The Transient Fault Handling Framework provides a set of reusable components for adding intelligent retry logic into applications leveraging SQL Azure, Windows Azure storage and AppFabric Service Bus. It enables enhancing existing applications with support for retry-aware scopes that greatly improve reliability and reduce the … More » Blog Post by: Valery Mizonov

Today I did a fun presentation at the Engineering World Conference in the Netherlands on using the Windows Phone 7 with a Workflow Service hosted on Windows Azure. The sample application, that is complete with all source on CodePlex over here , consists of an expense app on the phone and an ASP.NET MVC site hosting the workflow service. The PowerPoint presentation can be found here . It was a fun session on a fun event   www.TheProblemSolver.nl www.dotnetevents.nl Blog Post by: Maurice

The next update to the Windows Azure AppFabric LABS environment is scheduled for February 9, 2011 (Wednesday). Users will have NO access to the AppFabric LABS portal and services during the scheduled maintenance down time. When: START: February 9, 2011, 10 am PST END: February 9, 2011, 6 pm PST Impact Alert: The AppFabric LABS environment (Service Bus, Access Control, Caching, and portal) will be unavailable during this period. Additional impacts are described below. Action Required: Cache SDK and...

The following blog post summarizes some of my personal key learnings from a recent customer project where I have successfully been able to leverage Enterprise Library 5.0 (EntLib) on the Windows Azure platform and take advantage of several capabilities provided … More » Blog Post by: Valery Mizonov

Facebook has a half-billion users. You have an idea and want to make it available to those users. Problem is, what if it turns out your idea is good, goes viral, and the hordes come beating on your doors to get in? The article below from Internet.com is about a great success story using Windows Azure with Facebook, and an SDK that’s available to get you jump started. In addition, a forthcoming version of the Azure AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS) supports Facebook connect (this is available...

To answer customers’ demand we have added a detailed FAQ page on our MSDN documentations in addition to the existing FAQs we have on our website. The current content is mainly focused on Service Bus pricing questions, but we will be updating this page frequently, so please make sure to check back often. Here is a link to the new Windows Azure AppFabric FAQ page on MSDN. You can also find general FAQs on the Windows Azure Platform FAQ page on our website, and filter these results according to different...

If you interested in an in-depth understanding of workflow services along with various security options. Then check out my latest MSDN magazine article. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/magazine/gg598919.aspx Associated Source code Blog Post by: zamd

I have co-authored a whitepaper on the TechNet Wiki based on a customer project. The paper “Implementing end-to-end ordered delivery using Microsoft BizTalk Server and SQL Server Service Broker” is available here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/implementing-end-to-end-ordered-delivery-using-microsoft-biztalk-server-and-sql-server-service-broker.aspx. Check it out on the TechNet … More » Blog Post by: Tim Wieman

CloudCamp in LA a couple of weeks ago was a lot of fun, a good time was had by all, and much knowledge was exchanged. Lots and lots of great discussions happened. It doesn’t matter what your knowledge level is, whether you’re a guru or maybe just be wondering about the cloud, you will get something out of this and learn new things. This is a technology-agnostic event. Next week CloudCamp comes to San Diego. This is a totally free event (well, except for parking). CloudCamp is an unconference where...

In this post I’ll walk you through the steps of exposing a ‘Windows Server AppFabric’ hosted workflow service over the Azure service bus.  IIS/AppFabric hosted services are message activated so they cannot be visible on the servicebus until they are activated. So in this post, I’ll use the AutoStart feature of AppFabric to make my [...] Blog Post by: zamd

I am thrilled to announce that we have released a January 2011 update to the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit & Training Course. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit & Training Course includes a comprehensive set of technical content including hands-on labs, presentations, and demos that are designed to help you learn how to use [...] Blog Post by: Wade

As I blogged about here , CodeCamp Fullerton is this weekend. I signed up for 3 sessions. My friend, author and Azure MVP David Pallmann will also be doing Azure session there (as well as many others). The way the organizers have laid things out on Saturday is a thing of beauty if you’re an Azure person. You can basically camp out in room UH246 at 10:00am and get the “Brian and David” show all day long. Saturday - Room UH 246: 10:00am - Brian - Windows Azure Overview 12:15pm - Brian - Windows Azure...

One of the most common workloads I hear about from customers and developers is video encoding in Windows Azure.  There are certainly many ways to perform video encoding in Windows Azure – in fact, at PDC 2009 I was joined by Mark Richards of Origin Digital who discussed their video transcoding solution on Windows Azure [...] Blog Post by: Wade

Recently, in October 2010, at our Professional Developers Conference (PDC) we made some exciting roadmap announcements regarding Windows Azure AppFabric, and we have already gotten very positive feedback regarding this roadmap from both customers and analysts ( Gartner Names Windows Azure AppFabric "A Strategic Core of Microsoft's Cloud Platform" ). As result of these announcements we wanted to have a series of blog posts that will give a refreshed introduction to the Windows Azure...

One of the main benefits of identity federation for you as an end user is that you don’t need to maintain / remember tons of Usernames and Passwords for all those disparate systems that you deal with. You can do with just one Username and Passowrd which will enable you to logon to multiple systems. You may say…”OK, so what is the big deal?, I will have the same Username and Password for all my systems, Emails, Website etc.”, well it’s not the same thing… By keeping...

Identity Federation as the name suggest, is a process of relating multiple identities such that disparate systems can be integrated seamlessly. To put it in simple words, Identity federation is a concept of ensuring that a user does not have to manually logon to multiple systems to accomplish a given objective, it enables you to navigate through the systems by logging on only once. For example, imagine you are planning your next vacation and you logon to your favorite travel agent’s website...

When: START: Thursday 27, 2011, 3 pm PST END: Thursday 27, 2011, 4 pm PST Impact Alert: Customers of Service Bus CTP in LABS environment will experience intermittent failures for the duration of this maintenance. Action Required: None The Windows Azure AppFabric Team Blog Post by: netsqlservicesteam

We recently published this case study on Advanced Telemetry , a startup that offers an extensible, remote, energy-monitoring-and-control software framework. The company migrated its telemetry solution to the Windows Azure Platform in order to expand into new vertical markets without having to incur the costs of investing in server infrastructure. As part of their solution the company used Windows Azure, SQL Azure and Windows Azure AppFabric. AppFabric Service Bus is used by the developers in order...

Ever wanted to have something running in the background servicing your Web Role in Windows Azure? Maybe you want to preload often read but seldom written values from SQL Azure or you’d like to download content in the background on … More » Blog Post by: Christian Martinez

Introduction In the first article of the series we discussed how to exchange messages with an orchestration via a two-way WCF Receive Location using the Duplex Message Exchange Pattern. This form of bi-directional communication is characterized by the ability of … More » Blog Post by: Paolo Salvatori