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

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 this post regarding Service Bus and Access Control , and this post regarding Caching . In the current post we will discuss how AppFabric addresses the challenges developers and IT Pros face when Building Composite Applications and how the Composite App service plays a key role in that. Building Composite Applications As noted in the first...

Thanks to Jean-Sebastien who contacted me with this question. Imagine you have the following service contract 1: [ServiceContract] 2: public interface IBaseMyServiceContract 3: { 4: [OperationContract] 5: MyMessage CallAMethod( string correlationHandle, MyMessage data); 6: } Now suppose you want to create a workflow service which implements this contract using the technique I showed in my blog post How to make a WorkflowService implement a contract But to make it interesting suppose you want to use...

Today we released the new and improved Windows Azure AppFabric Silverlight-based portal experience. The new Silverlight-based portal provides the same great experience as the Windows Azure and SQL Azure Silverlight portals. The new Silverlight portal has the same capabilities as the old portal with an improved Silverlight experience. We will have both the old and the new portals available in parallel for a while, but we will remove the old portal in the near future. The possible error message that...

Now available Download the AppFabric WCF Service Template C# Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft’s unified programming model for building service-oriented applications. Windows Server AppFabric provides tools for managing and monitoring your web services and workflows. The AppFabric WCF Service template brings these two products together providing the following features: Monitor the calls to your service across multiple servers with AppFabric Monitoring Create custom Event Tracing...

In a few days, we’ll be deploying an updated Windows Azure AppFabric portal to correspond to recent changes in our environment . In the interim, users of the AppFabric portal located at http://appfabric.azure.com may experience the following issue: When creating a new service namespace, the namespace appears as “Activating” for several seconds and then appears as “Active”. If you click on the namespace link you may be redirected to an error page. If you wait 2-5 minutes...

Unplug from your day job. Be inspired at MIX. Join the conversation at MIX – see the latest tools and technologies and draw inspiration from a professional community of your peers and experts. More About MIX. · PREVIEW THE NEXT WEB MIX is where you’ll learn about the future of web, from the diversity of devices and interaction models on the front-end, to the tools and technologies that power the user experience, to the services that make it all possible. There’s no better...

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft’s unified programming model for building service-oriented applications. Windows Server AppFabric provides tools for managing and monitoring your web services and workflows. WCF HTTP Service is a service that can be accessed by a simple HTTP POST/GET request and can return responses in plain XML and in JSON formats. The AppFabric WCF HTTP Service template brings these two products together providing the following features: Monitor the calls...

The February 2011 update of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit includes several updates and bug fixes for the hands-on labs.   Most of the updates were focused on supporting the new Windows Azure AppFabric February CTP and the new portal experience for AppFabric Caching, Access Control, and the Service Bus.  The specific content that was [...] Blog Post by: Wade

By now most customers do understand that AppFabric Cache improves application performance by offering a distributed in-memory cache but often I get asked, what performance gains can be expect? The answer has several pivots, since one needs to first understand … More » Blog Post by: Jaime Alva Bravo

Lately, a lot of CTP’s came available on the Windows Azure platform. My goal is to try them all out. I blogged on two of these technologies already: Using Windows Azure VM Role Azure connect - VPN as a service This time, we’re getting on the data side, with SQL Azure Data Sync. This data synchronization service is built on the Microsoft Sync Framework technologies. It provides bi-directional data synchronization and data management capabilities allowing data to be easily shared across...

Today (1/3/2011) the Windows Azure 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. The addition is under United States (North/Central). Value...

The Windows Azure AppFabric LABS release of Access Control Service received an update today that impacts users who are using ACS management service. For more details, see the ACS release notes on Codeplex . The Windows Azure AppFabric Team Blog Post by: netsqlservicesteam

Yesterday during the “Cloud Computing in Retail Breakfast” at the Euroshop Retail Design Conference in Dusseldorf, Germany, Microsoft partner BEDIN Shop Systems made an announcement regarding their retail industry software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions powered by the Windows Azure platform. BEDIN Shop Systems announced that their Windows Azure-based aKite® Vers.2.0 software services suite has gained significant customer acceptance since its introduction on July 11, 2010 at Microsoft’s...

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

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...

  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