topics) is divided across two namespaces – a ‘Management Namespace’ and a ‘Runtime Namespace’. Management namespace is used to create/define messaging entities [...] Blog Post by: zamd

The EF team at Microsoft just release a first CTP of the EF 4.1 Power Tools making it even easier to do Code First development with an existing database. Guess it isn’t really code first in that case but database first   I did a quick test with an existing database, Northwind to be exact, and it worked pretty well. The only gotcha is you have to make sure the EF4.1 assemblies are available in your project otherwise you will receive the exception below. Adding Ef4.1 is easy though, just download...

Today’s release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 (v1.2.1) has two important updates: Support for Visual Basic Bug fixes You can download the latest drop here: http://watoolkitwp7.codeplex.com/releases/view/61952 Visual Basic When we released on Monday we did not include updated project templates for Visual Basic – turns out that creating these project templates [...] Blog Post by: Wade

If you’re looking for a quick way to get started with Windows Azure, we’re running a series of “bootcamps” in the western US. There is no charge for these events, and if you’ve wanted to learn more about Windows Azure, this is a great way to do it. Space is limited , register today (links are below)! DATE LOCATION TIME LINK May 31, 2011 San Francisco, CA 8:30 AM – 6:00 PM PST 1032486466 June 2, 2011 Los Angeles, CA 8:30 AM – 6:00 PM PST 1032486471 June 3, 2011 Mountain View, CA 8:30 AM – 6:00 PM...

Earlier this week, the first CTP of the Service Bus enhancements was released; the May CTP. This CTP was announced at TechEd and on the AppFabric Team Blog . One week prior to that, Codit has been accepted in the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) of the Windows Azure AppFabric team. In this program, we will work closely together with the product team to build our cloud integration offering. Being BizTalk experts since our inception, we are highly interested in this release of the AppFabric Service...

Code download In yesterday’s post I have explored how to use Service Bus queues as a transport to communicate between a WCF client and a service. In today’s post I will show you WCF pub/sub messaging using the topics and subscriptions. A subscription behaves exactly like a queue for reads while a topic behaves exactly [...] Blog Post by: zamd

In this mini-series, I’ll share experiences from a recent project and explore the decisions that were made as we worked to design and deliver a solution which leverages the relay capability of the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus. The first … More » Blog Post by: Keith Bauer

The other day I got this tweet from Adam @ronljacobs anyway to do something like: [WebGet(UriTemplate = "{id}", IgnoreTrailingSlash = true)] want {id} and {id}/  to be the same Off hand I didn’t know the answer but now that I’m back from Tech-Ed I decided to take a look at the problem. I went to my WCF WebHttp REST Entity Service sample and because I had loads of unit tests I just created a new test case.  I had to modify my HttpTestHelper class to allow for a trailing slash....

A few days ago, Fredrik Olsson opened a pull request against our GitHub repository for the Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS.  A pull request provides a way to tell others about changes you’ve made to a repository – by sending me a pull request, Fredrik was notifying me of his updates so that I could [...] Blog Post by: Wade

Introduction There are some processes which are executed as parallel processes nested within a parallel process and this parent process itself is, you guessed it, run in a parallel fashion – a situation of extreme parallelism that is vaguely referred … More » Blog Post by: Suren Machiraju

Well it’s that time of year again.  Time to write the performance review.  While working out at the gym this morning I had a thought… What if I shared my self-evaluation performance review with you?  After all, you are very important to my success and what you think matters… a lot.  So here we go, here is my FY2010 self-evaluation (WARNING: this is going to sound like boastful arrogance but what can you say? It is a performance review) I joined the AppFabric Developer Platform...

In the past, we have always recommended disabling Intel’s Hyper-Threading in the server’s BIOS on your BizTalk Server and SQL Server machines (for processors that are Hyper-Threading enabled).  With Intel’s current-generation (Nehalem+) of Hyper-Threading, is this recommendation still sound advice?  … More » Blog Post by: Tim Wieman

The BizTalk Server 2010 Performance Optimization Guide was released earlier in the year (for those who missed it).  I spent a bunch of time working on the lab for this guide and then working with our user education team on … More » Blog Post by: Tim Wieman

At this point I’m sure you’ve heard that the Windows Phone Developer Tools for "Mango" released today (also called the Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta).  To learn about these tools I suggest you review the following: Download & release notes: Windows Phone Developer Tools for Mango What’s New in Windows Phone Developer Tools Code [...] Blog Post by: Wade

One of the most common requests I’ve received for the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 has been a tutorial for deploying the services to Windows Azure.  It’s taken longer than it should have—my humblest apologies—but I’ve finally put one together.  You’ll need to follow the following steps outlined below: Create a Certificate (used [...] Blog Post by: Wade