WebCamp: Windows Azure Εποχή για Camping!! function WebCamps () {                 WebCampDay.Morning.Learn();                 WebCampDay.Afternoon.Build(); } Τι ...

Windows Azure SDK 1.4 was released yesterday with no breaking changes and a lot of stability fixes. You can get the bits from here. Among an important fix, specially if you use a source control system, where the web.config was being locked but Windows Azure Tools still needed write access to update the machine key, there are new features for ...

Yesterday I presented a 200 level session on Windows Azure over Live Meeting. This was the first of a three part series of Live Meetings regarding Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform. The session covered all of the fundamentals of Cloud Computing, the different types of cloud computing services (IAAS, PAAS, SAAS), and then went on discussing ...

DevLiveMeetings11 – Windows Azure (Series of 3) Online Παρουσιάσεις Τεχνολογιών της Microsoft για Προγραμματιστές Για τρεις Τρίτες1, 8 και 15 ΜαρτίουΏρα: 17.00- ...

I posted an article at CodeProject explaining how you can use Windows Azure AppFabric Cache (CTP) in your applications. You can find the article here -> http://www.codeproject.com/KB/azure/WA-AppFabric-cache.aspx Please let me know if you liked or not and of course any comments are more than welcome! Thank you, PK.

A lot of interesting things have been going on lately on the Windows Azure MVP list and I'll be try to pick the best and the ones I can share and make some posts. During an Azure bootcamp another fellow Windows Azure MVP, had a very interesting question ''What happens if someone is updating the BLOB and a request come in for that BLOB to serve ...

Amazon announced the AWS Free Usage Tier (http://aws.amazon.com/free/) last week, which will start from November the 1st. I know some people are excited about this announcement and so am I because I believe that competition between cloud providers always brings better service for the customer, but in Amazon's case, it's more like a marketing trick ...

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 ...

Once again, Microsoft proved that it values its customers, either big enterprise or small startups. We’re a small private-held business and I personally have a major role in it as I’m one of the founders. Recently, I’ve been giving some pretty nice presentations and a bunch of sessions for Microsoft Hellas about Windows Azure and Cloud ...

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 ...

  Yes, it is. Table storage has multiple replicas and guarantees uptime and availability, but for business continuity reasons you have to be protected from possible failures on your application. Business logic errors can harm the integrity of your data and all Windows Azure Storage replicas will be harmed too. You have to be protected from ...

Last week I had the chance to talk about strating up with SQL Azure on a Microsoft’s Developers Day event. The things I’ve talked about included: How to create your database on the cloud, querying data, migrating Databases to SQL Azure. Tips and Tricks: SQL Azure firewall through API, Managing connections, Logging sessionId's, Throttling and ...

Just three days ago on Feb 13th, SQL Azure got an update. Long requested features like downgrade and upgrade between Web and Enterprise Edition is finally implemented. It’s easy, just with a single command to switch between versions. Also some DMVs were introduced to match on premise SQL Server. Idle session timeout was also increased. In ...

Windows Azure configuration files support an osVersion attribute where you can set which version of the Windows Azure OS should run your service. This feature doesn’t make much sense at the moment as there is only one version WA-GUEST-OS-1.0_200912-01 but in the future it’s going to be very handy. You can learn more about it here. PK.

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, ...

Recently at MSDN Forums there were people asking how they can detect if their web application is running on the cloud or locally (Dev Storage). Well besides the obvious part, if you have code inside a Web Role or a Worker Role Start() method, this only exists on a cloud template but what if you want to make that check somewhere else, for ...

You’re trying to create a queue on Windows Azure and you’re getting a “400 Bad Request” as an inner exception. Well, there are two possible scenarios: 1) The name of the queue is not valid. It has to be a valid DNS Name to be accepted by the service. 2) The service is down or something went wrong and you just have to re-try, so implementing ...

Windows Azure training kit it the best starting point if you want to get involved in Azure development. It helps you understand the basics of Windows Azure, its components and the whereabouts of the service. December’s release includes some updates and samples from PDC 09 so don’t miss it. You can download the kit from here –> ...

One of the latest features introduced on SQL Azure is the abillity to apply firewall settings on your database and allow only specific IP ranges to connect to it. This can be done through SQL Azure Portal or through code using stored procedures. If you want to take a look at which rules are active on your SQL Azure database, you can ...

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 ...

Are you intrigued with Cloud computing, are you considering Microsoft’s Windows Azure but don’t know whether this is going to actually save you money? Then visit Windows Azure ROI / TCO calculator and find out. After you agree to the terms, you’ll then have to fill in a one page questionnaire. The most important question is about the expected ...

Last week at Microsoft DevDays “Make Web not War” we had a rather passionate conversation on the features Microsoft’s cloud relational database engine (SQL Azure) offers today and how these are going to change the way we program today. In that direction I’m linking the page that Microsoft has put up in order to listen everyone's wishes on what ...

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 ...

This series of Web seminars is designed to quickly immerse you in the world of the Windows Azure Platform. You’ll learn what Azure is all about, including the fundamental concepts of cloud computing and Windows Azure. You’ll learn why you should target Windows Azure, and see the tangible business benefits you can gain by deploying your apps to the ...

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 ...