A nice change I noticed today is that VMDepot images are now visible in the Windows Azure Portal. If you to Virtual Machines You’ll see an option that says “Browse VMDepot” If you click it, you get the list of the image already in the VM Depot:   You can select one and create a virtual [...]

VM Depot allows users to build, deploy and share their favorite Linux configuration, create custom open source stacks, work with others and build new architectures for the cloud that leverage the openness and flexibility of the Azure platform. How it works All images shared via this catalog are open for interaction where other users of [...]

What is Windows AzureConf On November 14, 2012, Microsoft will be hosting Windows AzureConf, a free event for the Windows Azure community. This event will feature a keynote presentation by Scott Guthrie, along with numerous sessions executed by Windows Azure community members. Streamed live for an online audience on Channel 9, the event will allow ...

It’s a short post but worth it! It’s live, Windows Azure WebSites are now running with support for .NET Framework 4.5. As this is an in-place upgrade from 4.0 to 4.5 don’t expect anything breaking or things not working but make sure you test your stuff before you upload. Everything targeting 4.0 should still work as [...]

I accessed the portal today and a nice surprise was waiting for me. Among other improvements that I either didn’t spot yet or they are not visible to us (backend changes) they were two new very welcome changes: 1) Service bus can now be managed from the new portal! Under the “App Services” category, you can now [...]

Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS) is a powerful hosting platform provided by Microsoft on Windows Azure. One of the coolest features is that you can run your Web Sites/Web Apps pretty easily and it’s not limited to ASP.NET but it also supports PHP. Also on database level it’s not only SQL databases (MSSQL) that are [...]

Windows Azure Trust Center was released to the public and it contains valuable information about security and privacy on the platform. You can find details about what kind of certificates the platform holds and generally why and how the platform is secure, handles data and respects privacy. All that information applies to Windows Azure core ...

There is a common error sometimes when you try to start and debug a web site/web app on the Windows Azure Emulator that it’s caused for a couple of reasons that I will explain below. The error message is “There was an error attaching the debuger to the IIS worker process for URL <THE_URL> …”. Reason … Continue ...

Continuing on where I left it on my previous post, I’m going to explain how the Announcement service works and why we choose that approach. The way JBoss and mod_proxy work now is that every time something changes in the topology, either a new proxy is added or removed or a JBoss node, then the proxy [...]

I’m going to start a series of posts to explain how we made JBoss run on Windows Azure, not just on standalone mode but with full cluster support. Let me start with one simple definition, I’m NOT a Java guy, but I work with some very talented people under the same roof and under the [...]

Today Windows Azure SDK 1.5 and Windows Azure AppFabric SDK 1.5 were released, fixing issues and bugs detected during the beta. There are also some new enhancements to it: Re-architected emulator, which enables higher fidelity between local and cloud developments. Support for uploading service certificates in csupload.exe. A new csencrypt.exe tool ...

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 ...

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 ...

  Every single time something new emerges in the IT market, there are three distinct categories of people: Early adopters, Late majority, Skeptics. Each one of them has its own reasons and its own concerns about when, why and if they are going to adapt to this new technology, either completely or in a hybrid mode. All of them have some things ...

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 ...