* AI business solutions: https://partner.microsoft.com/en-US/solutions/practice-areas/artificial-intelligence * AI platform: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/ai-platform/ at the section «Open and comprehensive platform» (scroll down) and see the three tabs AI tools/AI frameworks/AI related infrastructure * Azure (cloud) Machine Learning: ...

Σύγχρονη εταιρία λογισμικού στην Ιρλανδία που ειδικεύεται σε e-commerce, αναζητά προσωπικό για να καλύψει θέσεις: ΝΕΤ Developer σε όλα τα επίπεδα (senior, mid και junior) και για όλες τις ειδικότητες (front-end, back-end ή full stack), Software Architect, Product Owner, Scrum Master, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

It’s 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 ...

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 ...

It's been a interesting week for Windows Azure. Since last Friday (13th of November) the latest Windows Azure Tools was released and strangely the installer was marked to be a 1.0 release although I'm not sure it really is one. Project Dallas has been announced which is a MarketPlace for Vendors to publish their Azure Services for consuming ...