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  • Register now for the UK Windows Azure Self-paced Interactive Learning Course starting May 10th

    - by Eric Nelson
    [Suggested twitter tag #selfpacedazure] We (myself and David Gristwood) have been working in the UK to create a fantastic opportunity to get yourself up to speed on the Windows Azure Platform over a 6 week period starting May 10th – without ever needing to leave the comfort of your home/office.  The course is derived from the internal training Microsoft gives on Azure which is both fun and challenging in equal parts – and we felt was just too good to keep to ourselves! We will be releasing more details nearer the date but hopefully the following is enough to convince you to register and … recommend it to a colleague or three :-) What we have produced is the “Microsoft Azure Self-paced Learning Course”. This is a free, interactive, self-paced, technical training course covering the Windows Azure platform – Windows Azure, SQL Azure and the Azure AppFabric. The course takes place over a six week period finishing on June 18th. During the course you will work from your own home or workplace, and get involved via interactive Live Meetings session, watch on-line videos, work through hands-on labs and research and complete weekly coursework assignments. The mentors and other attendees on the course will help you in your research and learning, and there are weekly Live Meetings where you can raise questions and interact with them. This is a technical course, aimed at programmers, system designers, and architects who want a solid understanding of the Microsoft Windows Azure platform, hence a prerequisite for this course is at least six months programming in the .NET framework and Visual Studio. Check out the full details of the event or go straight to registration.   The course outline is: Week 1 - Windows Azure Platform Week 2 - Windows Azure Storage Week 3 - Windows Azure Deep Dive and Codename "Dallas" Week 4 - SQL Azure Week 5 - Windows Azure Platform AppFabric Access Control Week 6 - Windows Azure Platform AppFabric Service Bus If you have any questions about the course and its suitability, please email [email protected].

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  • How to terminate a particular Azure worker role instance

    - by Oliver Bock
    Background I am trying to work out the best structure for an Azure application. Each of my worker roles will spin up multiple long-running jobs. Over time I can transfer jobs from one instance to another by switching them to a readonly mode on the source instance, spinning them up on the target instance, and then spinning the original down on the source instance. If I have too many jobs then I can tell Azure to spin up extra role instance, and use them for new jobs. Conversely if my load drops (e.g. during the night) then I can consolidate outstanding jobs to a few machines and tell Azure to give me fewer instances. The trouble is that (as I understand it) Azure provides no mechanism to allow me to decide which instance to stop. Thus I cannot know which servers to consolidate onto, and some of my jobs will die when their instance stops, causing delays for users while I restart those jobs on surviving instances. Idea 1: I decide which instance to stop, and return from its Run(). I then tell Azure to reduce my instance count by one, and hope it concludes that the broken instance is a good candidate. Has anyone tried anything like this? Idea 2: I predefine a whole bunch of different worker roles, with identical contents. I can individually stop and start them by switching their instance count from zero to one, and back again. I think this idea would work, but I don't like it because it seems to go against the natural Azure way of doing things, and because it involves me in a lot of extra bookkeeping to manage the extra worker roles. Idea 3: Live with it. Any better ideas?

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  • External File Upload Optimizations for Windows Azure

