This Wednesday, November 14th, we’ll be hosting Windows AzureConf – a free online event for and by the Windows Azure community.  It will be streamed online from 8:30am->5:00 PM PST via Channel 9 , and you can watch it all for free. I’ll be kicking off the event with a Windows Azure overview in the morning (a great way to learn more about Windows Azure if you haven’t used it yet!), and following my talk the rest of the day will be full of excellent presentations from members of the Windows...

We've updated our Workflow Developer Center on MSDN. We've simplified the design and refreshed the site with updated links. As part of this work, we've also pulled together a list of key WF samples. Our goal is for this to be a go-to site that aggregates key Workflow resources, including documentation, samples, videos, and other important links. Let us know what other content you think is important and what else you'd like to see on the site. Blog Post by: Jurgen Willis

It’s been a fun couple of weeks launching HDInsight, and I’m going to be getting back into doing some more technical blogging.  There are a few easy topics off the bat that we’ve heard requested from customers.  The first one involves Piggybank , which is a user contributed collection of useful Pig user defined functions (UDF’s). This assumes your machine is set up with: HDInsight (grab from WebPI here ) Java build tools ( Ant and Ivy on your command path) Next, let’s build Piggybank by...

This is the code sample that accompanies my talk at DevConnections 2012 in Las Vegas. It provides a great starter for hosting WASABi (the Autoscaler that's a part of Enterprise Library). Feel free to download and play around, and contact...

We delivered a Workflow session at the //build/ conference yesterday. Slides and a recording of the presentation are now available ; it was a great opportunity to provide an update on all of our recent investments . It was a packed session with lots of good questions and discussions afterward. Thank you to everyone who was able to attend //build/ in person - the team is really enjoying all of the great conversations! Blog Post by: Jurgen Willis

We have a new case study from one of our good partners, PayGlobal . The case study does a great job describing how WF contributes to their Exolvo solution. It also highlights the developer productivity gains that PayGlobal's consultants and customers are seeing from the Workflow designer enhancements we made in .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012. From the article: “Adopting Windows Workflow Foundation 4.5 for our Exolvo product development has made it much easier to build and maintain the...

This week we finished rolling out .NET 4.5 to all of our Windows Azure Web Site clusters.  This means that you can now publish and run ASP.NET 4.5 based apps, and use  .NET 4.5 libraries and features (for example: async and the new spatial data-type support in EF), with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This enables a ton of really great capabilities - check out Scott Hanselman’s great post of videos that highlight a few of them. Visual Studio 2012 includes built-in publishing support to Windows...

We have completed our validation work and are pleased to announce that Microsoft AppFabric 1.1 for Windows Server now supports the following platforms: .NET 4.5 Windows Server 2012 Windows 8 x64 (for development purposes) Windows PowerShell 3.0 SQL Server 2012 No changes were required in AppFabric to run on these platforms, so no updates are required. Blog Post by: Jurgen Willis

Today we announced the RTM release of Workflow Manager 1.0, a new offering that builds on and extends the capabilities of WF 4.5. It's been an incredibly busy time for the team, and we're thrilled to get this release out to our customers, hot on the heels of our WF enhancements in .NET 4.5 . As previously mentioned , this first release of Workflow Manager has had a strong focus on supporting the upcoming releases of SharePoint Server 2013 and Office 365. Thank you to all of you who helped...

A few weeks ago I blogged about Windows Azure Mobile Services - a new capability in Windows Azure that makes it incredibly easy to connect your client and mobile applications to a scalable cloud backend. Earlier today we delivered a number of great improvements to Windows Azure Mobile Services.  New features include: iOS support – enabling you to connect iPhone and iPad apps to Mobile Services Facebook, Twitter, and Google authentication support with Mobile Services Blob, Table, Queue, and Service...

This download is described in my forthcoming DevProConnections article. Stay tuned for a direct link to the article. For those looking for the source in the article, here it is: Download Ronin

Earlier today we released a number of enhancements to the new Windows Azure Management Portal.  These new capabilities include: Service Bus Management and Monitoring Support for Managing Co-administrators Import/Export support for SQL Databases Virtual Machine Experience Enhancements Improved Cloud Service Status Notifications Media Services Monitoring Support Storage Container Creation and Access Control Support All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using...

(Intro: Sometimes as part of testing I go to silly lengths to try to point out what I think is going to be a bug in a piece of code I have seen. And frequently when I do this, I am basically wrong, for any of various reasons – it’s a bug according to some world view which is not quite aligned with reality, or whatever. Overall I think I tend to frustrate some people when I go through this exercise, but an end result is often that I learn something...) I just emerged from the testing vaults with a...

Today, I am pleased to announce the ten finalists for the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure powered by TechStars . These startups are about to launch into a three-month program where they will develop new products and businesses using Windows Azure. The response to the program has been fantastic - we received nearly 600 applications from entrepreneurs in 69 countries around the world, spanning a host of industries including retail, travel, entertainment, banking, real estate and more. ...

I’m excited to announce some great improvements to the Windows Azure Web Sites capability we first introduced earlier this summer .  Today’s improvements include: a new low-cost shared mode scaling option, support for custom domains with shared and reserved mode web-sites using both CNAME and A-Records (the later enabling naked domains), continuous deployment support using both CodePlex and GitHub, and FastCGI extensibility.  All of these improvements are now live in production and available...

With my partner in crime Isabelle Van Campenhoudt (SQL Server MVP), I’ll be SharePoint 2013 speaker for the Guss (Groupe des Utilisateurs Francophones de SQL Server, Paris) by the end of September in the Microsoft France Offices; for more information click here. Of course, I will share my slidedeck… Blog Post by: sergeluca

Today I’m just advertising another MSDN blog that got circulated my way. This post may only going to make full sense if you’ve heard of OData already. If you’re heard of OData, and have been wondering what a good way to use it from workflow might be, I think you’ll find it good food for thought. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/derrick_vanarnams_blog/archive/2012/09/06/announcing-the-adventureworks-odata-feed-sample.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/derrick_vanarnams_blog/archive/2012/09/12/introducing-the-odata...

I’ve been managing the creation of a new web site (based on SharePoint) that went live today. the technologies used are : Office 365 (SharePoint Online), javascript, css, SharePoint Client Object Model : Blog Post by: sergeluca

I know I haven’t posted much since SharePoint 2013 preview has been made available by Microsoft. I’m currently writing 2 chapters of a SharePoint 2013 book that should be published soon. Chapter 1 : SharePoint 2013 as a Business Intelligence Platform Chapter 2 : SharePoint 2013 : new workflow features. Blog Post by: sergeluca

Pluralsight has developed some great training courses on the new .NET 4.5 and VS 2012 release, including two fantastic courses from John Papa that cover how to build HTML5 web apps using ASP.NET Web API, Knockout and jQuery: Single Page Apps with HTML5, Web API, Knockout and jQuery Building HTML5 and JavaScript Apps with MVVM and Knockout Free 1-Month Subscription to the Courses Pluralsight is offering a special promotion that allows you to get a free 1-month subscription to watch the above courses...