The final release of ASP.NET MVC 2 is now available for VS 2008/Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with ASP.NET 3.5. You can download and install it from the following locations:
Download ASP.NET MVC 2 using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer
Download ASP.NET MVC 2 from the Download Center
The final release of VS 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 will have ASP.NET MVC 2 built-in – so you won’t need an additional install in order to use ASP.NET MVC 2 with them.
Ryan Dunn, the Technical Evangelist for Windows Azure, posted a neat trick on how to measure your database size in SQL Azure. Here is the exact queries you can run to do it:
select
sum(reserved_page_count) * 8.0 / 1024
from
sys.dm_db_partition_stats
GO
select
sys.objects.name, sum(reserved_page_count) * 8.0 / 1024
from
sys.dm_db_partition_stats, sys.objects
where
sys.dm_db_partition_stats.object_id = sys.objects.object_id
group by sys.objects.name
The first one will give you the size of your database in MB and the second one will do the same, but break it out for each object in your database.
C – Connection
T – Time is seconds during 5 min interval for which connection is active. Value cannot exceed 300 ( 5*60=300seconds)
C1*T1+…+Cn*Tn
TWC = ———————
T1+…+Tn
Cost = max (TWC1,…, TWCn)/no.of days in month * 3.99
This release supports VS 2008 and the upcoming VS 2010 RC. For VS 2010 Beta 2 you can use the November 2009 release.
New for version 1.1:
Updated and additional samples are available at: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuresamples
Microsoft Corp. and the National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced an agreement that will offer individual researchers and research groups selected through NSF’s merit review process free access to advanced cloud computing resources. By extending the capabilities of powerful, easy-to-use PC applications via Microsoft cloud services, the program is designed to help broaden researcher capabilities, foster collaborative research communities, and accelerate scientific discovery. Projects will be awarded and managed by NSF. More details about funding opportunities are available here.
An interoperable cloud could help companies cut costs and governments connect constituents, say Microsoft executives.
Governments and businesses alike are looking at cloud services as a way to consolidate IT infrastructure, scale their IT systems for the future, and enable innovative services and activities that were not possible before.
To help organizations realize the benefits of cloud services, technology vendors are investing in the hard work of identifying and solving the challenges presented by operating in mixed IT environments, and are collaborating to ensure that their products work well together.
In fact, although the industry is still in the early stages of collaborating on cloud interoperability issues, there has already been considerable progress. But what does ‘cloud interoperability’ mean, and how is it benefiting people today?
Data Services Update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (aka ADO Data Services v1.5) has been re-released and is available for download. If your target is Windows7 or Windows 2008 R2 you can pick it up here. For all other OS versions you can get the release from here. This release targets the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 platform, provides new client and server side features for data service developers and will enable a number of new integration scenarios such as programming against SharePoint Lists.
This release is a redistributable, in-place update to the data services assemblies (System.Data.Services.*.dll) which shipped as part of the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. Since this is a .NET Framework update, this release does not include an updated Silverlight client libraryAn updated Silverlight client will be available soon.
What’s included in this release?
Window Azure platform AppFabric has now been deployed to more data centers around the world. Previously, when you provisioned a service namespace, you were asked to select a region from a list that contained only United States (South/Central). Now, when you provision a service namespace, you have three more regions from which to choose — United States (North/Central), Europe (North) and Asia (Southeast). If your firewall configuration restricts outbound traffic, you will need to perform the addition step of opening your outbound TCP port range 9350-9353 to the IP range associated with your selected regional data center. Those IP ranges are listed at the bottom of this article.
If you are a software developer and didn’t read this paper you should. This paper is targeted towards cloud architects who are gearing up to move an enterprise-class application from a fixed physical environment to a virtualized cloud environment. The focus of this paper is to highlight concepts, principles and best practices in creating new cloud applications or migrating existing applications to the cloud. Most importantly, the paper discusses some specific strategies on how to architect your application to leverage the benefits of the cloud benefits. Although you’ll see some specific tactics on how to use different Amazon Web Services features and services (the paper is written by Jinesh Varia, Web Services Evangelist at Amazon), the principles can be applied using any cloud providers (Windows Azure).
Current status on the health of the Windows Azure Platform is shown here. If you wish to receive notifications for interruptions to any of the services, you can subscribe to the respective RSS feeds. THey also maintain the history of the health status for each service for the past five weeks in the form of running logs.
Windows Azure Status Dashboard
