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• Windows Azure - access webrole local storage from separate workerrole

  - by Brett Smith

  I'm running an application on windows azure, the MVC views need to be dynamic, I started by storing them as records in the database, but am quite keen to move them to a physical location. My concept was to create the physical file via code... which worked great and speeds up the page load dramatically. This was of course before I realised that the files were only available for the duration of the role Next I looked at a start up task to create the files when the role was started - however I then realised that any separate instances weren't going to sync up unless I monitored the database for changes. So I moved from a start up task to a function in the run method of the role that checks the database every 10 minutes to see if changes have occurred. The problem is that this seems to choke up the application (at least in the warm up stage). Ideally I would like to move the run function to it's own worker role that can sit there and push files out to web role instances, but I'm unsure on how I would go about accessing the web roles local storage from the worker role. Can anybody tell me whether this is actually possible? and hopefully point me in the right direction to achieve this? Just to clarify what I'm trying to achieve -View is created in user interface running on web role and stored in database -Separate web role (front end) has clientside application with virtualpath provider pointing Views requests to local storage (localresource) -separate worker role to create View structure and load this into clientside web role local storage

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• Microsoft launches two new Data Centres for Azure in US to meet growing demand

  - by Gopinath

  In order to meet the growing demand for Windows Azure in US, Microsoft has launched two new data centres in US – East US and West US. With the addition of these two data centres the number of Azure data centres across the globe has grown to 8 and 4 among them are located in US. The two new data centres are providing Computer and Storage resources and few enthusiastic customers already deployed their applications. The other services like SQL Azure and AppFabric will be offered by these data centres in the coming months. The addition of new data centres is a good sign to Microsoft as the customer demand for their Cloud offering is growing. Amazon Web Services is the pioneer in Cloud Computing and they offer wider range of Cloud Services compared to Microsoft. Source: Windows Azure Blog

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• Is Azure Compatible with JPEG XR?

  - by Shawn Eary

  I just put an F#/MVC app into a Windows Azure solution as a Web Role. Before migration, my JPEG XR (*.WDP) files were getting displayed on the client in IE9 without issue via my local and hosted sites. Now, after migration into Windows Azure, my JPEG XR files neither get displayed in my local Windows Azure compute emulator nor do they get displayed when they are deployed to http://*.cloudapp.net. Is there some sort of conflict with Widows Azure and (JPEG XR) *.wdp files? If so, what is the accepted best practice for overcoming this conflict?

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• Azure - Unable To Get SQL Azure Invitation Code!

  - by Goober

  Scenario I'm trying to convert my Silverlight Business Application over to the cloud with the help of Azure. I have been following this link from Brad Abrams blog. Both the links to Windows Azure and SQL Azure crash out in Google Chrome, they work in Internet Explorer, but it's literally one of the worst user experiences I've ever had. The Problem I'm asked to sign in to Microsoft connect with my Live ID. I do so, I'm then asked to register!? - I do so. I'm then sent a verification email which I verify. I'm then signed out!?!?! When I sign back in, it repeats the process.... ANY IDEAS!??! Edit/Update: Finally managed to get signed up/in to connect. From here I was able to get hold of an invitation code to Windows Azure. Now I need an invitation code for SQL Azure. I cannot see ANYWHERE that advertises a way of getting this SQL Azure code, the only thing that I have seen is some text saying that there "may be a delay" in receiving codes due to volume of interest, which quite frankly I find hard to believe......... It's so far been 3 days now.This officially Sucks! If I have any more news I'll post back here.

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• How to create a virtual network with Azure Connect

  - by Herve Roggero

  If you are trying to establish a virtual network between machines located in disparate networks, you can either use VPN, Virtual Network or Azure Connect. If you want to establish a connection between machines located in Windows Azure, you should consider using the Virtual Network service. If you want to establish a connection between local machines and Virtual Machines in Windows Azure, you may be able to use your existing VPN device (assuming you have one), as long as the device is supported by Microsoft. If the VPN device you are using isn’t supported, or if you are trying to create a virtual network between machines from disparate networks (such as machines located in another cloud provider), you can use Azure Connect. This blog post explains how Azure Connect can help you create virtual networks between multiple servers in the cloud, various servers in different cloud environments, and on-premise. Note: Azure Connect is currently in Technical Preview. About Azure Connect Let’s do a quick review of Azure Connect. This technology implements an IPSec tunnel from machines to to a relay service located in the Microsoft cloud (Azure). So in essence, Azure Connect doesn’t provide a point-to-point connection between machines; the network communication is tunneled through the relay service. The relay service in turn offers a mechanism to enforce basic communication rules that you define through Groups. We will review this later. You could network two or more VMs in the Azure cloud (although you should consider using a Virtual Network if you go this route), or servers in the Azure cloud and other machines in the Amazon cloud for example, or even two or more on-premise servers located in different locations for which a direct network connection is not an option. You can place any number of machines in your topology. Azure Connect gives you great flexibility on how you want to build your virtual network across various environments. So Azure Connect makes sense when you want to: Connect machines located in different cloud providers Connect on-premise machines running in different locations Connect Azure VMs with on-premise (if you do not have a VPN device, or if your device is not supported) Connect Azure Roles (Worker Roles, Web Roles) with on-premise servers or in other cloud providers The diagram below shows you a high level network topology that involves machines in the Windows Azure cloud, other cloud providers and on-premise. You should note that the only required component in this diagram is the Relay itself. The other machines are optional (although your network is useful only if you have two or more machines involved). Relay agents are currently available in three geographic areas: US, Europe and Asia. You can change which region you want to use in the Windows Azure management portal. High Level Network Topology With Azure Connect Azure Connect Agent Azure Connect establishes a virtual network and creates virtual adapters on your machines; these virtual adapters communicate through the Relay using IPSec. This is achieved by installing an agent (the Azure Connect Agent) on all the machines you want in your network topology. However, you do not need to install the agent on Worker Roles and Web Roles; that’s because the agent is already installed for you. Any other machine, including Virtual Machines in Windows Azure, needs the agent installed.  To install the agent, simply go to your Windows Azure portal (http://windows.azure.com) and click on Networks on the bottom left panel. You will see a list of subscriptions under Connect. If you select a subscription, you will be able to click on the Install Local Endpoint icon on top. Clicking on this icon will begin the download and installation process for the agent. Activating Roles for Azure Connect As previously mentioned, you do not need to install the Azure Connect Agent on Worker Roles and Web Roles because it is already loaded. However, you do need to activate them if you want the roles to participate in your network topology. To do this, you will need to click on the Get Activation Token icon. The activation token must then be copied and placed in the configuration file of your roles. For more information on how to perform this step, visit MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg432964.aspx. Firewall Rules Note that specific firewall rules must exist to allow the agent to communicate through the Relay. You will need to allow TCP 443 and ICMPv6. For additional information, please visit MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg433061.aspx. CA Certificates You can optionally require agents to sign their activation request with the Relay using a trusted certificate issued by a Certificate Authority (CA). Click on Activation Options to learn more. Groups To create your network topology you must first create a group. A group represents a logical container of endpoints (or machines) that can communicate through the Relay. You can create multiple groups allowing you to manage network communication differently. For example you could create a DEVELOPMENT group and a PRODUCTION group. To add an endpoint you must first install an agent that will create a virtual adapter on the machine on which it is installed (as discussed in the previous section). Once you have created a group and installed the agents, the machines will appear in the Windows Azure management portal and you can start assigning machines to groups. The next figure shows you that I created a group called LocalGroup and assigned two machines (both on-premise) to that group. Groups and Computers in Azure Connect As I mentioned previously you can allow these machines to establish a network connection. To do this, you must enable the Interconnected option in the group. The following diagram shows you the definition of the group. In this topology I chose to include local machines only, but I could also add worker roles and web roles in the Azure Roles section (you must first activate your roles, as discussed previously). You could also add other Groups, allowing you to manage inter-group communication. Defining a Group in Azure Connect Testing the Connection Now that my agents have been installed on my two machines, the group defined and the Interconnected option checked, I can test the connection between my machines. The next screenshot shows you that I sent a PING request to DEVLAP02 from DEVDSK02. The PING request was successful. Note however that the time is in the hundreds of milliseconds on average. That is to be expected because the machines are connecting through the Relay located in the cloud. Going through the Relay introduces an extra hop in the communication chain, so if your systems rely on high performance, you may want to conduct some basic performance tests. Sending a PING Request Through The Relay Conclusion As you can see, creating a network topology between machines using the Azure Connect service is simple. It took me less than five minutes to create the above configuration, including the time it took to install the Azure Connect agents on the two machines. The flexibility of Azure Connect allows you to create a virtual network between disparate environments, as long as your operating systems are supported by the agent. For more information on Azure Connect, visit the MSDN website at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg432997.aspx. About Herve Roggero Herve Roggero, Windows Azure MVP, is the founder of Blue Syntax Consulting, a company specialized in cloud computing products and services. Herve's experience includes software development, architecture, database administration and senior management with both global corporations and startup companies. Herve holds multiple certifications, including an MCDBA, MCSE, MCSD. He also holds a Master's degree in Business Administration from Indiana University. Herve is the co-author of "PRO SQL Azure" from Apress and runs the Azure Florida Association (on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4177626). For more information on Blue Syntax Consulting, visit www.bluesyntax.net. Special Thanks I would like thank those that helped me figure out how Azure Connect works: Marcel Meijer - http://blogs.msmvps.com/marcelmeijer/ Michael Wood - Http://www.mvwood.com Glenn Block - http://www.codebetter.com/glennblock Yves Goeleven - http://cloudshaper.wordpress.com/ Sandrino Di Mattia - http://fabriccontroller.net/ Mike Martin - http://techmike2kx.wordpress.com

