Tag: Azure
All the articles with the tag "Azure".
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AZUG Windows Azure Saturday overview
As one of the board members of the Windows Azure User Group in Belgium, I wanted to write a post on an event we organized last weekend. We do more events (one each month), however this one was way out of our comfort zone. Typically, we have an evening event in which a speaker delivers one session to around 40 attendees. Last Saturday, we organized our first Windows Azure Saturday, a hackaton followed by a barbecue. Here’s what I will remember about our event… The idea for a “hackaton plus barbecue” emerged a couple of months ago. The idea was simple: get a group of Windows Azure enthusiasts together, code for a couple of hours and have a fun barbecue afterwards.
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Ready for a Windows Azure roadtrip?
A while ago, Michelangelo van Dam (a hardcore PHP guy), François Hertay (a hardcore Java guru) and myself (a .NET guy) were asked if we wanted to write about some of our experiences with the Windows Azure platform. Starting next week, you’ll find about 3 blog posts per week and/or videos on Windows Azure (both a getting started level as well as some fun advanced posts) on a freshly released website: www.azure-roadtrip.be. I have the honour of kicking off a series of blog posts on .NET, starting with a level 100 one: the what & why of Windows Azure for .NET developers.
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Social meet up on Twitter for MEET Windows Azure on June 7th
Here’s a perhaps rather redundant event for you but it should be kind of fun: MEET Windows Azure on Twitter (+ Beer). The idea is to list people who have a twitter account and intend to follow the MEET Windows Azure event via live streaming on June 7th (1pm PDT). So see you online for the event on the 7th! My Twitter handle is @maartenballiauw MEET Windows Azure Blog Relay: + Beer? Since you are watching the event from your coucnh (or the totilet, or your bed, or actually, from wherever you want), feel free to open up a beer. Call to action: Link to this blog post on your blog and I will update this post to link to you!
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The world is changing: the future of IT
I’ve had my say on cloud and the new world of IT already in an earlier post, Predictions for the future. Today, I’m seeing signs the world is in fact starting to change. Sites like Instagram started small and grew big in no time. Were the founders IT wonders? No. And you don’t have to be. Not so long ago, it would have taken you a lot of time and resources to get your idea up and running on the Internet. Especially if it required multiple datacenters and scalability. You would have to deploy a bunch of servers and make sure you had an agile IT environment in place in order to get things running and keep things flexible, a key requirement for many startups but also for large organizations.
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Using the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network
As you know, Windows Azure is a very rich platform. Next to compute and storage, it offers a series of building blocks that simplify your life as a cloud developer. One of these building blocks is the content delivery network (CDN), which can be used for offloading content to a globally distributed network of servers, ensuring faster throughput to your end users. I’ve been asked to write an article on this matter, which I did, and which is live at ACloudyPlace.com since today. As a small teaser, here’s the first section of it:
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Protecting Windows Azure Web and Worker roles from malware
Most IT administrators will install some sort of virus scanner on your precious servers. Since the cloud, from a technical perspective, is just a server, why not follow that security best practice on Windows Azure too? It has gone by almost unnoticed, but last week Microsoft released the Microsoft Endpoint Protection for Windows Azure Customer Technology Preview. For the sake of bandwidth, I’ll be referring to it as EP. EP offers real-time protection, scheduled scanning, malware remediation (a fancy word for quarantining), active protection and automatic signature updates. Sounds a lot like Microsoft Endpoint Protection or Windows Security Essentials? That’s no coincidence: EP is a Windows Azurified version of it.
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TechDays Finland - Architectural Patterns for the Cloud - NuGet
As promised, here are the slide decks for the two sessions delivered at TechDays Finland last week. The promise of all cloud vendors out there is they can run your applications without changes. While that claim is true, it’s better to optimize existing software or design specifically for the cloud when moving or building an application. Architectural optimization will speed up your application, make it more scalable and even will make it cheaper to run on Windows Azure. This session will take you along some common patterns that are easy to implement and will make your cloud more sunny.
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Slides for TechDays Belgium 2012: SignalR
It was the last session on the last day of TechDays 2012 so I was expecting almost nobody to show up. Still, a packed room came to have a look at how to make the web realtime using SignalR. Thanks for joining and for being very cooperative during the demos! As promised, here are the slides. You can also find the demo code here: SignalR. Code, not toothpaste - TechDays Belgium 2012.zip (2.74 mb) A recording on Channel9 is available as well. PS: The book on NuGet (Pro NuGet) which I mentioned can be (pre)ordered on Amazon.
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How do you synchronize a million to-do lists?
Not this question, but a similar one, has been asked by one of our customers. An interesting question, isn’t it? Wait. It gets more interesting. I’ll sketch a fake scenario that’s similar to our customer’s question. Imagine you are building mobile applications to manage a simple to-do list. This software is available on Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone 7 and via a web browser. One day, the decision to share to-do lists has been made. Me and my wife should be able to share one to-do list between us, having an up-to-date version of the list on every device we grant access to this to-do list. Now imagine there are a million of those groups, where every partner in the sync relationship has the latest version of the list on his device. In often a disconnected world. How would you solve this?
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Publishing symbol packages for a MyGet feed
Ever since NuGet 1.2, there is a great way for NuGet package authors to let their users debug into the package’s binaries. With almost no additional effort, package authors can publish their symbols and sources, and package consumers can debug into them from Visual Studio, simply by pushing a symbols package in addition to the standard NuGet package. Today, we’re proud to announce MyGet has partnered with SymbolSource.org to offer an easy workflow to publish symbol packages for a private MyGet feed. This means from now on you can publish symbol packages for your private feeds as well!