Posted by Alin Irimie
on May 23, 2010
The book by Sriram Krishnan “Programming Windows Azure” is now available on Amazon. Sriram Krishnan is a Program Manager on the Windows Azure team at Microsoft. At Windows Azure, he ran the feature teams which built the service management APIs, geo-capabilities and several back-end infrastructure pieces. He is a prolific speaker and has delivered talks at several conferences including PDC and MIX.
The book’s first half focuses on how to write and host application code on Windows Azure, while the second half explains all of the options you have for storing and accessing data on the platform with high scalability and reliability. Lots of code samples and screenshots are available to help you along the way.
Not everything about Windows Azure is covered in this book, and it is impossible for one book to cover it all. It is a must read however, for any Windows Azure developer. It is one of those must have books.
Posted by Alin Irimie
on May 05, 2010
Do you want to learn more about Windows Azure Blob API?:
* Using the StorageClient library, take a lap around the Blob API and discover the common operations
* Hear the latest news and announcements for the platform
* Discover a quick tip/gotcha for running the AppFabric Service Bus in Windows Azure
Check out the show on channel 9.
Useful Links:
Windows Azure self-paced training
OData under Apache 2.0 license
Filtering Diagnostic Events
New SQL Azure features are live
AppFabric Service Bus troubleshooting Tips
Blob API Upload Optimizations (via Rob Gillen)
You can follow @cloudcovershow on Twitter for future shows.
Posted by Alin Irimie
on March 23, 2010
Awesome post on how to troubleshoot SQL Azure connectivity by SQL Services Team, helping you to understand some of the common connectivity error messages that you would see while connecting to SQL Azure as listed below:
- A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the server. (Provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host.)
- System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. The statement has been terminated.
- An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections
- Error: Microsoft SQL Native Client: Unable to complete login process due to delay in opening server connection.
- A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.
Continue reading…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on February 09, 2010
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
Posted by Alin Irimie
on January 29, 2010
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.
Continue reading…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on January 25, 2010
Current status on the health of the Windows Azure Platform is shown here. If you wish to receive notifications for interruptions to any of the services, you can subscribe to the respective RSS feeds. THey also maintain the history of the health status for each service for the past five weeks in the form of running logs.
Windows Azure Status Dashboard
Posted by Alin Irimie
on November 14, 2009
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…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on November 07, 2009
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…
Posted by Alin Irimie
on September 02, 2009
Until this week, using the Windows Azure CTP meant signing up and then waiting a couple of days for an invitation code to arrive by email. No more. You can now register for access and receive an invitation code right there on the spot. No email, no waiting, no excuses.
Go register now and build something cool!
(Via Steve Marx.)
Posted by Alin Irimie
on May 21, 2009
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…