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• Integrate Bing Search API into ASP.Net application

  - by sreejukg

  Couple of months back, I wrote an article about how to integrate Bing Search engine (API 2.0) with ASP.Net website. You can refer the article here http://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/archive/2012/04/07/integrate-bing-api-for-search-inside-asp-net-web-application.aspx Things are changing rapidly in the tech world and Bing has also changed! The Bing Search API 2.0 will work until August 1, 2012, after that it will not return results. Shocked? Don’t worry the API has moved to Windows Azure market place and available for you to sign up and continue using it and there is a free version available based on your usage. In this article, I am going to explain how you can integrate the new Bing API that is available in the Windows Azure market place with your website. You can access the Windows Azure market place from the below link https://datamarket.azure.com/ There is lot of applications available for you to subscribe and use. Bing is one of them. You can find the new Bing Search API from the below link https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/5BA839F1-12CE-4CCE-BF57-A49D98D29A44 To get access to Bing Search API, first you need to register an account with Windows Azure market place. Sign in to the Windows Azure market place site using your windows live account. Once you sign in with your windows live account, you need to register to Windows Azure Market place account. From the Windows Azure market place, you will see the sign in button it the top right of the page. Clicking on the sign in button will take you to the Windows live ID authentication page. You can enter a windows live ID here to login. Once logged in you will see the Registration page for the Windows Azure market place as follows. You can agree or disagree for the email address usage by Microsoft. I believe selecting the check box means you will get email about what is happening in Windows Azure market place. Click on continue button once you are done. In the next page, you should accept the terms of use, it is not optional, you must agree to terms and conditions. Scroll down to the page and select the I agree checkbox and click on Register Button. Now you are a registered member of Windows Azure market place. You can subscribe to data applications. In order to use BING API in your application, you must obtain your account Key, in the previous version of Bing you were required an API key, the current version uses Account Key instead. Once you logged in to the Windows Azure market place, you can see “My Account” in the top menu, from the Top menu; go to “My Account” Section. From the My Account section, you can manage your subscriptions and Account Keys. Account Keys will be used by your applications to access the subscriptions from the market place. Click on My Account link, you can see Account Keys in the left menu and then Add an account key or you can use the default Account key available. Creating account key is very simple process. Also you can remove the account keys you create if necessary. The next step is to subscribe to BING Search API. At this moment, Bing Offers 2 APIs for search. The available options are as follows. 1. Bing Search API - https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/5ba839f1-12ce-4cce-bf57-a49d98d29a44 2. Bing Search API – Web Results only - https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/8818f55e-2fe5-4ce3-a617-0b8ba8419f65 The difference is that the later will give you only web results where the other you can specify the source type such as image, video, web, news etc. Carefully choose the API based on your application requirements. In this article, I am going to use Web Results Only API, but the steps will be similar to both. Go to the API page https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/8818f55e-2fe5-4ce3-a617-0b8ba8419f65, you can see the subscription options in the right side. And in the bottom of the page you can see the free option Since I am going to use the free options, just Click the Sign Up link for that. Just select I agree check box and click on the Sign Up button. You will get a recipt pagethat detail your subscription. Now you are ready Bing Search API – Web results. The next step is to integrate the API into your ASP.Net application. Now if you go to the Search API page (as well as in the Receipt page), you can see a .Net C# Class Library link, click on the link, you will get a code file named “BingSearchContainer.cs”. In the following sections I am going to demonstrate the use of Bing Search API from an ASP.Net application. Create an empty ASP.Net web application. In the solution explorer, the application will looks as follows. Now add the downloaded code file (“BingSearchContainer.cs”) to the project. Right click your project in solution explorer, Add -> existing item, then browse to the downloaded location, select the “BingSearchContainer.cs” file and add it to the project. To build the code file you need to add reference to the following library. System.Data.Services.Client You can find the library in the .Net tab, when you select Add -> Reference Try to build your project now; it should build without any errors. Add an ASP.Net page to the project. I have included a text box and a button, then a Grid View to the page. The idea is to Search the text entered and display the results in the gridview. The page will look in the Visual Studio Designer as follows. The markup of the page is as follows. In the button click event handler for the search button, I have used the following code. Now run your project and enter some text in the text box and click the Search button, you will see the results coming from Bing, cool. I entered the text “Microsoft” in the textbox and clicked on the button and I got the following results. Searching Specific Websites If you want to search a particular website, you pass the site url with site:<site url name> and if you have more sites, use pipe (|). e.g. The following search query site:microsoft.com | site:adobe.com design will search the word design and return the results from Microsoft.com and Adobe.com See the sample code that search only Microsoft.com for the text entered for the above sample. var webResults = bingContainer.Web("site:www.Microsoft.com " + txtSearch.Text, null, null, null, null, null, null); Paging the results returned by the API By default the BING API will return 100 results based on your query. The default code file that you downloaded from BING doesn’t include any option for this. You can modify the downloaded code to perform this paging. The BING API supports two parameters $top (for number of results to return) and $skip (for number of records to skip). So if you want 3rd page of results with page size = 10, you need to pass $top = 10 and $skip=20. Open the BingSearchContainer.cs in the editor. You can see the Web method in it as follows. public DataServiceQuery<WebResult> Web(String Query, String Market, String Adult, Double? Latitude, Double? Longitude, String WebFileType, String Options) {  In the method signature, I have added two more parameters public DataServiceQuery<WebResult> Web(String Query, String Market, String Adult, Double? Latitude, Double? Longitude, String WebFileType, String Options, int resultCount, int pageNo) { and in the method, you need to pass the parameters to the query variable. query = query.AddQueryOption("$top", resultCount); query = query.AddQueryOption("$skip", (pageNo -1)*resultCount); return query; Note that I didn’t perform any validation, but you need to check conditions such as resultCount and pageCount should be greater than or equal to 1. If the parameters are not valid, the Bing Search API will throw the error. The modified method is as follows. The changes are highlighted. Now see the following code in the SearchPage.aspx.cs file protected void btnSearch_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) {     var bingContainer = new Bing.BingSearchContainer(new Uri(https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Bing/SearchWeb/));     // replace this value with your account key     var accountKey = "your key";     // the next line configures the bingContainer to use your credentials.     bingContainer.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(accountKey, accountKey);     var webResults = bingContainer.Web("site:microsoft.com" +txtSearch.Text , null, null, null, null, null, null,3,2);     lstResults.DataSource = webResults;     lstResults.DataBind(); } The following code will return 3 results starting from second page (by skipping first 3 results). See the result page as follows. Bing provides complete integration to its offerings. When you develop search based applications, you can use the power of Bing to perform the search. Integrating Bing Search API to ASP.Net application is a simple process and without investing much time, you can develop a good search based application. Make sure you read the terms of use before designing the application and decide which API usage is suitable for you. Further readings BING API Migration Guide http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=248077 Bing API FAQ http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=252146 Bing API Schema Guide http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=252151

