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When building cloud applications on Windows Azure, it’s always a good thing to delegate as much work to specialized services as possible. File downloads would be one good example: these can be streamed directly from Windows Azure blob storage to your client, without having to pass a web application hosted on Windows Azure Cloud Services or Web Sites. Why occupy the web server with copying data from a request stream to a response stream? Let blob storage handle it! When thinking this through there may be some issues you may think of. Here are a few: Let’s answer these!

TL;DR: Using source control is a really bad idea. Or is it? Skip to Conclusion for the meat of this post. One of the first things I do with a new project in Visual Studio is not add it to source control. There are many reasons, but it all boils down to this: Source Control introduces more problems than it solves. Before I dive into this, I’ll share the solution with you. Put your sources on a USB drive. Yes, it’s that simple. If you’re like most other people, you don’t like that solution, because it feels inefficient: All of that is true, but then again…

Pfew! Around February 2013, Xavier and I started planning work on an update of our book. Eight months later, we’re proud to present you with Pro NuGet (second edition). It’s been a tough couple of months writing this: Xavier has become a father for the second time (congratulations!), we’ve had two massive updates to NuGet we had to work in our book, … But here it is! What’s new? Next to that there is a lot more meat in there! We would love to get your feedback! E-mail us or write a review on your blog or Amazon. Enjoy the read!

Have you tried Glimpse before? It shows you server-side information like execution times, server configuration, request data and such in your browser. At the February MVP Summit this year, Anthony, Nik and I had a chat about what would be useful information to be displayed in Glimpse when working on Windows Azure. Some beers and a bit of coding later, we had a proof-of-concept showing Windows Azure runtime configuration data in a Glimpse tab.

Today’s official Visual Studio 2013 launch provides some interesting novelties, especially for Windows Azure Web Sites. There is now the choice of choosing which pipeline to run in (classic or integrated), we can define separate applications in subfolders of our web site, debug a web site right from within Visual Studio. But the most impressive one is this. How about… an in-browser editor for your application? Let’s take a quick tour of it. After creating a web site we can go to the web site’s configuration we can enable the Visual Studio Online preview.

Word of warning: This is a partial cross-post from the JetBrains WebStorm blog. The post you are currently reading adds some more information around Windows Azure Mobile Services and builds on a full example and is a bit more in-depth.

With the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) released as a preview, I thought it was a good time to write up some details about how to work with it. The CDN can be used for offloading content to a globally distributed network of servers, ensuring faster throughput to your end users. Note: this is a modified and updated version of my article at ACloudyPlace.com roughly two years ago. I have added information on how to work with ASP.NET MVC bundling and the Windows Azure CDN, updated screenshots and so on.

NOTE: While the content is this blog post will still work, JetBrains now has a plugin that is the recommended way of working with TeamCity and build agents on Azure. Please check this blog post to learn more about it.

After a beta version about a month ago, we are proud to release MvcSiteMapProvider 4.0 stable! (get it from NuGet, it’s fresh!) It took 6 months to complete this major version but I think our GitHub contributors have done a great job. Thank you all and especially Shad for taking the lead on this release!

With yesterday’s announcement on Windows Azure Traffic Manager surfacing in the management portal (as a preview), I thought it was a good moment to recap this more than 2 year old service. Windows Azure Traffic Manager allows you to control the distribution of network traffic to your Cloud Services and VMs hosted within Windows Azure.