Posted by Alin Irimie
on October 27, 2009
Today Amazon released its answer to SQL Azure, the hosted cloud database offered by Microsoft. The newest service form Amazon, the Amazon Relational Database Service, or Amazon RDS for short, now in beta, makes it easier for you to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. You get direct database access without worrying about infrastructure provisioning, software maintenance, or common database management tasks.
Using the RDS APIs or the command-line tools, you can access the full capabilities of a complete, self-contained MySQL 5.1 database instance in a matter of minutes. You can scale the processing power and storage space as needed with a single API call and you can initiate fully consistent database snapshots at any time.
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Posted by Alin Irimie
on October 20, 2009
As PcMagazine put it, “uQuery is to the App Store what Google is to the Web”. After allowing people to create an account and mark the applications they like or they own, today, even more good news: uQuery, just released a WordPress plugin allowing you to easily display an iPhone/iPod Touch application details in your blog. It is easy to use, you just need to know the app store application ID, which you can find it on uQuery.com (the number in the URL when you go to an application page).
If you don’t have a WordPress blog, you can still create a widget yourself, by clicking on “Get Embed Widget Code” in an application details page on uquery.com, then copy and paste the generated code in your blog Check it out!
You can download the widget here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/uquery-widget/. The little widget looks like this (Facebook iPhone/iPod application details)
Posted by Alin Irimie
on October 19, 2009
Microsoft announced today the immediate availability of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 to MSDN subscribers; general availability will follow on Oct. 21.
New testing options in Visual Studio 2010 will help ensure quality code. Enhancements to the integrated development environment mean that whether modeling, coding, testing or debugging, developers can use existing skills to deploy a growing number of application types. Built-in tools for Windows 7 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010, new drag and drop bindings for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation, and interoperability with innovative technologies (such as those for the database, ASP.NET model view controller, unified modeling language, Expression, and multicore) allow developers to bring their visions to life.
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Posted by Alin Irimie
on October 15, 2009
Today, the SQL Azure October CTP 2 was released. This CTP represents the complete feature set that will be available in the SQL Azure at PDC.
The October CTP has been deployed to one of Microsoft’s go-live production clusters. This production cluster is significantly larger and more powerful than the machine cluster that is supporting the August CTP but is a completely separate machine cluster serviced by a dedicated developer portal (https://sql.azure.com). Accounts for all existing users of the current CTP (August CTP) have been automatically provisioned for access to the new October CTP and environment. Simply go to the developer portal (https://sql.azure.com) to activate your account and create servers on the new environment. Servers you create on this new environment will be reachable through a new address(<servername>.database.windows.net). Continue reading…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on October 06, 2009
At commercial launch, Windows Azure will feature an improved logging system. The new system will give users greater flexibility over what information is logged and how it is collected.
The initial Community Technology Preview provided a logging API that allowed developers to write custom messages to an append-only log. The API was built on top of the efficient event tracing capabilities of Windows.
The new logging system, you’ll have the ability to collect other kinds of data, such as performance counters. You’ll have the ability to automatically push your logs to Windows Azure storage at an interval you specify, in a structured format that’s easy to query. You’ll have the ability to reconfigure your logging on the fly, so you don’t have to decide up-front exactly what data you’ll need to debug problems.
The new logging system retains the best attributes of the initial logging API (simplicity and efficiency) while adding important features to help you build robust and reliable applications on Windows Azure.