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• Windows and SQL Azure Best Practices: Affinity Groups

  - by BuckWoody

  When you create a Windows Azure application, you’ll pick a subscription to put it under. This is a billing container - underneath that, you’ll deploy a Hosted Service. That holds the Web and Worker Roles that you’ll deploy for your applications. along side that, you use the Storage Account to create storage for the application. (In some cases, you might choose to use only storage or Roles - the info here applies anyway) As you are setting up your environment, you’re asked to pick a “region” where your application will run. If you choose a Region, you’ll be asked where to put the Roles. You’re given choices like Asia, North America and so on. This is where the hardware that physically runs your code lives. We have lots of fault domains, power considerations and so on to keep that set of datacenters running, but keep in mind that this is where the application lives. You also get this selection for Storage Accounts. When you make new storage, it’s a best practice to put it where your computing is. This makes the shortest path from the code to the data, and then back out to the user. One of the selections for the location is “Anywhere U.S.”. This selection might be interpreted to mean that we will bias towards keeping the data and the code together, but that may not be the case. There is a specific abstraction we created for just that purpose: Affinity Groups. An Affinity Group is simply a name you can use to tie together resources. You can do this in two places - when you’re creating the Hosted Service (shown above) and on it’s own tree item on the left, called “Affinity Groups”. When you select either of those actions, You’re presented with a dialog box that allows you to specify a name, and then the Region that  names ties the resources to. Now you can select that Affinity Group just as if it were a Region, and your code and data will stay together. That helps with keeping the performance high. Official Documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh531560.aspx

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• Creating a Training Lab on Windows Azure