    - by rgillen
    [Cross posted from here: http://rob.gillenfamily.net/post/External-File-Upload-Optimizations-for-Windows-Azure.aspx] I’m wrapping up a bit of the work we’ve been doing on data movement optimizations for cloud computing and the latest set of data yielded some interesting points I thought I’d share. The work done here is not really rocket science but may, in some ways, be slightly counter-intuitive and therefore seemed worthy of posting. Summary: for those who don’t like to read detailed posts or don’t have time, the synopsis is that if you are uploading data to Azure, block your data (even down to 1MB) and upload in parallel. Set your block size based on your source file size, but if you must choose a fixed value, use 1MB. Following the above will result in significant performance gains… upwards of 10x-24x and a reduction in overall file transfer time of upwards of 90% (eg, uploading a 1GB file averaged 46.37 minutes prior to optimizations and averaged 1.86 minutes afterwards). Detail: For those of you who want more detail, or think that the claims at the end of the preceding paragraph are over-reaching, what follows is information and code supporting these claims. As the title would indicate, these tests were run from our research facility pointing to the Azure cloud (specifically US North Central as it is physically closest to us) and do not represent intra-cloud results… we have performed intra-cloud tests and the overall results are similar in notion but the data rates are significantly different as well as the tipping points for the various block sizes… this will be detailed separately). We started by building a very simple console application that would loop through a directory and upload each file to Azure storage. This application used the shipping storage client library from the 1.1 version of the azure tools. The only real variation from the client library is that we added code to collect and record the duration (in ms) and size (in bytes) for each file transferred. The code is available here. We then created a directory that had a collection of files for the following sizes: 2KB, 32KB, 64KB, 128KB, 512KB, 1MB, 5MB, 10MB, 25MB, 50MB, 100MB, 250MB, 500MB, 750MB, and 1GB (50 files for each size listed). These files contained randomly-generated binary data and do not benefit from compression (a separate discussion topic). Our file generation tool is available here. The baseline was established by running the application described above against the directory containing all of the data files. This application uploads the files in a random order so as to avoid transferring all of the files of a given size sequentially and thereby spreading the affects of periodic Internet delays across the collection of results.  We then ran some scripts to split the resulting data and generate some reports. The raw data collected for our non-optimized tests is available via the links in the Related Resources section at the bottom of this post. For each file size, we calculated the average upload time (and standard deviation) and the average transfer rate (and standard deviation). As you likely are aware, transferring data across the Internet is susceptible to many transient delays which can cause anomalies in the resulting data. It is for this reason that we randomized the order of source file processing as well as executed the tests 50x for each file size. We expect that these steps will yield a sufficiently balanced set of results. Once the baseline was collected and analyzed, we updated the test harness application with some methods to split the source file into user-defined block sizes and then to upload those blocks in parallel (using the PutBlock() method of Azure storage). The parallelization was handled by simply relying on the Parallel Extensions to .NET to provide a Parallel.For loop (see linked source for specific implementation details in Program.cs, line 173 and following… less than 100 lines total). Once all of the blocks were uploaded, we called PutBlockList() to assemble/commit the file in Azure storage. For each block transferred, the MD5 was calculated and sent ensuring that the bits that arrived matched was was intended. The timer for the blocked/parallelized transfer method wraps the entire process (source file splitting, block transfer, MD5 validation, file committal). A diagram of the process is as follows: We then tested the affects of blocking & parallelizing the transfers by running the updated application against the same source set and did a parameter sweep on the block size including 256KB, 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, and 4MB (our assumption was that anything lower than 256KB wasn’t worth the trouble and 4MB is the maximum size of a block supported by Azure). The raw data for the parallel tests is available via the links in the Related Resources section at the bottom of this post. This data was processed and then compared against the single-threaded / non-optimized transfer numbers and the results were encouraging. The Excel version of the results is available here. Two semi-obvious points need to be made prior to reviewing the data. The first is that if the block size is larger than the source file size you will end up with a “negative optimization” due to the overhead of attempting to block and parallelize. The second is that as the files get smaller, the clock-time cost of blocking and parallelizing (overhead) is more apparent and can tend towards negative optimizations. For this reason (and is supported in the raw data provided in the linked worksheet) the charts and dialog below ignore source file sizes less than 1MB. (click chart for full size image) The chart above illustrates some interesting points about the results: When the block size is smaller than the source file, performance increases but as the block size approaches and then passes the source file size, you see decreasing benefit to the point of negative gains (see the values for the 1MB file size) For some of the moderately-sized source files, small blocks (256KB) are best As the size of the source file gets larger (see values for 50MB and up), the smallest block size is not the most efficient (presumably due, at least in part, to the increased number of blocks, increased number of individual transfer requests, and reassembly/committal costs). Once you pass the 250MB source file size, the difference in rate for 1MB to 4MB blocks is more-or-less constant The 1MB block size gives the best average improvement (~16x) but the optimal approach would be to vary the block size based on the size of the source file.    (click chart for full size image) The above is another view of the same data as the prior chart just with the axis changed (x-axis represents file size and plotted data shows improvement by block size). It again highlights the fact that the 1MB block size is probably the best overall size but highlights the benefits of some of the other block sizes at different source file sizes. This last chart shows the change in total duration of the file uploads based on different block sizes for the source file sizes. Nothing really new here other than this view of the data highlights the negative affects of poorly choosing a block size for smaller files.   Summary What we have found so far is that blocking your file uploads and uploading them in parallel results in significant performance improvements. Further, utilizing extension methods and the Task Parallel Library (.NET 4.0) make short work of altering the shipping client library to provide this functionality while minimizing the amount of change to existing applications that might be using the client library for other interactions.   Related Resources Source code for upload test application Source code for random file generator ODatas feed of raw data from non-optimized transfer tests Experiment Metadata Experiment Datasets 2KB Uploads 32KB Uploads 64KB Uploads 128KB Uploads 256KB Uploads 512KB Uploads 1MB Uploads 5MB Uploads 10MB Uploads 25MB Uploads 50MB Uploads 100MB Uploads 250MB Uploads 500MB Uploads 750MB Uploads 1GB Uploads Raw Data OData feeds of raw data from blocked/parallelized transfer tests Experiment Metadata Experiment Datasets Raw Data 256KB Blocks 512KB Blocks 1MB Blocks 2MB Blocks 4MB Blocks Excel worksheet showing summarizations and comparisons

