New for the May 2009 CTP:
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.
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. Continue reading…
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.
Amazon just released the BETA of a really useful service if you’re dealing with huge amounts of data.
AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWSImport/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity.
How does it work? Continue reading…
Microsoft is set to deliver Windows Azure to the public by the end of this year, with an imminent announcement at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles on November 17, 2009.
When Steve Ballmer mentioned this February that Windows Azure “will reach fruition with the PDC this year” I didn’t really believed it, considering where the product was and how much we knew about the progress Microsoft was making on delivering Windows Azure and related services. Even TechEd this year was surprisingly quiet about Windows Azure, but this is just the silence before the storm. Microsoft is revving up the software development and marketing machine so at this year’s PDC cloud computing and Windows Azure will take again center stage.
Starting this summer with the 2009 Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), New Orleans, July 13-16, we will see more and more announcements about Windows Azure. So what to expect in the next months? Continue reading…
Microsoft released a new Windows Azure Management tool. The Windows Azure Management Tool was created to manage your storage accounts in Windows Azure. Developed as a managed MMC, the tool allows you to create and manage both blobs and queues. Easily create and manage containers, blobs, and permissions. Add and remove queues, inspect or add messages or empty queues as well.
Features
- Manage multiple storage accounts
- Easily switch between remote and local storage services
- Manage your blobs
- Create containers and manage permissions
- Upload files or even entire folders
- Read metadata or preview the blob contents
- Manage your queues
- Create new queues
- Monitor queues
- Read (peek) messages
- Post new messages to the queue
- Purge queues
Known Issues
The current release does not work with Windows 7 due to a bug in the RC version of PowerShell. Other OS versions should be unaffected.
You can download it here.
If you haven’t heard yet, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is now available for MSDN subscribers to download. It will be more generally available on Wednesday.
You can find a great whitepaper which describes what is new for web developers in ASP 4 which is included.
One thing you’ll notice is that ASP.NET MVC is not included in Beta 1. Right now, if you try and open an MVC project with VS 2010 Beta 1, you’ll get some error message about the project type not being supported. The easy fix for now is to remove the ASP.NET MVC ProjectTypeGuid entry as described by this post.
Microsoft is working hard to have an out-of-band installer which will install the project templates and tooling for ASP.NET MVC which works with VS2010 Beta 1 sometime in June on CodePlex.
(via Phil Haak’s blog)
On Monday, May 18th, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 (Professional, Suite and Team Foundation Server) will be available to MSDN Subscribers through MSDN Subscriber Downloads and to the general public on Wednesday, May 20th through Microsoft Downloads.
It is easier and easier easier for programmers to build sophisticated, scalable, and robust web applications using AWS, and now it became even easier. Amazon just released a new set of features to complement its EC2 offerings: load balancing, auto scaling, and cloud monitoring are now available.
The features work together to help you to build highly scalable and highly available applications.
Amazon CloudWatch monitors your Amazon EC2 capacity, Auto Scaling dynamically scales it based on demand, and Elastic Load Balancing distributes load across multiple instances in one or more Availability Zones.
The measurements collected by Amazon CloudWatch provide Auto Scaling with the information needed
to run enough Amazon EC2 instances to deal with the traffic load.
Auto Scaling updates the Elastic Load Balancing service when new instances are launched or terminated to automatically scale the load-balanced capacity.
You can instantiate, configure, and deploy these important system architecture components in seconds. More details… Continue reading…
Amazon recently announced the release of Amazon Simple Pay Subscriptions. You can use this product to charge your customers on a recurring basis after a single authorization from the customer. If you offer digital content subscriptions, collect membership dues on a periodic basis, or provide premium services on your website, this service is for you.
Amazon launched the product in limited beta to gather feedback from businesses and developers to improve the product’s feature set and its ease of use. As a result, they added a feature for businesses to manage subscriptions from the Amazon Payments website, improved the ability for merchants to cancel subscriptions on behalf of their customers and revamped the existing Amazon Simple Pay documentation… Continue reading…
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