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/06/17/153149.aspxThis week we are preparing for a training course that Alan Smith will be running for the support teams at one of my customers around Windows Azure. In order to facilitate the training lab we have a few prerequisites we need to handle. One of the biggest ones is that although the support team all have MSDN accounts the local desktops they work on are not ideal for running most of the labs as we want to give them some additional developer background training around Azure. Some recent Azure announcements really help us in this area: MSDN software can now be used on Azure VM You don't pay for Azure VM's when they are no longer used  Since the support team only have limited experience of Windows Azure and the organisation also have an Enterprise Agreement we decided it would be best value for money to spin up a training lab in a subscription on the EA and then we can turn the machines off when we are done. At the same time we would be able to spin them back up when the users need to do some additional lab work once the training course is completed. In order to achieve this I wanted to create a powershell script which would setup my training lab. The aim was to create 18 VM's which would be based on a prebuilt template with Visual Studio and the Azure development tools. The script I used is described below The Start & Variables The below text will setup the powershell environment and some variables which I will use elsewhere in the script. It will also import the Azure Powershell cmdlets. You can see below that I will need to download my publisher settings file and know some details from my Azure account. At this point I will assume you have a basic understanding of Azure & Powershell so already know how to do this. Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestrictedcls $startTime = get-dateImport-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\PowerShell\Azure\Azure.psd1"# Azure Publisher Settings $azurePublisherSettings = '<Your settings file>.publishsettings'  # Subscription Details $subscriptionName = "<Your subscription name>" $defaultStorageAccount = "<Your default storage account>"  # Affinity Group Details $affinityGroup = '<Your affinity group>' $dataCenter = 'West Europe' # From Get-AzureLocation  # VM Details $baseVMName = 'TRN' $adminUserName = '<Your admin username>' $password = '<Your admin password>' $size = 'Medium' $vmTemplate = '<The name of your VM template image>' $rdpFilePath = '<File path to save RDP files to>' $machineSettingsPath = '<File path to save machine info to>'    Functions In the next section of the script I have some functions which are used to perform certain actions. The first is called CreateVM. This will do the following actions: If the VM already exists it will be deleted Create the cloud service Create the VM from the template I have created Add an endpoint so we can RDP to them all over the same port Download the RDP file so there is a short cut the trainees can easily access the machine via Write settings for the machine to a log file  function CreateVM($machineNo) { # Specify a name for the new VM $machineName = "$baseVMName-$machineNo" Write-Host "Creating VM: $machineName"       # Get the Azure VM Image      $myImage = Get-AzureVMImage $vmTemplate   #If the VM already exists delete and re-create it $existingVm = Get-AzureVM -Name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName if($existingVm -ne $null) { Write-Host "VM already exists so deleting it" Remove-AzureVM -Name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName }   "Creating Service" $serviceName = "bupa-azure-train-$machineName" Remove-AzureService -Force -ServiceName $serviceName New-AzureService -Location $dataCenter -ServiceName $serviceName   Write-Host "Creating VM: $machineName" New-AzureQuickVM -Windows -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName -ImageName $myImage.ImageName -InstanceSize $size -AdminUsername $adminUserName -Password $password  Write-Host "Updating the RDP endpoint for $machineName" Get-AzureVM -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName ` | Add-AzureEndpoint -Name RDP -Protocol TCP -LocalPort 3389 -PublicPort 550 ` | Update-AzureVM    Write-Host "Get the RDP File for machine $machineName" $machineRDPFilePath = "$rdpFilePath\$machineName.rdp" Get-AzureRemoteDesktopFile -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName -LocalPath "$machineRDPFilePath"   WriteMachineSettings "$machineName" "$serviceName" }    The delete machine settings function is used to delete the log file before we start re-running the process.  function DeleteMachineSettings() { Write-Host "Deleting the machine settings output file" [System.IO.File]::Delete("$machineSettingsPath"); }    The write machine settings function will get the VM and then record its details to the log file. The importance of the log file is that I can easily provide the information for all of the VM's to our infrastructure team to be able to configure access to all of the VM's    function WriteMachineSettings([string]$vmName, [string]$vmServiceName) { Write-Host "Writing to the machine settings output file"   $vm = Get-AzureVM -name $vmName -ServiceName $vmServiceName $vmEndpoint = Get-AzureEndpoint -VM $vm -Name RDP   $sb = new-object System.Text.StringBuilder $sb.Append("Service Name: "); $sb.Append($vm.ServiceName); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("VM: "); $sb.Append($vm.Name); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("RDP Public Port: "); $sb.Append($vmEndpoint.Port); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("Public DNS: "); $sb.Append($vmEndpoint.Vip); $sb.AppendLine(""); [System.IO.File]::AppendAllText($machineSettingsPath, $sb.ToString());  } # end functions    Rest of Script In the rest of the script it is really just the bit that orchestrates the actions we want to happen. It will load the publisher settings, select the Azure subscription and then loop around the CreateVM function and create 16 VM's  Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile $azurePublisherSettings Set-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscriptionName -CurrentStorageAccount $defaultStorageAccount Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscriptionName  DeleteMachineSettings    "Starting creating Bupa International Azure Training Lab" $numberOfVMs = 16  for ($index=1; $index -le $numberOfVMs; $index++) { $vmNo = "$index" CreateVM($vmNo); }    "Finished creating Bupa International Azure Training Lab" # Give it a Minute Start-Sleep -s 60  $endTime = get-date "Script run time " + ($endTime - $startTime)    Conclusion As you can see there is nothing too fancy about this script but in our case of creating a small isolated training lab which is not connected to our corporate network then we can easily use this to provision the lab. Im sure if this is of use to anyone you can easily modify it to do other things with the lab environment too. A couple of points to note are that there are some soft limits in Azure about the number of cores and services your subscription can use. You may need to contact the Azure support team to be able to increase this limit. In terms of the real business value of this approach, it was not possible to use the existing desktops to do the training on, and getting some internal virtual machines would have been relatively expensive and time consuming for our ops team to do. With the Azure option we are able to spin these machines up for a temporary period during the training course and then throw them away when we are done. We expect the costing of this test lab to be very small, especially considering we have EA pricing. As a ball park I think my 18 lab VM training environment will cost in the region of $80 per day on our EA. This is a fraction of the cost of the creation of a single VM on premise.

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• Windows Azure: General Availability of Web Sites + Mobile Services, New AutoScale + Alerts Support, No Credit Card Needed for MSDN