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  • SQL Azure Data Sync

    - by kaleidoscope
    The Microsoft Sync Framework Power Pack for SQL Azure contains a series of components that improve the experience of synchronizing with SQL Azure. This includes runtime components that optimize performance and simplify the process of synchronizing with the cloud. SQL Azure Data Sync allows developers and DBA's to: · Link existing on-premises data stores to SQL Azure. · Create new applications in Windows Azure without abandoning existing on-premises applications. · Extend on-premises data to remote offices, retail stores and mobile workers via the cloud. · Take Windows Azure and SQL Azure based web application offline to provide an “Outlook like” cached-mode experience. The Microsoft Sync Framework Power Pack for SQL Azure is comprised of the following: · SqlAzureSyncProvider · Sql Azure Offline Visual Studio Plug-In · SQL Azure Data Sync Tool for SQL Server · New SQL Azure Events Automated Provisioning Geeta

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  • Azure Florida Association: Modern Architecture for Elastic Azure Applications

    - by Herve Roggero
    Join us on November 28th at 7PM, US Eastern Time, to hear Zachary Gramana talk about elastic scale on Windows Azure. REGISTER HERE: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/657038102 Description: Building horizontally scalable applications can be challenging. If you face the need to rapidly scale or adjust to high load variations, then you are left with little choice. Azure provides a fantastic platform for building elastic applications. Combined with recent advances in browser capabilities, some older architectural patterns have become relevant again. We will dust off one of them, the client-server architecture, and show how we can use its modern incarnation to bypass a class of problems normally encountered with distributed ASP.NET applications.

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  • Finalists for the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure

    - by ScottGu
    Today, I am pleased to announce the ten finalists for the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure powered by TechStars. These startups are about to launch into a three-month program where they will develop new products and businesses using Windows Azure. The response to the program has been fantastic - we received nearly 600 applications from entrepreneurs in 69 countries around the world, spanning a host of industries including retail, travel, entertainment, banking, real estate and more.  There were so many innovative ideas and amazing teams that it really made the selection process hard.  We finally landed on 10 finalists, based on their experience, qualifications, and innovative business ideas built on the cloud. This fall’s Windows Azure class includes: Advertory – Berlin, Germany. Advertory helps local businesses increase revenue and build customer loyalty. Appetas – Seattle, WA. Appetas' mission is to make restaurants look as beautiful online as they do on the plate! BagsUp – Sydney, Australia. Find great places from people you trust. Embarke – San Diego, CA. Embarke allows developers and companies the ability to integrate with any human communication channel (Facebook, Email, Text Message, Twitter) without having to learn the specifics, write code, or spend time on any of them. Fanzo – Seattle, WA. Fanzo puts sports fans in the spotlight. Find other fans, show off your fanswagger and get rewarded for your passion. MetricsHub – Bellevue, WA. A service providing cloud monitoring with incident detection and prebuilt workflows for remedying common problems. Mobilligy – Bellevue, WA. Mobilligy revolutionizes how people pay their bills by bringing convenient, secure, and instant bill payment support to mobile devices. Realty Mogul – Los Angeles, CA. Realty Mogul is a crowdfunding platform for real estate where accredited investors pool capital and invest in properties that are acquired, managed and eventually resold by professional private real estate companies and their management teams. Staq – San Francisco, CA. Back-end as a service for APIs. Socedo – Bellevue, WA. A simple and effective web application for lead generation and relationship management on Twitter. Each startup will be hosted in Seattle and mentored by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists as well as leaders from Windows Azure and other Microsoft organizations. The teams will spend the first month ideating and refining their business concepts with input and advice from their mentors as well as Microsoft customers, followed by two months of design and development. They will present their results to investors and Microsoft partners at an event in mid-January. We are really looking forward to seeing how their businesses evolve.  These teams have demonstrated incredible energy, passion, and innovative capabilities – and they are ready to show the world what’s possible with Windows Azure. Thanks, Scott P.S. And if you are new to Twitter you can also optionally follow me: @scottgu

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  • Windows Azure Diagnostics: Next to Useless?

