Tag: Azure
All the articles with the tag "Azure".
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Remix 2010 slides and sample code
As promised during my session on Remix 10 yesterday in Belgium, here's the slide deck and sample code. Abstract: “It’s time to take advantage of the cloud! In this session Maarten builds further on the application created during Gill Cleeren’s Silverlight session. The campaign website that was developed in Silverlight 4 still needs a home. Because the campaign will only run for a short period of time, the company chose for cloud computing on the Windows Azure platform. Learn how to leverage flexible hosting with automated scaling on Windows Azure, combined with the power of a cloud hosted SQL Azure database to create a cost-effective and responsive web application.” Thanks for joining and bearing with me during this tough session with very sparse bandwidth!
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Windows Azure Diagnostics in PHP
When working with PHP on Windows Azure, chances are you may want to have a look at what’s going on: log files, crash dumps, performance counters, … All this is valuable information when investigating application issues or doing performance tuning. Windows Azure is slightly different in diagnostics from a regular web application. Usually, you log into a machine via remote desktop or SSH and inspect the log files: management tools (remote desktop or SSH) and data (log files) are all on the same machine. This approach also works with 2 machines, maybe even with 3. However on Windows Azure, you may scale beyond that and have a hard time looking into what is happening in your application if you would have to use the above approach. A solution for this? Meet the Diagnostics Monitor.
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Introducing Windows Azure Companion – Cloud for the masses?
At OSIDays in India, the Interoperability team at Microsoft has made an interesting series of announcements related to PHP and Windows Azure. To summarize: Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse for PHP has been updated and is on par with Visual Studio tooling (which means you can deploy a PHP app to Windows Azure without leaving Eclipse!). The Windows Azure Command-line Tools for PHP have been updated, and there’s a new release of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP and a Windows Azure Storage plugin for WordPress built on that.
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Announcing the Windows Azure Online Conference
Steve Plank from Microsoft UK has just announced the UK Windows Azure Online Conference on his blog. This will be a whole day, online Windows Azure conference consisting of three different tracks: Cirrus – the high level stuff, Altocumulus – the mid level stuff (cast studies) and Stratocumulus – the low level stuff (deep tech). I’ll be doing a session in the Stratocumulus track. Since this is an online conference, feel free to subscribe for the event! All details can be found on the UK Windows Azure Online Conference announcement. I feel this is going to be very interesting, covering a broad range of Windows Azure topics! Here’s the list of sessions I’ll try to attend: The only thing I’m wondering about: how are they going to provide lunch through Live Meeting…
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Hybrid Azure applications using OData
In the whole Windows Azure story, Microsoft has always been telling you could build hybrid applications: an on-premise application with a service on Azure or a database on SQL Azure. But how to do it in the opposite direction? Easy answer there: use the (careful, long product name coming!) Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus to expose an on-premise WCF service securely to an application hosted on Windows Azure. Now how would you go about exposing your database to Windows Azure? Open a hole in the firewall? Use something like PortBridge to redirect TCP traffic over the service bus? Why not just create an OData service for our database and expose that over AppFabric Service Bus. In this post, I’ll show you how.
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Simplified access control using Windows Azure AppFabric Labs
Earlier this week, Zane Adam announced the availability of the New AppFabric Access Control service in LABS. The highlights for this release (and I quote): Wow! This just *has* to be good! Let’s see how easy it is to work with claims based authentication and the AppFabric Labs Access Control Service, which I’ll abbreviate to “ACS” throughout this post. In essence, I’ll be “outsourcing” the access control part of my application to the ACS. When a user comes to the application, he will be asked to present certain “claims”, for example a claim that tells what the user’s role is. Of course, the application will only trust claims that have been signed by a trusted party, which in this case will be the ACS.
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Manage your SQL Azure database from your browser
Yesterday, I noticed on Twitter that the SQL Azure - Project “Houston” CTP 1 has been released online. For those who do not know Houston, this is a lightweight and easy to use database management tool for SQL Azure databases built in Silverlight. Translation: you can now easily manage your SQL Azure database using any browser. It’s not a replacement for SSMS, but it’s a viable, quick solution into connecting to your cloudy database. After connecting to your SQL Azure database through http://manage.sqlazurelabs.com, you’ll see a quick overview of your database elements (tables, views, stored procedures) as well as a fancy, three-dimensional cube displaying your database details. Let’s create a new table… After clicking the “New table” toolbar item on top, a simple table designer pops up:
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Running on Windows Azure - ChronoRace - Autoscaling
At RealDolmen, we had the luck of doing the first (known) project on Windows Azure in Belgium. Together with Microsoft, we had the opportunity to make the ChronoRace website robust enough to withstand large sports events like the 20km through Brussels.
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Taking Care of a Cloud Environment (slides)
It looks like I’m only doing sessions lately :-) Here’s another slide deck for a presentation I did on the Architect Forum last week in Belgium. Abstract: “No, this session is not about greener IT. Learn about using the RoleEnvironment and diagnostics provided by Windows Azure. Communication between roles, logging and automatic upscaling of your application are just some of the possibilities of what you can do if you know about how the Windows Azure environment works.” Thanks for attending!
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Linuxwochen Austria
As part of my global domination plans, I this week visited Vienna, Austria for a session at Linuxwochen around PHP on Windows. Abstract: “Ever wanted to get started with PHP development on Windows? This session covers the basics of running PHP on the Windows platform and will help getting your development environment ready.” Thanks for being in this session! I know it is a controversial one on a Linux event :-)