  - by ScottGu

  This morning we released a major set of updates to Windows Azure.  These updates included: Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites with SLA Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services with SLA Auto-Scale: New automatic scaling support for Web Sites, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines Alerts/Notifications: New email alerting support for all Compute Services (Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines) MSDN: No more credit card requirement for sign-up All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Web Sites. The Windows Azure Web Sites service is perfect for hosting a web presence, building customer engagement solutions, and delivering business web apps.  Today’s General Availability release means we are taking off the “preview” tag from the Free and Standard (formerly called reserved) tiers of Windows Azure Web Sites.  This means we are providing: A 99.9% monthly SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the Standard tier Microsoft Support available on a 24x7 basis (with plans that range from developer plans to enterprise Premier support) The Free tier runs in a shared compute environment and supports up to 10 web sites. While the Free tier does not come with an SLA, it works great for rapid development and testing and enables you to quickly spike out ideas at no cost. The Standard tier, which was called “Reserved” during the preview, runs using dedicated per-customer VM instances for great performance, isolation and scalability, and enables you to host up to 500 different Web sites within them.  You can easily scale your Standard instances on-demand using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can adjust VM instance sizes from a Small instance size (1 core, 1.75GB of RAM), up to a Medium instance size (2 core, 3.5GB of RAM), or Large instance (4 cores and 7 GB RAM).  You can choose to run between 1 and 10 Standard instances, enabling you to easily scale up your web backend to 40 cores of CPU and 70GB of RAM: Today’s release also includes general availability support for custom domain SSL certificate bindings for web sites running using the Standard tier. Customers will be able to utilize certificates they purchase for their custom domains and use either SNI or IP based SSL encryption. SNI encryption is available for all modern browsers and does not require an IP address.  SSL certificates can be used for individual sites or wild-card mapped across multiple sites (we charge extra for the use of a SSL cert – but the fee is per-cert and not per site which means you pay once for it regardless of how many sites you use it with).  Today’s release also includes the following new features: Auto-Scale support Today’s Windows Azure release adds preview support for Auto-Scaling web sites.  This enables you to setup automatic scale rules based on the activity of your instances – allowing you to automatically scale down (and save money) when they are below a CPU threshold you define, and automatically scale up quickly when traffic increases.  See below for more details. 64-bit and 32-bit mode support You can now choose to run your standard tier instances in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode (previously they only ran in 32-bit mode).  This enables you to address even more memory within individual web applications. Memory dumps Memory dumps can be very useful for diagnosing issues and debugging apps. Using a REST API, you can now get a memory dump of your sites, which you can then use for investigating issues in Visual Studio Debugger, WinDbg, and other tools. Scaling Sites Independently Prior to today’s release, all sites scaled up/down together whenever you scaled any site in a sub-region. So you may have had to keep your proof-of-concept or testing sites in a separate sub-region if you wanted to keep them in the Free tier. This will no longer be necessary.  Windows Azure Web Sites can now mix different tier levels in the same geographic sub-region. This allows you, for example, to selectively move some of your sites in the West US sub-region up to Standard tier when they require the features, scalability, and SLA of the Standard tier. Full pricing details on Windows Azure Web Sites can be found here.  Note that the “Shared Tier” of Windows Azure Web Sites remains in preview mode (and continues to have discounted preview pricing).  Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Mobile Services is perfect for building scalable cloud back-ends for Windows 8.x, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML/JavaScript applications.  Customers We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Windows Azure Mobile Services since we first previewed it last September, and more than 20,000 customers are now running mobile back-ends in production using it.  These customers range from startups like Yatterbox, to university students using Mobile Services to complete apps like Sly Fox in their spare time, to media giants like Verdens Gang finding new ways to deliver content, and telcos like TalkTalk Business delivering the up-to-the-minute information their customers require.  In today’s Build keynote, we demonstrated how TalkTalk Business is using Windows Azure Mobile Services to deliver service, outage and billing information to its customers, wherever they might be. Partners When we unveiled the source control and Custom API features I blogged about two weeks ago, we enabled a range of new scenarios, one of which is a more flexible way to work with third party services.  The following blogs, samples and tutorials from our partners cover great ways you can extend Mobile Services to help you build rich modern apps: New Relic allows developers to monitor and manage the end-to-end performance of iOS and Android applications connected to Mobile Services. SendGrid eliminates the complexity of sending email from Mobile Services, saving time and money, while providing reliable delivery to the inbox. Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud that you can use with Mobile Services to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into your mobile apps. Xamarin provides a Mobile Services add on to make it easy building cross-platform connected mobile aps. Pusher allows quickly and securely add scalable real-time messaging functionality to Mobile Services-based web and mobile apps. Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 This week during //build/ keynote, we demonstrated how Visual Studio 2013, Mobile Services and Windows 8.1 make building connected apps easier than ever. Developers building Windows 8 applications in Visual Studio can now connect them to Windows Azure Mobile Services by simply right clicking then choosing Add Connected Service. You can either create a new Mobile Service or choose existing Mobile Service in the Add Connected Service dialog. Once completed, Visual Studio adds a reference to Mobile Services SDK to your project and generates a Mobile Services client initialization snippet automatically. Add Push Notifications Push Notifications and Live Tiles are a key to building engaging experiences. Visual Studio 2013 and Mobile Services make it super easy to add push notifications to your Windows 8.1 app, by clicking Add a Push Notification item: The Add Push Notification wizard will then guide you through the registration with the Windows Store as well as connecting your app to a new or existing mobile service. Upon completion of the wizard, Visual Studio will configure your mobile service with the WNS credentials, as well as add sample logic to your client project and your mobile service that demonstrates how to send push notifications to your app. Server Explorer Integration In Visual Studio 2013 you can also now view your Mobile Services in the the Server Explorer. You can add tables, edit, and save server side scripts without ever leaving Visual Studio, as shown on the image below: Pricing With today’s general availability release we are announcing that we will be offering Mobile Services in three tiers – Free, Standard, and Premium.  Each tier is metered using a simple pricing model based on the # of API calls (bandwidth is included at no extra charge), and the Standard and Premium tiers are backed by 99.9% monthly SLAs.  