    - by Your DisplayName here!
    To quote my good friend Christian: “Tracing is probably one of the most discussed topics in the Windows Azure world. Not because it is freaking cool – but because it can be very tedious and partly massively counter-intuitive.” <rant> The .NET Framework has this wonderful facility called TraceSource. You define a named trace and route that to a configurable listener. This gives you a lot of flexibility – you can create a single trace file – or multiple ones. There is even nice tooling around that. SvcTraceViewer from the SDK let’s you open the XML trace files – you can filter and sort by trace source and event type, aggreate multiple files…blablabla. Just what you would expect from a decent tracing infrastructure. Now comes Windows Azure. I was already were grateful that starting with the SDK 1.2 we finally had a way to do tracing and diagnostics in the cloud (kudos!). But the way the Azure DiagnosticMonitor is currently implemented – could be called flawed. The Azure SDK provides a DiagnosticsMonitorTraceListener – which is the right way to go. The only problem is, that way this works is, that all traces (from all sources) get written to an ETW trace. Then the DiagMon listens to these traces and copies them periodically to your storage account. So far so good. But guess what happens to your nice trace files: the trace source names get “lost”. They appear in your message text at the end. So much for filtering and sorting and aggregating (regex #fail or #win??). Every trace line becomes an entry in a Azure Storage Table – the svclog format is gone. So much for the existing tooling. To solve that problem, one workaround was to write your own trace listener (!) that creates svclog files inside of local storage and use the DiagMon to copy those. Christian has a blog post about that. OK done that. Now it turns out that this mechanism does not work anymore in 1.3 with FullIIS (see here). Quoting: “Some IIS 7.0 logs not collected due to permissions issues...The root cause to both of these issues is the permissions on the log files.” And the workaround: “To read the files yourself, log on to the instance with a remote desktop connection.” Now then have fun with your multi-instance deployments…. </rant>

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  • SharePoint Apps and Windows Azure

    - by ScottGu
    Last Monday I had an opportunity to present as part of the keynote of this year’s SharePoint Conference.  My segment of the keynote covered the new SharePoint Cloud App Model we are introducing as part of the upcoming SharePoint 2013 and Office 365 releases.  This new app model for SharePoint is additive to the full trust solutions developers write today, and is built around three core tenants: Simplifying the development model and making it consistent between the on-premises version of SharePoint and SharePoint Online provided with Office 365. Making the execution model loosely coupled – and enabling developers to build apps and write code that can run outside of the core SharePoint service. This makes it easy to deploy SharePoint apps using Windows Azure, and avoid having to worry about breaking SharePoint and the apps within it when something is upgraded.  This new loosely coupled model also enables developers to write SharePoint applications that can leverage the full capabilities of the .NET Framework – including ASP.NET Web Forms 4.5, ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET Web API, EF 5, Async, and more. Implementing this loosely coupled model using standard web protocols – like OAuth, JSON, and REST APIs – that enable developers to re-use skills and tools, and easily integrate SharePoint with Web and Mobile application architectures. A video of my talk + demos is now available to watch online: In the talk I walked through building an app from scratch – it showed off how easy it is to build solutions using new SharePoint application, and highlighted a web + workflow + mobile scenario that integrates SharePoint with code hosted on Windows Azure (all built using Visual Studio 2012 and ASP.NET 4.5 – including MVC and Web API). The new SharePoint Cloud App Model is something that I think is pretty exciting, and it is going to make it a lot easier to build SharePoint apps using the full power of both Windows Azure and the .NET Framework.  Using Windows Azure to easily extend SaaS based solutions like Office 365 is also a really natural fit and one that is going to offer a bunch of great developer opportunities.  Hope this helps, Scott  P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • Aplicações do SharePoint e Windows Azure

