Posted by Alin Irimie
on June 13, 2009
According to the .NET Services Team blog, they’re going to release the June 2009 QFE on 6/18/2009 (Thursday). Users will have NO access to .NET Services Portal and .NET Services during the scheduled maintenance down time from 6/18/2009 noon to 6/18/2009 5pm.
There are a few things you should be aware if you’re using .NET Services like:
Queues and Routers data will NOT be persisted and restored after the maintenance. Users will need to back up their data if they wish to restore them after the QFE release.
Check the details here.
Posted by Alin Irimie
on June 12, 2009
There are three new “How Do I” videos on Windows Azure, you can watch and learn from.
How Do I: Use Paging in Windows Azure Tables.
To improve application usability, many applications need to support viewing data page-by-page. In this screencast, you’ll learn how Windows Azure table storage provides a built-in mechanism that allows you to efficiently page through query results.
How Do I: Sync Between Devices and the Cloud with FeedSync?
Syncing the cloud and a growing world of devices is a fundamental need in today’s world. In this video, you will learn how to use FeedSync feeds to synchronize Live Framework data between a device and the cloud.
How Do I: Leverage Concurrency in Windows Azure Table Storage?
Windows Azure table storage is designed to support many users at the same time. In this session, you’ll learn how Windows Azure table storage supports concurrency, and you’ll learn a few strategies to help you deal with any concurrency violations.
Enjoy!
Posted by Alin Irimie
on June 11, 2009
The Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop is tested and deployed on Yahoo!’s clusters, which are the largest Hadoop clusters in the world. The Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop is a source distribution that is based entirely on code found in the Apache Hadoop project.
Hadoop is a free Java software framework that supports data intensive distributed applications. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers.
A wide variety of companies and organizations use Hadoop for both research and production. Users are encouraged to add themselves to the Hadoop users wiki page.
Amazon announced in April the beta release of a new service called Amazon Elastic MapReduce which they describe as “a web service that enables businesses, researchers, data analysts, and developers to easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data. It utilizes a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
Posted by Alin Irimie
on June 10, 2009
Microsoft released ASP .NET MVC for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, you can find the installer on CodePlex. Many of the new Visual Studio 2010 features intended to support the TDD workflow fit very nicely with ASP.NET MVC, which ScottGu will describe in an upcoming blog post.
If you run into problems with the intaller, try out this troubleshooting guide by Jacques, the developer who did the installer work and do provide feedback.
You’ll notice that the installer says this is ASP.NET MVC 1.1, but as the readme notes point out, this is really ASP.NET MVC 1.0 retargeted for Visual Studio 2010. The 1.1 is just a placeholder version number. The version number was bumped to avoid runtime conflicts with ASP.NET MVC 1.0. All of this and more is described in the Release Notes…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on June 10, 2009
I wrote previously about the potential of SQL Data Services, the sql-in-the-cloud offering from Microsoft. Today, Shankar Pal, the Principal Program Manager for SQL Data Services (SDS) team mentioned in the SQL Data Services blog that Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive (EHA) is built in the cloud, using SDS. He writes about how well the SDS relational database service platform scales and provides some simple design principles to achieve maximum scalability .
Make no mistake about it, this is a big deal.
Posted by Alin Irimie
on June 03, 2009
In the previous article about SQL Data Services (SDS) I mentioned one of the most exciting technologies coming out from Microsoft this year: Data Hub, “an aggregation of enterprise, partner, desktop and device data within SQL Data Services”. It is a service, hosted in the Azure data centers along with SQL Data Services you can use to synchronize your on-premises database with the database in the cloud. This service is completely based on the Microsoft Sync Framework technology.
What you can do with it, is you can take an existing database on your premises, and sync-enable it, mainly you can specify tables, rows, which should be published to the cloud.
Posted by Alin Irimie
on June 03, 2009
Steve Guggenheimer’s anniversary keynote address at leading OEM conference highlights partner opportunities with upcoming Microsoft innovations:
“Today during a keynote address at Computex 2009 in Taipei, Microsoft’s OEM Division Corporate Vice President Steve Guggenheimer revealed that the company is confident with the progress made with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and that as a result, Microsoft will deliver Release to Manufacturing (RTM) code to partners in the second half of July. Windows 7 will become generally available on Oct. 22, 2009, and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be broadly available at the same time.”
Whow … that seems fast compared with Vista release …
Posted by Alin Irimie
on May 29, 2009
New for the May 2009 CTP:
- Support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1
- Update for Visual Studio 2008
- Improved integration with the Development Fabric and Storage services to improve the reliability of debug and run of Cloud Services from Visual Studio
- Enhanced robustness and stability
Release notes/Known issues are available here.
Visual Studio 2010 compatible samples are available here.
Direct download link here.
See this post for more information.
Posted by Alin Irimie
on May 27, 2009
One thing in the Microsoft cloud I find really interesting is SQL Data Services and Huron/Data Hub - SQL cloud sync service, one of the “cloud” offerings I believe has lots of potential and will really make sharing of data in the cloud so much easier.
I had the pleasure to sit down and talk about this subject with Liam Cavanagh, Sr. Program Manager at Microsoft, with the SDS/Huron team, and get some insights about the current state and the future of this remarkable new technology. In this article I’ll talk about SQL Data Services, and I’ll follow up with one about Data Hub/Huron.
SQL Data Services is at the core, nothing more than a (Microsoft SQL) database-as-a-service offering from Microsoft, part of the Azure Services Platform. First thing you’ll find about SQL Data Services is that “is just SQL” (at least that’s how Microsoft is advertising it). And it is.
Posted by Alin Irimie
on May 25, 2009
Some good news here, or bad, depends how you look at it. COM is not supported in Windows Azure. Azure VM’s don’t have COM runtime installed. Currently the only native code supported in Windows Azure is standard C++ library and standard Win32 API. There’s no MFC, COM or COM+.
To expose the C++ library as a service, if it is a 64 bit library, you can use straight PInvoke. If it is a 32 bit library, you’ll have to create a .NET exe project as a bridge that will use PInvoke with the native library. Then expose a WCF service in the .NET project using NetNamePipeBinding. Your web/worker role can than talk with the WCF service.
I don’t believe COM will be supported any time in the future.