You can elastically scale up or down the number of instances you have of each tier to increase the # of API requests your service can support – allowing you to efficiently scale as your business grows. The following table summarizes the new pricing model (full pricing details here):   You can find the full details of the new pricing model here. Build Conference Talks The //BUILD/ conference will be packed with sessions covering every aspect of developing connected applications with Mobile Services. The best part is that, even if you can’t be with us in San Francisco, every session is being streamed live. Be sure not to miss these talks: Mobile Services – Soup to Nuts — Josh Twist Building Cross-Platform Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner Connected Windows Phone Apps made Easy with Mobile Services — Yavor Georgiev Build Connected Windows 8.1 Apps with Mobile Services — Nick Harris Who’s that user? Identity in Mobile Apps — Dinesh Kulkarni Building REST Services with JavaScript — Nathan Totten Going Live and Beyond with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Kirill Gavrylyuk , Paul Batum Protips for Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner AutoScale: Dynamically scale up/down your app based on real-world usage One of the key benefits of Windows Azure is that you can dynamically scale your application in response to changing demand. In the past, though, you have had to either manually change the scale of your application, or use additional tooling (such as WASABi or MetricsHub) to automatically scale your application. Today, we’re announcing that AutoScale will be built-into Windows Azure directly.  With today’s release it is now enabled for Cloud Services, Virtual Machines and Web Sites (Mobile Services support will come soon). Auto-scale enables you to configure Windows Azure to automatically scale your application dynamically on your behalf (without any manual intervention) so you can achieve the ideal performance and cost balance. Once configured it will regularly adjust the number of instances running in response to the load in your application. Currently, we support two different load metrics: CPU percentage Storage queue depth (Cloud Services and Virtual Machines only) We’ll enable automatic scaling on even more scale metrics in future updates. When to use Auto-Scale The following are good criteria for services/apps that will benefit from the use of auto-scale: The service/app can scale horizontally (e.g. it can be duplicated to multiple instances) The service/app load changes over time If your app meets these criteria, then you should look to leverage auto-scale. How to Enable Auto-Scale To enable auto-scale, simply navigate to the Scale tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal for the app/service you wish to enable.  Within the scale tab turn the Auto-Scale setting on to either CPU or Queue (for Cloud Services and VMs) to enable Auto-Scale.  Then change the instance count and target CPU settings to configure the Auto-Scale ranges you want to maintain. The image below demonstrates how to enable Auto-Scale on a Windows Azure Web-Site.  I’ve configured the web-site so that it will run using between 1 and 5 VM instances.  The exact # used will depend on the aggregate CPU of the VMs using the 40-70% range I’ve configured below.  If the aggregate CPU goes above 70%, then Windows Azure will automatically add new VMs to the pool (up to the maximum of 5 instances I’ve configured it to use).  If the aggregate CPU drops below 40% then Windows Azure will automatically start shutting down VMs to save me money: Once you’ve turned auto-scale on, you can return to the Scale tab at any point and select Off to manually set the number of instances. Using the Auto-Scale Preview With today’s update you can now, in just a few minutes, have Windows Azure automatically adjust the number of instances you have running  in your apps to keep your service performant at an even better cost. Auto-scale is being released today as a preview feature, and will be free until General Availability. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 separate auto-scale rules across all of the resources they have (Web sites, Cloud services or Virtual Machines). If you hit the 10 limit, you can disable auto-scale for any resource to enable it for another. Alerts and Notifications Starting today we are now providing the ability to configure threshold based alerts on monitoring metrics. This feature is available for compute services (cloud services, VM, websites and mobiles services). Alerts provide you the ability to get proactively notified of active or impending issues within your application.  You can define alert rules for: Virtual machine monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (CPU percentage, network in/out, disk read bytes/sec and disk write bytes/sec) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Cloud service monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (same as VM), monitoring metrics from the guest VM (from performance counters within the VM) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. For Web Sites and Mobile Services, alerting rules can be configured on monitoring metrics from monitoring endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Creating Alert Rules You can add an alert rule for a monitoring metric by navigating to the Setting -> Alerts tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click on the Add Rule button to create an alert rule. Give the alert rule a name and optionally add a description. Then pick the service which you want to define the alert rule on: The next step in the alert creation wizard will then filter the monitoring metrics based on the service you selected:   Once created the rule will show up in your alerts list within the settings tab: The rule above is defined as “not activated” since it hasn’t tripped over the CPU threshold we set.  If the CPU on the above machine goes over the limit, though, I’ll get an email notifying me from an Windows Azure Alerts email address ([email protected]). And when I log into the portal and revisit the alerts tab I’ll see it highlighted in red.  Clicking it will then enable me to see what is causing it to fail, as well as view the history of when it has happened in the past. Alert Notifications With today’s initial preview you can now easily create alerting rules based on monitoring metrics and get notified on active or impending issues within your application that require attention. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 alert rules across all of the services that support alert rules. No More Credit Card Requirement for MSDN Subscribers Earlier this month (during TechEd 2013), Windows Azure announced that MSDN users will get Windows Azure Credits every month that they can use for any Windows Azure services they want. You can read details about this in my previous Dev/Test blog post. Today we are making further updates to enable an easier Windows Azure signup for MSDN users. MSDN users will now not be required to provide payment information (e.g. no credit card) during sign-up, so long as they use the service within the included monetary credit for the billing period. For usage beyond the monetary credit, they can enable overages by providing the payment information and remove the spending limit. This enables a super easy, one page sign-up experience for MSDN users.  Simply sign-up for your Windows Azure trial using the same Microsoft ID that you use to manage your MSDN account, then complete the one page sign-up form below and you will be able to spend your free monthly MSDN credits (up to $150 each month) on any Windows Azure resource for dev/test:   This makes it trivially easy for every MDSN customer to start using Windows Azure today.  If you haven’t signed up yet, I definitely recommend checking it out. Summary Today’s release includes a ton of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. 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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• Please guide this self-taught Web Developer.

