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At the Build conference, Microsoft today announced that Windows Azure Cloud Services now support autoscaling. And they do! From the Windows Azure Management Portal, we can use the newly introduced SCALE tab to configure autoscaling. That’s right: some configuration and we can select the range of instances we want to have. Windows Azure does the rest. And this is true for both Cloud Services and Standard Web Sites (formerly known as Reserved instances). We can add various rules in the autoscaler: A long awaited feature is there! I’ll enable this for some services and see how it goes…

While probably this post will be outdated in the coming days, at the time of writing Windows Azure Web Sites has no PHP 5.5 support (again: yet). In this post, we’ll explore how to enable PHP 5.5 on Windows Azure Web Sites ourselves. Last year my friend Cory wrote a post on enabling PHP 5.4 in Windows Azure Web Sites which applies to PHP 5.5 as well. However I want to discuss a different approach. And do read on if PHP 5.5 is already officially available on WAWS: there are some tips and tricks in here.

It has been a while since a new major update has been done to the MvcSiteMapProvider project, but today is the day! MvcSiteMapProvider is a tool that provides flexible menus, breadcrumb trails, and SEO features for the ASP.NET MVC framework, similar to the ASP.NET SiteMapProvider model. To be honest, I have not done a lot of work. Thanks to the power of open source (and Shad who did a massive job on refactoring the whole, thanks!), MvcSiteMapProvider v4 is around the corner.

With the latest version of the ReSharper 8 EAP, JetBrains shipped an extension manager for plugins, annotations and settings. Where it previously was a hassle and a suboptimal experience to install plugins into ReSharper, it’s really easy to do now. And what is really nice is that this extension manager is built on top of NuGet! Which means we can do all sorts of tricks…

One of the services provided by the Windows Azure cloud computing platform is the Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS). It is a service that provides federated authentication and rules-driven, claims-based authorization. It has some social providers like Microsoft Account, Google Account, Yahoo! and Facebook. But what about the other social identity providers out there? For example the newly introduced Login with Amazon, or LinkedIn? As they are OAuth2 implementations they don’t really fit into ACS.

Many API’s out there, such as GitHub’s API, have a concept called “rate limiting” or “throttling” in place. Rate limiting is used to prevent clients from issuing too many requests over a short amount of time to your API. For example, we can limit anonymous API clients to a maximum of 60 requests per hour whereas we can allow more requests to authenticated clients. But how can we implement this?

A couple of weeks, I told you about NuGet Package Source Discovery. In short, it allows you to add some meta information to your website and use your website as a discovery document for NuGet feeds. And thanks to a contribution to the spec by Marcin from SymbolSource.org, Package Source Discovery (PSD) now supports configuring Visual Studio for consuming symbols as well. Nifty! Let’s go with an example. If we discover packages from my blog, some feeds will be added to NuGet in Visual Studio. Because my blog links to my feeds on MyGet, I can provide my MyGet credentials with it:

One of the well-loved features of Windows Azure Web Sites is the fact that you can simply push our ASP.NET application’s source code to the platform using Git (or TFS or DropBox) and that sources are compiled and deployed on your Windows Azure Web Site. If you’ve checked the management portal earlier, you may have noticed that a number of deployment steps are executed: the deployment process searches for the project file to compile, compiles it, copies the build artifacts to the web root and has your website running. But did you know you can customize this process?

It’s already been 2 years since NuGet was introduced. This.NET package manager features the concept of feeds, or “package sources”, on which packages containing .NET libraries and tools can be hosted. In fact, support for feeds inspired us to build www.myget.org. While not all people are aware of this, Microsoft started out with two feeds as well: one for www.nuget.org, the other one for the Orchard CMS. More and more feeds are being created daily, both by Microsoft as well as others. Here’s a list of feeds Microsoft has that I know of (there are probably more):

Here’s another cross-post from our JetBrains .NET blog. It’s focused around dotTrace but there are a lot of tips and tricks around Windows Azure Cloud Services in it as well, especially around working with the load balancer. Enjoy the read! With dotTrace Performance, we can profile applications running on our local computer as well as on remote machines. The latter can be very useful when some performance problems only occur on the staging server (or even worse: only in production). And what if that remote server is a Windows Azure Cloud Service?