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.

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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?

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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).

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Microsoft just released several new features for Windows Azure through the Windows Azure Tools and SDK.This release adds support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and VWD Express 2010 Beta 2.
What’s New? Continue reading…

Microsoft just released a tool to help you figure out how much money you can save by switching to Windows Azure from your on-premises solution.

The tool will provide you with a customized estimate of potential cost savings you (or your company or organization) may achieve by building on the Windows Azure Platform. Upon completion of the TCO and ROI Calculator profile analysis, you will be presented with a detailed report which shows estimated line item costs for an accurate TCO and a 1 to 3 year ROI analysis for you or your company or organization.

You should not interpret the analysis report you receive as a part of this process to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft makes no guarantees regarding the accuracy of any information presented in the report. You should not view the results of this report as a substitute for engaging with a third party expert to independently evaluate you or your company’s specific computing needs. The analysis report you will receive is for informational purposes only.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/tco/

Under the pressure from Windows Azure release in a week, Amazon unveiled today a new AWS SDK for .NET Developers providing .NET developers the libraries, code samples, and documentation needed to build an AWS-powered application using any programming language capable of making .NET calls including C#, Visual Basic, Windows PowerShell, and other compliant languages. .NET developers get a special treatment with a dedicated .NET Forum and a special Windows & .NET Developer Center.

The SDK includes: Continue reading…

Windows Identity Foundation (formerly called code name Geneva framework) is a new Microsoft .NET Framework technology that gives developers a programming model and SDK to create new advanced identity capabilities in .NET applications. It provides developers pre-built .NET security logic for building claims-aware applications, enhancing either ASP.NET or WCF applications. Windows Identity Foundation makes it easier to build richer, more secure applications (cloud and on-premise) without being a security and identity expert. It will boost developer productivity, as a result, and enhance app security through a standard approach to federation, strong authentication and identity delegation.

The RC is available here.

Look for more information about ‘WIF’ coming out of Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference, the week of Nov 16.

Microsoft just announced the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver Windows Azure Blob content. Windows Azure CDN offers developers a global solution for delivering high-bandwidth content.

Windows Azure CDN has 18 locations globally (United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America) and continues to expand. Windows Azure CDN caches your Windows Azure blobs at strategically placed locations to provide maximum bandwidth for delivering your content to users. You can enable CDN delivery for any storage account via the Windows Azure Developer Portal. The CDN provides edge delivery only to blobs that are in public blob containers, which are available for anonymous access.

The benefit of using a CDN is better performance and user experience for users who are farther from the source of the content stored in the Windows Azure Blob service. In addition, Windows Azure CDN provides worldwide high-bandwidth access to serve content for popular events. Continue reading…

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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Microsoft released a preview of the Windows Azure Service Management API to help you manage your deployments, hosted services and storage accounts. This is a REST-based API which users can code against in their toolset of choice to manage their services. You can find the documentation (along with the rest of the Windows Azure documentation) here.

This is a REST-based API which uses X509 client certificates for authentication. Users can upload any valid X509 certificate in .cer format to the Windows Azure developer portal and then use it as a client certificate when making API requests.

The following operations are currently supported:

• Deployments – Viewing, creating, deleting, swapping, modifying configuration settings, changing instance counts, and updating the deployment.
• Listing and viewing properties for hosted services, storage accounts and affinity groups

There is a small tool called csmanage.exe to help you interact with this API and manage your deployments. You can find csmanage here along with our other samples.

How do I get started? Continue reading…