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.

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:

• Windows Azure Drive: Enable a Windows Azure application to use existing NTFS APIs to access a durable drive. This allows the Windows Azure application to mount a page blob as a drive letter, such as X:, and enables easy migration of existing NTFS applications to the cloud.
• OS Version Support: Allows a Windows Azure application to choose the appropriate Guest OS to run on in the cloud.
• Bug Fixes
  • StorageClient: Expose account key from storage credentials, expose continuation tokens for pagination, and reduce maximum buffer size for parallel uploads.
  • Windows Azure Diagnostics: Fix path corruption for crash dumps, OnDemandTransfer now respects LogLevelFilter.
  • VS 2010: Improved packaging performance.
  • VS 2010: Support for linked files in Web projects.
  • VS 2010: Support for ASP.NET web project web.config transformations.
  • Certificate selection lists certificates from LocalMachine\My instead of CurrentUser\My.
  • Right click on Role under Roles folder to select whether to launch the browser against HTTP, HTTPS or not at all.

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.

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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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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.

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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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Today, at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) here Los Angeles, Microsoft announced not only the release of version 4.0 of the.NET Micro Framework, but also that they are open sourcing the product and making it available under the Apache 2.0 license, which is already being used by the community within the embedded space.

The .NET Micro Framework, a development and execution environment for resource-constrained devices, was initially developed inside the Microsoft Startup Business Accelerator, but recently moved to the Developer Division so as to be more closely aligned with the overall direction of Microsoft development efforts. 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/

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…