  - by ChickenPuke

  One of the major regrets in life is that I didn't do something with my introversion. I didn't manage to get past the first year of college because of that. I have chosen the path where there are no video games and other time sinks, all I have is the internet to quench my thirst of learning the ins and outs of the field of Web Developing/Designing. Though currently, I'm taking a Web Design Associate course at one of the best Computer Arts and this is the last month of the class. Even though I'm still a sapling, I love this field so much. So basically, At school I'm learning web design while at home I'm teaching myself web-developing. First thing first, returning to college seems impossible at the moment because of some financial problems. I'm pretty comfortable with CSS and HTML and I'm into PHP/MySQL at the moment. Could you please provide me a web-development Curriculum to follow. And do I need to learn about the theories behind? And I think I'm still young(I'm 18 at the time of writing). Is it a good thing or bad thing for choosing this path? I'm glad with my decision but in all honesty, I'm worrying about my future and employment because I'm an undergrad, coming from a country where companies are degree b!tches, it saddens me so. Thank you. (My questions are the bold parts. )

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• Best Web Site Copying Software

  - by GregH

  I just wanted to get some opinions on the best "web site copying" software out there (free or commercial is fine). I have a site that I've recently become responsible for managing, and the previous consultant has not provided operating system access. As such, the plan is to re-host the web site. I realize there are a lot of different issues to consider in doing this. However, I don't have much choice in the matter now. The plan is to use web site copying software (ala HTTrack) to "rip" the web site, and then modify what is downloaded back in to a maintainable site. This, of course, involves HTML, css, javascript, etc on the front-end. I'd like to recover as much of the site as possible to make re-creating it as easy as possible. Your input is appreciated. Input on my approach is also appreciated. Thanks!

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• integration of dynamic forms for 3rd party web apps

  - by afr0

  I've a custom web forms definition interface where I user can define bespoke web forms and those webforms are then rendered on the other part of the my web app. It works well as I can render and submit my forms dynamically. However I have a scenario where there will be different 3rd party apps should be interacting with my custom forms. So the quesion arises how can I have my client side web forms and the fields within to work with the 3rd party interfaces on the fly. Any idea in that regard or best practice will be highly appreciated.

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• Manage SQL Server Connectivity through Windows Azure Virtual Machines Remote PowerShell

  - by SQLOS Team

  Manage SQL Server Connectivity through Windows Azure Virtual Machines Remote PowerShell Blog This blog post comes from Khalid Mouss, Senior Program Manager in Microsoft SQL Server. Overview The goal of this blog is to demonstrate how we can automate through PowerShell connecting multiple SQL Server deployments in Windows Azure Virtual Machines. We would configure TCP port that we would open (and close) though Windows firewall from a remote PowerShell session to the Virtual Machine (VM). This will demonstrate how to take the advantage of the remote PowerShell support in Windows Azure Virtual Machines to automate the steps required to connect SQL Server in the same cloud service and in different cloud services.  Scenario 1: VMs connected through the same Cloud Service 2 Virtual machines configured in the same cloud service. Both VMs running different SQL Server instances on them. Both VMs configured with remote PowerShell turned on to be able to run PS and other commands directly into them remotely in order to re-configure them to allow incoming SQL connections from a remote VM or on premise machine(s). Note: RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) is kept configured in both VMs by default to be able to remote connect to them and check the connections to SQL instances for demo purposes only; but not actually required. Step 1 – Provision VMs and Configure Ports   Provision VM1; named DemoVM1 as follows (see examples screenshots below if using the portal):   Provision VM2 (DemoVM2) with PowerShell Remoting enabled and connected to DemoVM1 above (see examples screenshots below if using the portal): After provisioning of the 2 VMs above, here is the default port configurations for example: Step2 – Verify / Confirm the TCP port used by the database Engine By the default, the port will be configured to be 1433 – this can be changed to a different port number if desired.   1. RDP to each of the VMs created below – this will also ensure the VMs complete SysPrep(ing) and complete configuration 2. Go to SQL Server Configuration Manager -> SQL Server Network Configuration -> Protocols for <SQL instance> -> TCP/IP - > IP Addresses   3. Confirm the port number used by SQL Server Engine; in this case 1433 4. Update from Windows Authentication to Mixed mode   5.       Restart SQL Server service for the change to take effect 6.       Repeat steps 3., 4., and 5. For the second VM: DemoVM2 Step 3 – Remote Powershell to DemoVM1 Enter-PSSession -ComputerName condemo.cloudapp.net -Port 61503 -Credential <username> -UseSSL -SessionOption (New-PSSessionOption -SkipCACheck -SkipCNCheck) Your will then be prompted to enter the password. Step 4 – Open 1433 port in the Windows firewall netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="DemoVM1Port" dir=in localport=1433 protocol=TCP action=allow Output: netsh advfirewall firewall show rule name=DemoVM1Port Rule Name:                            DemoVM1Port ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Enabled:                              Yes Direction:                            In Profiles:                             Domain,Private,Public Grouping:                             LocalIP:                              Any RemoteIP:                             Any Protocol:                             TCP LocalPort:                            1433 RemotePort:                           Any Edge traversal:                       No Action:                               Allow Ok. Step 5 – Now connect from DemoVM2 to DB instance in DemoVM1 Step 6 – Close port 1433 in the Windows firewall netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name=DemoVM1Port Output: Deleted 1 rule(s). Ok. netsh advfirewall firewall show  rule name=DemoVM1Port No rules match the specified criteria.   Step 7 – Try to connect from DemoVM2 to DB Instance in DemoVM1  Because port 1433 has been closed (in step 6) in the Windows Firewall in VM1 machine, we can longer connect from VM3 remotely to VM1. Scenario 2: VMs provisioned in different Cloud Services 2 Virtual machines configured in different cloud services. Both VMs running different SQL Server instances on them. Both VMs configured with remote PowerShell turned on to be able to run PS and other commands directly into them remotely in order to re-configure them to allow incoming SQL connections from a remote VM or on on-premise machine(s). Note: RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) is kept configured in both VMs by default to be able to remote connect to them and check the connections to SQL instances for demo purposes only; but not actually needed. Step 1 – Provision new VM3 Provision VM3; named DemoVM3 as follows (see examples screenshots below if using the portal): After provisioning is complete, here is the default port configurations: Step 2 – Add public port to VM1 connect to from VM3’s DB instance Since VM3 and VM1 are not connected in the same cloud service, we will need to specify the full DNS address while connecting between the machines which includes the public port. We shall add a public port 57000 in this case that is linked to private port 1433 which will be used later to connect to the DB instance. Step 3 – Remote Powershell to DemoVM1 Enter-PSSession -ComputerName condemo.cloudapp.net -Port 61503 -Credential <UserName> -UseSSL -SessionOption (New-PSSessionOption -SkipCACheck -SkipCNCheck) You will then be prompted to enter the password.   Step 4 – Open 1433 port in the Windows firewall netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="DemoVM1Port" dir=in localport=1433 protocol=TCP action=allow Output: Ok. netsh advfirewall firewall show rule name=DemoVM1Port Rule Name:                            DemoVM1Port ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Enabled:                              Yes Direction:                            In Profiles:                             Domain,Private,Public Grouping:                             LocalIP:                              Any RemoteIP:                             Any Protocol:                             TCP LocalPort:                            1433 RemotePort:                           Any Edge traversal:                       No Action:                               Allow Ok.   Step 5 – Now connect from DemoVM3 to DB instance in DemoVM1 RDP into VM3, launch SSM and Connect to VM1’s DB instance as follows. You must specify the full server name using the DNS address and public port number configured above. Step 6 – Close port 1433 in the Windows firewall netsh advfirewall firewall delete rule name=DemoVM1Port   Output: Deleted 1 rule(s). Ok. netsh advfirewall firewall show  rule name=DemoVM1Port No rules match the specified criteria.  Step 7 – Try to connect from DemoVM2 to DB Instance in DemoVM1  Because port 1433 has been closed (in step 6) in the Windows Firewall in VM1 machine, we can no longer connect from VM3 remotely to VM1. Conclusion Through the new support for remote PowerShell in Windows Azure Virtual Machines, one can script and automate many Virtual Machine and SQL management tasks. In this blog, we have demonstrated, how to start a remote PowerShell session, re-configure Virtual Machine firewall to allow (or disallow) SQL Server connections. References SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines   Originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlosteam/