    - by Leniel Macaferi
    Segunda-feira passada eu tive a oportunidade de me apresentar dando uma palestra na SharePoint Conference (em Inglês). Meu segmento na palestra cobriu o novo modelo de Aplicações para Nuvem do SharePoint (SharePoint Cloud App Model) que estamos introduzindo como parte dos próximos lançamentos do SharePoint 2013 e Office 365. Este novo modelo de aplicações para o SharePoint é aditivo para as soluções de total confiança que os desenvolvedores escrevem atualmente, e é construído em torno de três pilares principais: Simplificar o modelo de desenvolvimento tornando-o consistente entre a versão local do SharePoint e a versão online do SharePoint fornecida com o Office 365. Tornar o modelo de execução flexível - permitindo que os desenvolvedores criem aplicações e escrevam código que pode ser executado fora do núcleo do serviço do SharePoint. Isto torna mais fácil implantar aplicações SharePoint usando a Windows Azure, evitando a preocupação com a quebra do SharePoint e das aplicações que rodam dentro dele quando algo é atualizado. Este novo modelo flexível também permite que os desenvolvedores escrevam aplicações do SharePoint que podem alavancar as capacidades do .NET Framework - incluindo ASP.NET Web Forms 4.5, ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET Web API, Entity Framework 5, Async, e mais. Implementar este modelo flexível utilizando protocolos padrão da web - como OAuth, JSON e APIs REST - que permitem aos desenvolvedores reutilizar habilidades e ferramentas, facilmente integrando o SharePoint com arquiteturas Web e arquiteturas para aplicações móveis. Um vídeo da minha palestra + demos está disponível para assistir on-line (em Inglês): Na palestra eu mostrei como construir uma aplicação a partir do zero - ela mostrou como é fácil construir soluções usando a nova aplicação SharePoint, e destacou um cenário web + workflow + móvel que integra o SharePoint com código hospedado na Windows Azure (totalmente construído usando o Visual Studio 2012 e ASP.NET 4.5 - incluindo MVC e Web API). O novo Modelo de Aplicações para Nuvem do SharePoint é algo que eu acho extremamente emocionante, e que vai tornar muito mais fácil criar aplicações SharePoint usando todo o poder da Windows Azure e do .NET Framework. Usar a Windows Azure para estender facilmente soluções baseadas em SaaS como o Office 365 é também algo muito natural e que vai oferecer um monte de ótimas oportunidades para os desenvolvedores.  Espero que ajude, - Scott P.S. Além do blog, eu também estou utilizando o Twitter para atualizações rápidas e para compartilhar links. Siga-me em: twitter.com/ScottGu Texto traduzido do post original por Leniel Macaferi.

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  • Is SQL Azure a newbies springboard?

    - by jamiet
    Earlier today I was considering the various SQL Server platforms that are available today and I wondered aloud, wonder how long until the majority of #sqlserver newcomers use @sqlazure instead of installing locally Let me explain. My first experience of development was way back in the early 90s when I would crank open VBA in Access or Excel and start hammering out some code, usually by recording macros and looking at the code that they produced (sound familiar?). The reason was simple, Office was becoming ubiquitous so the barrier to entry was incredibly low and, save for a short hiatus at university, I’ve been developing on the Microsoft platform ever since. These days spend most of my time using SQL Server. I take a look at SQL Azure today I see a lot of similarities with those early experiences, the barrier to entry is low and getting lower. I don’t have to download some software or actually install anything other than a web browser in order to get myself a fully functioning SQL Server  database against which I can ostensibly start hammering out some code and I believe that to be incredibly empowering. Having said that there are still a few pretty high barriers, namely: I need to get out my credit card Its pretty useless without some development tools such as SQL Server Management Studio, which I do have to install. The second of those barriers will disappear pretty soon when Project Houston delivers a web-based admin and presentation tool for SQL Azure so that just leaves the matter of my having to use a credit card. If Microsoft have any sense at all then they will realise the huge potential of opening up a free, throttled version of SQL Azure for newbies to party on; they get to developers early (just like they did with me all those years ago) and it gives potential customers an opportunity to try-before-they-buy. Perhaps in 20 years time people will be talking about SQL Azure as being their first foray into the world of coding! @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Windows Azure Virtual Machines - Make Sure You Follow the Documentation

