Posted by Alin Irimie
on March 25, 2009
Amazon Web Services Team just released an important new feature for Amazon SimpleDB. The new BatchPutAttributes function allows you to create or update up to 25 SimpleDB items at a time, in transactional fashion.
This new call is more efficient than a series of individual PutAttribute calls since one call incurs far less connection latency than a series of 25 calls. This new feature is available today and you can read about it here.
Also, based on feedback from the SimpleDB user community, they have increased the limit on the number of items per domain from 250 million to 1 billion.
Posted by Alin Irimie
on March 23, 2009
Here’s a list of Windows Azure related videos presented at MIX ‘09.
Posted by Alin Irimie
on March 22, 2009
Microsoft Live Team have new samples available for your use at Live Framework Code Gallery. They intend to release more samples at this location. You can subscribe to RSS Feed to keep track of changes being posted to Code Gallery.
You can also contribute your samples to MSDN Code Gallery. Click on Create New Resource Page, follow the instructions and upload the Code Sample/Application. Once you are done uploading, make sure that you tag your Sample/Application with Livefx and other appropriate tags so other community members can easily find this. Also, a post to this forum would be appreciated as well!
Here’s the list of samples added, for March 2009: Continue reading…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on March 19, 2009
Good news! The Azure team at Microsoft Just released the new and improved Windows Azure Tools and SDK. From now on, you only have to download the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio and the SDK will be installed as part of that package. Still not sure if it works in Windows 7.
Udate: This CTP does not fix the issue with Windows 7. Seems like the issue is within Windows 7 and should be fixed in the next Windows 7 release. There are no changes within the March CTP that would address the issue blocking the use on Windows 7. Continue reading…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on March 19, 2009
Today Microsoft Corp. announced the availability of Windows Internet Explorer 8, the new Web browser that offers the best solution for how people use the Web today. It can be downloaded in 25 languages at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8 starting at noon EDT on March 19. Internet Explorer 8 is easier to use, faster and offers leading-edge security features in direct response to people’s increasing concerns about online safety.
In addition to offering improved security and privacy protections, Internet Explorer 8 is one of the fastest browsers on the market today behind Safari and Firefox. It also helps people save time while using the Web with easy-to-use new features, including the following: Continue reading…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on March 18, 2009
Amazon Web Services is discontinuing the Alexa Site Thumbnail
service. The service has been providing developers with programmatic access to thumbnail images for the pages of web sites that were stored in Alexa’s index. New subscriptions are no longer being accepted, and existing subscribers will only have operational access until June 12, 2009.
Alexa Site Thumbnail was a paying service (developers were charged $0.0002 / thumbnail URL returned i.e. $0.20 per 1,000 thumbnail URLs) but in an e-mail sent out to developers Amazon admits that it never really took off and that the company will do the smart thing and focus their resources on more popular services.
The best alternative out there is PageGlimpse. It provides an easy to use API, a Wordpress plugin, .NET library and many other tools and features for FREE.
Posted by Alin Irimie
on March 13, 2009
The WCF REST Starter Kit is a set of .Net Framework classes and Visual Studio features and templates that enable users to create and access REST-style Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services. These services are based on the WCF web programming model available in .Net 3.5 SP1. The starter kit also contains the full source code for all features, detailed code samples, and unit tests.
The first set of features in the starter kit is server-side features for building WCF REST services, which enable or simplify various aspects of using the REST capabilities in WCF. These include declarative caching, security, error handling, help page support, conditional PUT, push style streaming, type based dispatch and semi-structured XML support. This functionality is exercised by a set of Visual Studio templates for creating REST services such as an Atom Feed service, a REST-RPC hybrid service, a resource singleton or collection service, and an Atom Publishing Protocol service.
You can download it here: WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2.
Preview 2 of the starter kit introduces a second set of client-side features for accessing WCF and third-party REST services from within .Net applications. The new HttpClient class provides the REST developer with a uniform extensible model for sending HTTP requests and processing HTTP responses, in a variety of formats. The new “Paste Xml as Type” Visual Studio add-in enhances the serialization support in HttpClient by generating serializable types based on XML examples or XSD schema.
Posted by Alin Irimie
on March 12, 2009
Amazon just announced a new EC2 pricing model, which they call Reserved Instances. After you purchase such an instance for a one-time fee, you have the option to launch an EC2 instance of a certain instance type, in a particular availability zone, for a period of either 1 of 3 years. Your launch is guaranteed to succeed; there’s no chance of encountering any transient limitations in EC2 capacity. You have no obligation to run the instances full time, so you’ll pay even less if you choose to turn them off when you are not using them.
Steady-state usage costs, when computed on an hourly basis over the term of the reservation, are significantly lower than those for the on-demand model. For example, an on-demand EC2 Small instance costs 10 cents per hour. Here’s the cost breakdown for a reserved instance (also check out the complete EC2 pricing info):
| Instances |
Standard |
Reserved (1 year / 3 years) |
| Small (Default) |
$0.11 per hour |
$0.03 per hour |
$325 |
$500 |
| Large |
$0.44 per hour |
$0.12 per hour |
$1300 |
$2000 |
| Extra Large |
$0.88 per hour |
$0.24 per hour |
$2600 |
$4000 |
| High CPU |
|
|
| Medium |
$0.22 per hour |
$0.06 per hour |
$650 |
$1000 |
| Extra Large |
$0.88 per hour |
$0.24 per hour |
$2600 |
$4000 |
|
.
This new model is really cool and easy to explain to your management. Think of the one-time fee as somewhat akin to acquiring hardware, and the hourly usage as similar to operating costs.
I did a quick calculation for a small instance, and savings are big if you run a 24/7 shop (like us).
A small instance running 24/7, meaning 8736 hours a year costs us, at $0.10/hour, $873, approximately $72/month. If we get a reserved instance, at $0.03/hr it will cost us … Continue reading…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on March 11, 2009
SQL Data Services team at Microsoft, proudly announced that SDS will deliver full relational database capabilities as a service. They promise to hold true to some on the main “cloud” principles, things like High Availability, Fault Tolerance, Friction Free Provisioning, Pay As You Grow Scaling, Immediate Consistency. They are still delivering on these promises and have added to the mix true relational capabilities, T-SQL and compatibility with the existing developer and management tools ecosystem.
The services can be accessed using TDS. TDS stands for Tabular Data Stream and it’s the published protocol that clients use to communicate with SQL Server. From its inception, SDS has always been built on the SQL Server technology foundation and it just made sense to allow our users to access their data via TDS. Most importantly for developers, this means symmetric SQL Server functionality and behavior combined with compatibility with the existing tools you are familiar with. This way, we’ll have: Tables, Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views, Indexes, Visual Studio Compatibility, ADO.Net Compatibility, ODBC Compatibility.
A majority of database applications will “just work”, allowing developers to target on and off-premises deployments with essentially the same code base. The initial scenarios they’re targeting are things like web and departmental applications.
What about Security?
Continue reading…
