Browse by Tags

One of my goals this past year has been to get more hands-on with respects to real-world cloud applications. Working for Aditi has provided many opportunities to dig into some interesting cloud workloads. In addition to building all kinds of applications running in Windows Azure, I’ve learned a lot working...

Lately I’ve been attempting to try out a number of different techniques for publishing web applications – both websites and web APIs – to the cloud. I’m being purposely vague when saying “the cloud” – it could be Windows Azure, AWS, or even a traditional hosting provider. It’s likely you saw a great...

Yesterday Windows Azure experienced a worldwide disruption in many services due to an expired PKI certificate for Windows Azure storage. Mary Jo Foley’s article Windows Azure storage issue: Expired HTTPS certificate possibly at fault provides the best coverage of the event as it unfolded. You can also...

Azure SQL Reporting goes live. Finally we have started taking our core assets into the cloud. Summary: Microsoft’s reporting services for Azure is finally generally available. Microsoft’s announcement of its Windows Azure spring update included a lot of moving parts. One that didn’t get as much attention...

Excellent keynote today by Scott Guthrie and the Windows Azure team! I don’t know if it’s because I’m seeing it on the other side for the first time or if it’s due to the amazing new capabilities introduced into Windows Azure, but I loved every second of it! Within a few minutes Scott had jumped [.....

Today’s release marks a significant milestone for Windows Azure. To date, Windows Azure has been a platform that allows developers to build and run applications across Microsoft’s global datacenters – the key emphasis has been on “applications”. Windows Azure has not been a platform for providing the...

Recently Steve Marx and I spent a few hours working on a best practices document for Windows Azure. As expected, this was a fun and educational experience – plenty of goofing around, but also some really good discussion on things to think about when building applications for Windows Azure. One of the...

This past week I’ve been working on a little project – amazing how less email equates to more time for other endeavors – and I was surprised when I received a DataServiceQueryException when querying table storage in the local storage emulator. I was querying based on partition and row keys and, if no...

I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about the right title for this post. Steve Marx was clever with Career vNext, Sriram Krishnan waxed poetic with On Leaving Microsoft, and Brad Abrams just came out and talked about My Last Day at Microsoft. Yet no matter how it’s phrased it comes down to one...

Umbraco is a fairly mature CMS system and recently I was engaged in an assignment to deploy Umbraco CMS to Windows Azure. In this post, I’ll share some of my learning’s. Umbraco accelerator (I call it bootstrapper) works well for small to medium web sites but you definitely have to increase the default...

Have you seen this error before? If you’ve spent any time with the Windows Azure storage emulator it’s highly probable. Here’s the full text: Added reservation for http://127.0.0.1:10000/ in user account COMPUTER\User. Added reservation for http://127.0.0.1:10001/ in user account COMPUTER\User. Added...

Great use of Azure platform for voting… Democracy Live is playing an important role in the presidential primaries in Florida, Virginia and California by making it easier for American military personnel stationed overseas and other citizens living abroad to vote in U.S. elections. Since voting began,...

If you follow my blog or on Twitter then you know that I’m passionate about using services running in Windows Azure to power mobile applications. To effectively run mobile services for mobile apps you need a platform that is responsive to a global audience and able to scale to the needs of your user...

  Good overview of SQL Azure Federation by Cihan Biyikoglu .  

Recently I wrote a WCF service that fronted an on-premises SQL Server database for an MVC application running in a Window Azure Web Role. There are a number of ways I could have approached this scenario; I decided to use the netTcpRelayBinding via the Windows Azure Service Bus for the following reasons...

Good to see Azure picking up with environmental agency. Cloud computing can be a powerful tool for scientists and researchers sharing massive amounts of environmental data. At the United Nations climate conference (COP 17) in Durban, South Africa this week, The European Environment Agency, geospatial...

A couple days ago I wrote a post on outsourcing user authentication in a Windows Phone application, demonstrating how easy it is to leverage the Windows Azure Access Control service in your Windows Phone application. The solution is built using a set of NuGet packages that our team has built for Windows...

Yesterday I shared all the NuGet packages we’re building to make it easy to build Windows Phone and Windows Azure applications. Today I wanted to share how easy it is to build a Windows Phone application that leverages the Windows Azure Access Control service. The Phone.Identity.AccessControl.BasePage...

Earlier this week we released the Windows Azure SDK 1.6, which includes a lot of great updates to the emulators, tools for Visual Studio, and libraries. One of my favorite additions is a new way to get a management certificate installed into Windows Azure and onto your machine. You can now browse to...

If you’ve been paying attention to the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone (or my twitter feed) the last couple weeks, you’ve probably noticed something about NuGet packages. We’ve been building a lot of Windows Phone and Windows Azure NuGet packages that, when composed together, give you the ability...

Today we published the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit – October Release. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit includes hands-on labs, presentations, and samples to help you understand how to build applications that utilize Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and the Windows Azure AppFabric. Download...

Yesterday I released an update to the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone. There are a few important updates in this release, so I encourage you to go and download the new tools. We have a number of significant updates: Upgraded Windows Azure projects to Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio...

As Promised at Build conference Windows Azure Marketplace is now live in 26 countries with support for 17 currencies. With this release we have delivered on a promise to our ISVs to have a g lobal marketplace for cloud applications and data with s ecure commerce platform. Benefits to ISVS: ISVs in 26...

Yesterday we released the Window Azure Platform Training Kit – September 2011 Release. You can get the content here: Windows Azure Platform Training Kit (offline) Windows Azure Platform Training Courses (online) The September 2011 release of the training kit includes the following updates: [New Hands...

Now that we can get our hands on the Windows Developer Preview of Windows 8, I’m sure everyone is excited to start building applications! For many of us, this means that we’ll want to install all of the great Windows Azure tools on our Windows Developer Preview machine – especially if we plan to take...