    - by BuckWoody
    To create a Windows Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service Virtual Machine you have several options. You can simply select an image from a “Gallery” which includes Windows or Linux operating systems, or even a Windows Server with pre-installed software like SQL Server. One of the advantages to Windows Azure Virtual Machines is that it is stored in a standard Hyper-V format – with the base hard-disk as a VHD. That means you can move a Virtual Machine from on-premises to Windows Azure, and then move it back again. You can even use a simple series of PowerShell scripts to do the move, or automate it with other methods. And this then leads to another very interesting option for deploying systems: you can create a server VHD, configure it with the software you want, and then run the “SYSPREP” process on it. SYSPREP is a Windows utility that essentially strips the identity from a system, and when you re-start that system it asks a few details on what you want to call it and so on. By doing this, you can essentially create your own gallery of systems, either for testing, development servers, demo systems and more. You can learn more about how to do that here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg465407.aspx   But there is a small issue you can run into that I wanted to make you aware of. Whenever you deploy a system to Windows Azure Virtual Machines, you must meet certain password complexity requirements. However, when you build the machine locally and SYSPREP it, you might not choose a strong password for the account you use to Remote Desktop to the machine. In that case, you might not be able to reach the system after you deploy it. Once again, the key here is reading through the instructions before you start. Check out the link I showed above, and this link: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc264456.aspx to make sure you understand what you want to deploy.  

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  • Windows Azure Horror Story: The Phantom App that Ate my Data

    - by jasont
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/jasont/archive/2013/10/31/windows-azure-horror-story-the-phantom-app-that-ate-my.aspxI’ve posted in the past about how my company, Stackify, makes some great tools that enhance the Windows Azure experience. By just using the Azure Management Portal, you don’t get a lot of insight into what is happening inside your instances, which are just Windows VMs. This morning, I noticed something quite scary, and fittingly enough, it’s Halloween. I deleted a deployment after doing a new deployment and VIP swap. But, after a few minutes, the instance still appeared in my Stackify dashboard. I thought this odd, as we monitor these operations and remove devices that have been deleted. Digging in showed that it wasn’t a problem with Stackify. This instance was still there, and still sending data. You’ll notice though that the “Status” check shows that the instance no longer exists. And it gets scarier. I quickly checked the running services, and sure enough, the Windows Azure Guest Agent (which runs worker roles) was still running: “Surely, this can’t be” I’m thinking at this point. Knowing that this worker role is in our QA environment, it has debug logging turned on. And, using our log file tailing feature, I can see that, yes, indeed, this deleted deployment is still executing code. Pulling messages off queues. Sending alerts. Changing data. Fortunately, our tools give me the ability to manually disable the Windows service that runs this code. In the meantime, I have contacted everyone I know (and support) at Microsoft to address this issue. Needless to say, this is concerning. When you delete a deployment, it needs to actually delete. Not continue to eat your data. As soon as I learn more, I’ll be posting an update.

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  • Creating a SQL Azure Database Should be Easier

    - by Ken Cox [MVP]
    Every time I try to create a database + tables + data for Windows Azure SQL I get errors.  One of them is 'Filegroup reference and partitioning scheme' is not supported in this version of SQL Server.' It’s partly due to my poor memory (since I’ve succeeded before) and partly due to the failure of tools that should be helping me. For example, when I want to create a script from an existing database on my local workstation, I use SQL Server Management Studio (currently v 11.0.2100.60).  I go to Tasks > Generate Scripts which brings up the nice Generate and Publish Scripts wizard. When I go into the Advanced button, under Script for Server Version, why don’t I see SQL Azure as an option by now? The tool should be sorting this out for me, right? Maybe this is available in SQL Server Data Tools? I haven’t got into that yet. Just merge the functionality with SSMS, please. Anyway, I pick an older version of SQL for the target and still need to tweak it for Azure. For example, I take out all the “[dbo].” stuff. Why is it put there by the wizard? I also have to get rid of "ON [PRIMARY]"  to deal with the error I noted at the top. Yes, there’s information on what a table needs to look like in SQL Azure but the tools should know this so I don’t have to mess with it.

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  • Using Essential Use Cases to design a UI-centric Application

    - by Bruno Brant
    Hello all, I'm begging a new project (oh, how I love the fresh taste of a new project!) and we are just starting to design it. In short: The application is a UI that will enable users to model an execution flow (a Visio like drag & drop interface). So our greatest concern is usability and features that will help the users model fast and clearly the execution flow. Our established methodology makes extensive use of Use Cases in order to create a harmonious view of the application between the programmers and users. This is a business concern, really: I'd prefer to use an Agile Method with User Stories rather than User Cases, but we need to define a clear scope to sell the product to our clients. However, Use Cases have a number of flaws, most of which are related to the fact that they include technical details, like UI, etc, as can be seem here. But, since we can't use User Stories and a fully interactive design, I've decided that we compromise: I will be using Essential Use Cases in order to hide those details. Now I have another problem: it's essential (no pun intended) to have a clear description of UI interaction, so, how should I document it? In other words, how do I specify a application through the use of Essential Use Cases where the UI interaction is vital to it? I can see some alternatives: Abandon the use of Use Cases since they don't correctly represent the problem Do not include interface descriptions in the use case, but create another documentation (Story Boards) and link then to the Essential Use Cases Include UI interaction description to the Essential Use Cases, since they are part of the business rules in the perspective of the users and the application itself

