Recently, I’ve been looking a way to persist the status of an idling Workflow on WF4. There is a way to use SQL Azure to achieve this, after modifying the scripts because they contain unsupported T-SQL commands, but it’s totally an overkill to use it just to persist WF information, if you’re not using the RDBMS for another reason. I decided ...

Paspartu is French for “one size fits all”. Recently I’ve been coming across posts explaining and “promoting” the idea of spawning threads inside a worker role each one of them with a unique work to be done. All are sharing the same idea and all of them are describing the same thing. The idea You have some work to do, but you want to do it ...

Watching Vittorio Bertocci's Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) introductory talk at PDC as well as the recording of the excellent talk Microsoft Architect Hervey Wilson gave on this subject at PDC09 brought back wonderful memories of long discussions (and arguments ;-)) I had with Stelios, Manolis, Dimos and Stavros back when I was working at DOL, ...

When you have your service running on Windows Azure, the least thing you want is monitoring every now and then and decide if there is a necessity for specific actions based on your monitoring data. You want the service to be, in some degree, self-manageable and decide on its own what the necessary actions should take place to satisfy a ...

In general, there are two kind of updates you’ll mainly perform on Windows Azure. One of them is changing your application’s logic (or so called business logic) e.g. the way you handle/read queues, or how you process data or even protocol updates etc and the other is schema updates/changes. I’m not referring to SQL Azure schema changes, which ...

In a previous post I’ve described what a VIP Swap is and how you can use it as an updating method to avoid service disruption. This particular method doesn’t apply to all possible scenarios and if not always, most of the times, during protocol updates or schema changes you’ll need to upgrade your service when its still running, chunk-by-chunk ...

Windows Azure automatically divides your role instances into some “logical” domains called upgrade domains. During upgrade, Azure is updating these domains one by one. This is a by design behavior to avoid nasty situations. Some of the last feature additions and enhancements on the platform was the ability to notify your role instances in case of ...

Today, during my presentation at Microsoft DevDays “Make Web not War” I had a pretty nice question about concurrency and I left the question somehow blurry and without a straight answer. Sorry, but we were changing subjects so fast that I missed it and I only realized it on my way back. The answer is yes, there is concurrency. If you examine ...

Performing an in-place upgrade on Windows Azure to change your service definition file it’s not possible unless you stop the service, upgrade and then start it again. Otherwise you can do a VIP Swap. VIP stands for Virtual IP and VIP swaps can be either done by the Developer portal or using the Service Management API by calling “Swap ...

Its been a while since Windows Azure caught the attention of a broader audience rising all kinds of questions from the most simple “How do I access my table storage” to the most complex and generic “How do I optimize my code to pay less”. Although there is a straight answer on the first one, that’s not the case on the second. Designing an ...