August, 2012

I’m excited to announce a new capability we are adding to Windows Azure today: Windows Azure Mobile Services Windows Azure Mobile Services makes it incredibly easy to connect a scalable cloud backend to your client and mobile applications.  It allows you to easily store structured data in the cloud that can span both devices and users, integrate it with user authentication, as well as send out updates to clients via push notifications. Today’s release enables you to add these capabilities to...

Earlier this year we announced Windows Azure Media Services . Windows Azure Media Services is a cloud-based PaaS solution that enables you to efficiently build and deliver media solutions to customers. It offers a bunch of ready-to-use services that enable the fast ingestion, encoding, format-conversion, storage, content protection, and streaming (both live and on-demand) of video.  Windows Azure Media Services can be used to deliver solutions to any device or client - including HTML5, Silverlight...

I’ve gotten a few questions about AppFabric for Windows Server, so I’d like to share some thoughts on the topic, specifically on the Workflow management aspects of AppFabric Server. First, it’s important to clarify what AppFabric Server is/isn’t, since I’ve seen some confusion on this. Simply put, AppFabric provides a set of extensions for IIS-hosted workflows. With .NET 4, we added support for “WCF Workflows Services”, workflows that you can call as WCF...

I mentioned in the previous post that one of our key investments has been supporting the new workflow model in SharePoint 2013 , which is now available in Preview form. To accomplish this, we have been developing the “Workflow Manager”. As the name implies Workflow Manager provides a hosting and management solution for workflows, built on the Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.5. Workflow Manager will be a general purpose technology, but the schedule and features for the first release...

We’ve been making significant investments in Workflow since the release of .NET 4, and now that we're starting to wrap up some of these investments, I thought it would be worthwhile to provide a summary. The work falls into 3 major areas: Improvements in Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012, which has just reached RTM ! Enhancements for running Windows Workflow Foundation in Azure Support for the new workflow capabilities in SharePoint 2013 and the next version...

Tomorrow, Friday August 10th, I’m doing another online LIDNUG session .  The talk will be from 2pm to 3:30pm (Pacific Time).  I do these talks a few times a year and they tend to be pretty fun.  Attendees can ask any questions they want to me, and listen to me answer them live via LiveMeeting.  We usually end up having some really good discussions on a wide variety of topics.  Any topic or question is fair game. You can learn more and register to attend the online event for...

This small utility can download SharePoint Solution packages uploaded to SharePoint. I have updated it for SharePoint 2013 beta; we now have a version for SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013.   Blog Post by: sergeluca