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  • Remote Desktop to Your Azure Virtual Machine

    - by Shaun
    The Windows Azure Team had just published their new development portal this week and the SDK 1.3. Within this new release there are a lot of cool feature available. The one I’m looking forward to is Remote Desktop Access to your running Windows Azure Virtual Machine.   Configuration Remote Desktop Access It would be very simple to make the azure service enable the remote desktop access. First of all let’s create a new windows azure project from the Visual Studio. In this example I just created a normal MVC 2 web role without any modifications. Then we right-click the azure project node in the solution explorer window and select “Publish”. Then let’s select the “Deploy your Windows Azure project to Windows Azure” on the top radio button. And then select the credential, deployment service/slot, storage and label as susal. You must have the Management API Certificates uploaded to your Windows Azure account, and install the certification on you machine before in order to use this one-click deployment feature. If you are familiar with this dialog you will notice that there’s a linkage named “Configure Remote Desktop connections”. Here is where you need to make this service enable the remote desktop feature. After clicked this link we will set the configuration of the remote desktop access authorization information. There are 4 steps we need to do to configure our access. Certificates: We need either create or select a certificate file in order to encypt the access cerdenticals. In this example I will use the certificate file for my Management API. Username: The remote desktop user name to access the virtual machine. Password: The password for the access. Expiration: The access cerdentals would be expired after 1 month by default but we can amend here. After that we clicked the OK button to back to the publish dialog.   The next step is to back to the new windows azure portal and navigate to the hosted services list. I created a new hosted service and upload the certificate file onto this service. The user name and password access to the azure machine must be encrypted from the local machine, and then send to the windows azure platform, then decrypted on the azure side by the same file. This is why we need to upload the certificate file onto azure. We navigated to the “Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN"” from the left panel and created a new hosted service named “SDK13” and selected the “Certificates” node. Then we clicked the “Add Certificates” button. Then we select the local certificate file and the password to install it into this azure service.   The final step would be back to our Visual Studio and in the pulish dialog just click the OK button. The Visual Studio will upload our package and the configuration into our service with the remote desktop settings.   Remote Desktop Access to Azure Virtual Machine All things had been done, let’s have a look back on the Windows Azure Development Portal. If I selected the web role that I had just published we can see on the toolbar there’s a section named “Remote Access”. In this section the Enable checkbox had been checked which means this role has the Remote Desktop Access feature enabled. If we want to modify the access cerdentals we can simply click the Configure button. Then we can update the user name, password, certificates and the expiration date.   Let’s select the instance node under the web role. In this case I just created one instance for demo. We can see that when we selected the instance node, the Connect button turned enabled. After clicked this button there will be a RDP file downloaded. This is a Remote Desctop configuration file that we can use to access to our azure virtual machine. Let’s download it to our local machine and execute. We input the user name and password we specified when we published our application to azure and then click OK. There might be some certificates warning dislog appeared. This is because the certificates we use to encryption is not signed by a trusted provider. Just select OK in these cases as we know the certificate is safty to us. Finally, the virtual machine of Windows Azure appeared.   A Quick Look into the Azure Virtual Machine Let’s just have a very quick look into our virtual machine. There are 3 disks available for us: C, D and E. Disk C: Store the local resource, diagnosis information, etc. Disk D: System disk which contains the OS, IIS, .NET Frameworks, etc. Disk E: Sotre our application code. The IIS which hosting our webiste on Azure. The IP configuration of the azure virtual machine.   Summary In this post I covered one of the new feature of the Azure SDK 1.3 – Remote Desktop Access. We can set the access per service and all of the instances of this service could be accessed through the remote desktop tool. With this feature we can deep into the virtual machines of our instances to see the inner information such as the system event, IIS log, system information, etc. But we should pay attention to modify the system settings. 2 reasons from what I know for now: 1. If we have more than one instances against our service we should ensure that all system settings we modifed are applied to all instances/virtual machines. Otherwise, as the machines are under the azure load balance proxy our application process may doesn’t work due to the defferent settings between the instances. 2. When the virtual machine encounted some problem and need to be translated to another physical machine all settings we made would be disappeared.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Windows Azure Platform Training Kit - June Update

    - by guybarrette
    Microsoft released an update to its Azure training kit. Here is what is new in the kit: Introduction to Windows Azure - VS2010 version Introduction To SQL Azure - VS2010 version Introduction to the Windows Azure Platform AppFabric Service Bus - VS2010 version Introduction to Dallas - VS2010 version Introduction to the Windows Azure Platform AppFabric Access Control Service - VS2010 version Web Services and Identity in the Cloud Exploring Windows Azure Storage VS2010 version + new Exercise: “Working with Drives” Windows Azure Deployment VS2010 version + new Exercise: “Securing Windows Azure with SSL” Minor fixes to presentations – mainly timelines, pricing, new features etc. Download it here var addthis_pub="guybarrette";

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  • Windows Azure SDK - ASPProviders example

    - by David
    Hi, since the new SDK 1.1 is missing the tutorial for "ASPProviders", i am currently asking myself how i would implement a "azure session state provider" ( this is the path in the "old" SDK: C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0\Samples\AspProviders ) Related threads: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1023108/how-does-microsoft-azure-handle-session-state http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazure/thread/2d1340ed-0ad0-456a-b069-aa6b85672102/ Has anyone an idea or even the old example project and could post some snippets of the config here?

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  • Choosing between .NET Service Bus Queues vs Azure Queue Service

    - by ChrisV
    Just a quick question regarding an Azure application. If I have a number of Web and Worker roles that need to communicate, documentation says to use the Azure Queue Service. However, I've just read that the new .NET Service Bus now also offers queues. These look to be more powerful as they appear to offer a much more detailed API. Whilst the .NSB looks more interesting it has a couple of issues that make me wary of using it in distributed application. (for example, Queue Expiration... if I cannot guarantee that a queue will be renewed on time I may lose it all!). Has anyone had any experience using either of these two technologies and could give any advice on when to choose one over the other. I suspect that whilst the service bus looks more powerful, as my use case is really just enabling Web/Worker roles to communicate between each other, that the Azure Queue Service is what I'm after. But I'm just really looking for confirmation of that before progamming myself in to a corner :-) Thanks in advance. UPDATE Have read up about the two systems over the break. It defo looks like .NET service bus is more specifically designed for integrating systems rather than providing a general purpose reliable messaging system. Azure Queues are distributed and so reliable and scalable in a way that .NSB queues are not and so more suitable for code hosted within Azure itself. Thanks for the responses.

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  • Where to store things like user pictures using Azure? Blob Storage?

    - by n26
    I have just migrated a project of mine for test cases to Microsoft's azure. But for functionalities similar to an avatar upload I need write access to the files on the harddrive. But this is a cloud, so this is not possible. How can I build such functionalities instead? Should I use the Blob Storage or is there a better solution? Does it make sense to store all website images (f.e. layout images) in the Blob Storage? So I would have a Cookie-free Domain for my static content?

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  • knife azure image list doesn't return User image

    - by TooLSHeD
    I'm trying to create and bootstrap a Windows VM in Azure using knife-azure. I initially tried using a Public Win 2008 r2 image, but quickly found out that winrm needs to be configured before this can work. So, I created a VM from that image, configured winrm as per these instructions and captured the VM. The problem is that the image does not show up when executing knife azure image list. When I try creating the server with the image name from the Azure portal, it complains that it does not exist. I'm running Ubuntu, so I tried the Azure cli tools and it doesn't show there either. I installed Azure PS in a Win 8 VM and then it shows up. Feeling encouraged, I installed Chef and knife-azure in the Win 8 VM, but it doesn't show up there either. How do I get my User image to show in knife azure?

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  • Determine Last Modification Datetime for an Azure Table

    - by embeddedprogrammer
    I am developing an application which may be hosted on a microsoft sql server, or on Azure SQL, depending upon the end user's wishes. My whole system works fine with the exception of some WCF functions which determine the last modification time of tables using the following technique: SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) as tableName, last_user_update as lastUpdate FROM mydb.sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats This query fails in Azure. Is there any analogous way to get table last modification dates from Azure's sql?

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