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• Azure website that talks to third party services

  - by Andy Frank

  I have website that crawls data from many third party services when user browse to webpage. This can be really slow because I hit third party server and process returned data before showing it to user. I am hosting website on Azure (shared mode). I am thinking to improve my implementation. Here is what I am thinking... Run a service that crawls data from third party services, process it and then store it in database. when user browse to my site, my site pulls data from database and display them to user. But above solution is not clear to me. Should I have normal service or wcf service? If wcf service then should website talk to database or wcf service (that can access data from database)? If normal service then how can I deploy on Azure?

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• Azure flexibility in geolocation and specs

  - by bitbitbit

  Hi, I'm reading about Azure and there are a couple of things I don't understand: If I choose put a server on Europe, why can't I move it to another datacenter afterwards? If I choose a size for a worker/web role, could I upgrade it to a bigger one afterwards? I think I've read that I cannot put different instances of a worker/web role with different sizes working together? Am I right? And in affirmative case, why? What is cheaper? a big VM with a nicely multithreaded worker role or multiple single-threaded worker roles in several small VMs? Thanks in advance.

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• Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?

  - by Rick Strahl

  With the pending release of ASP.NET MVC 4 and the new ASP.NET Web API, there has been a lot of discussion of where the new Web API technology fits in the ASP.NET Web stack. There are a lot of choices to build HTTP based applications available now on the stack - we've come a long way from when WebForms and Http Handlers/Modules where the only real options. Today we have WebForms, MVC, ASP.NET Web Pages, ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST and now Web API as well as the core ASP.NET runtime to choose to build HTTP content with. Web API definitely squarely addresses the 'API' aspect - building consumable services - rather than HTML content, but even to that end there are a lot of choices you have today. So where does Web API fit, and when doesn't it? But before we get into that discussion, let's talk about what a Web API is and why we should care. What's a Web API? HTTP 'APIs' (Microsoft's new terminology for a service I guess)  are becoming increasingly more important with the rise of the many devices in use today. Most mobile devices like phones and tablets run Apps that are using data retrieved from the Web over HTTP. Desktop applications are also moving in this direction with more and more online content and synching moving into even traditional desktop applications. The pending Windows 8 release promises an app like platform for both the desktop and other devices, that also emphasizes consuming data from the Cloud. Likewise many Web browser hosted applications these days are relying on rich client functionality to create and manipulate the browser user interface, using AJAX rather than server generated HTML data to load up the user interface with data. These mobile or rich Web applications use their HTTP connection to return data rather than HTML markup in the form of JSON or XML typically. But an API can also serve other kinds of data, like images or other binary files, or even text data and HTML (although that's less common). A Web API is what feeds rich applications with data. ASP.NET Web API aims to service this particular segment of Web development by providing easy semantics to route and handle incoming requests and an easy to use platform to serve HTTP data in just about any content format you choose to create and serve from the server. But .NET already has various HTTP Platforms The .NET stack already includes a number of technologies that provide the ability to create HTTP service back ends, and it has done so since the very beginnings of the .NET platform. From raw HTTP Handlers and Modules in the core ASP.NET runtime, to high level platforms like ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, ASP.NET AJAX and the WCF REST engine (which technically is not ASP.NET, but can integrate with it), you've always been able to handle just about any kind of HTTP request and response with ASP.NET. The beauty of the raw ASP.NET platform is that it provides you everything you need to build just about any type of HTTP application you can dream up from low level APIs/custom engines to high level HTML generation engine. ASP.NET as a core platform clearly has stood the test of time 10+ years later and all other frameworks like Web API are built on top of this ASP.NET core. However, although it's possible to create Web APIs / Services using any of the existing out of box .NET technologies, none of them have been a really nice fit for building arbitrary HTTP based APIs. Sure, you can use an HttpHandler to create just about anything, but you have to build a lot of plumbing to build something more complex like a comprehensive API that serves a variety of requests, handles multiple output formats and can easily pass data up to the server in a variety of ways. Likewise you can use ASP.NET MVC to handle routing and creating content in various formats fairly easily, but it doesn't provide a great way to automatically negotiate content types and serve various content formats directly (it's possible to do with some plumbing code of your own but not built in). Prior to Web API, Microsoft's main push for HTTP services has been WCF REST, which was always an awkward technology that had a severe personality conflict, not being clear on whether it wanted to be part of WCF or purely a separate technology. In the end it didn't do either WCF compatibility or WCF agnostic pure HTTP operation very well, which made for a very developer-unfriendly environment. Personally I didn't like any of the implementations at the time, so much so that I ended up building my own HTTP service engine (as part of the West Wind Web Toolkit), as have a few other third party tools that provided much better integration and ease of use. With the release of Web API for the first time I feel that I can finally use the tools in the box and not have to worry about creating and maintaining my own toolkit as Web API addresses just about all the features I implemented on my own and much more. ASP.NET Web API provides a better HTTP Experience ASP.NET Web API differentiates itself from the previous Microsoft in-box HTTP service solutions in that it was built from the ground up around the HTTP protocol and its messaging semantics. Unlike WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX with ASMX, it’s a brand new platform rather than bolted on technology that is supposed to work in the context of an existing framework. The strength of the new ASP.NET Web API is that it combines the best features of the platforms that came before it, to provide a comprehensive and very usable HTTP platform. Because it's based on ASP.NET and borrows a lot of concepts from ASP.NET MVC, Web API should be immediately familiar and comfortable to most ASP.NET developers. Here are some of the features that Web API provides that I like: Strong Support for URL Routing to produce clean URLs using familiar MVC style routing semantics Content Negotiation based on Accept headers for request and response serialization Support for a host of supported output formats including JSON, XML, ATOM Strong default support for REST semantics but they are optional Easily extensible Formatter support to add new input/output types Deep support for more advanced HTTP features via HttpResponseMessage and HttpRequestMessage classes and strongly typed Enums to describe many HTTP operations Convention based design that drives you into doing the right thing for HTTP Services Very extensible, based on MVC like extensibility model of Formatters and Filters Self-hostable in non-Web applications  Testable using testing concepts similar to MVC Web API is meant to handle any kind of HTTP input and produce output and status codes using the full spectrum of HTTP functionality available in a straight forward and flexible manner. Looking at the list above you can see that a lot of functionality is very similar to ASP.NET MVC, so many ASP.NET developers should feel quite comfortable with the concepts of Web API. The Routing and core infrastructure of Web API are very similar to how MVC works providing many of the benefits of MVC, but with focus on HTTP access and manipulation in Controller methods rather than HTML generation in MVC. There’s much improved support for content negotiation based on HTTP Accept headers with the framework capable of detecting automatically what content the client is sending and requesting and serving the appropriate data format in return. This seems like such a little and obvious thing, but it's really important. Today's service backends often are used by multiple clients/applications and being able to choose the right data format for what fits best for the client is very important. While previous solutions were able to accomplish this using a variety of mixed features of WCF and ASP.NET, Web API combines all this functionality into a single robust server side HTTP framework that intrinsically understands the HTTP semantics and subtly drives you in the right direction for most operations. And when you need to customize or do something that is not built in, there are lots of hooks and overrides for most behaviors, and even many low level hook points that allow you to plug in custom functionality with relatively little effort. No Brainers for Web API There are a few scenarios that are a slam dunk for Web API. If your primary focus of an application or even a part of an application is some sort of API then Web API makes great sense. HTTP ServicesIf you're building a comprehensive HTTP API that is to be consumed over the Web, Web API is a perfect fit. You can isolate the logic in Web API and build your application as a service breaking out the logic into controllers as needed. Because the primary interface is the service there's no confusion of what should go where (MVC or API). Perfect fit. Primary AJAX BackendsIf you're building rich client Web applications that are relying heavily on AJAX callbacks to serve its data, Web API is also a slam dunk. Again because much if not most of the business logic will probably end up in your Web API service logic, there's no confusion over where logic should go and there's no duplication. In Single Page Applications (SPA), typically there's very little HTML based logic served other than bringing up a shell UI and then filling the data from the server with AJAX which means the business logic required for data retrieval and data acceptance and validation too lives in the Web API. Perfect fit. Generic HTTP EndpointsAnother good fit are generic HTTP endpoints that to serve data or handle 'utility' type functionality in typical Web applications. If you need to implement an image server, or an upload handler in the past I'd implement that as an HTTP handler. With Web API you now have a well defined place where you can implement these types of generic 'services' in a location that can easily add endpoints (via Controller methods) or separated out as more full featured APIs. Granted this could be done with MVC as well, but Web API seems a clearer and more well defined place to store generic application services. This is one thing I used to do a lot of in my own libraries and Web API addresses this nicely. Great fit. Mixed HTML and AJAX Applications: Not a clear Choice  For all the commonality that Web API and MVC share they are fundamentally different platforms that are independent of each other. A lot of people have asked when does it make sense to use MVC vs. Web API when you're dealing with typical Web application that creates HTML and also uses AJAX functionality for rich functionality. While it's easy to say that all 'service'/AJAX logic should go into a Web API and all HTML related generation into MVC, that can often result in a lot of code duplication. Also MVC supports JSON and XML result data fairly easily as well so there's some confusion where that 'trigger point' is of when you should switch to Web API vs. just implementing functionality as part of MVC controllers. Ultimately there's a tradeoff between isolation of functionality and duplication. A good rule of thumb I think works is that if a large chunk of the application's functionality serves data Web API is a good choice, but if you have a couple of small AJAX requests to serve data to a grid or autocomplete box it'd be overkill to separate out that logic into a separate Web API controller. Web API does add overhead to your application (it's yet another framework that sits on top of core ASP.NET) so it should be worth it .Keep in mind that MVC can generate HTML and JSON/XML and just about any other content easily and that functionality is not going away, so just because you Web API is there it doesn't mean you have to use it. Web API is not a full replacement for MVC obviously either since there's not the same level of support to feed HTML from Web API controllers (although you can host a RazorEngine easily enough if you really want to go that route) so if you're HTML is part of your API or application in general MVC is still a better choice either alone or in combination with Web API. I suspect (and hope) that in the future Web API's functionality will merge even closer with MVC so that you might even be able to mix functionality of both into single Controllers so that you don't have to make any trade offs, but at the moment that's not the case. Some Issues To think about Web API is similar to MVC but not the Same Although Web API looks a lot like MVC it's not the same and some common functionality of MVC behaves differently in Web API. For example, the way single POST variables are handled is different than MVC and doesn't lend itself particularly well to some AJAX scenarios with POST data. Code Duplication I already touched on this in the Mixed HTML and Web API section, but if you build an MVC application that also exposes a Web API it's quite likely that you end up duplicating a bunch of code and - potentially - infrastructure. You may have to create authentication logic both for an HTML application and for the Web API which might need something different altogether. More often than not though the same logic is used, and there's no easy way to share. If you implement an MVC ActionFilter and you want that same functionality in your Web API you'll end up creating the filter twice. AJAX Data or AJAX HTML On a recent post's comments, David made some really good points regarding the commonality of MVC and Web API's and its place. One comment that caught my eye was a little more generic, regarding data services vs. HTML services. David says: I see a lot of merit in the combination of Knockout.js, client side templates and view models, calling Web API for a responsive UI, but sometimes late at night that still leaves me wondering why I would no longer be using some of the nice tooling and features that have evolved in MVC ;-) You know what - I can totally relate to that. On the last Web based mobile app I worked on, we decided to serve HTML partials to the client via AJAX for many (but not all!) things, rather than sending down raw data to inject into the DOM on the client via templating or direct manipulation. While there are definitely more bytes on the wire, with this, the overhead ended up being actually fairly small if you keep the 'data' requests small and atomic. Performance was often made up by the lack of client side rendering of HTML. Server rendered HTML for AJAX templating gives so much better infrastructure support without having to screw around with 20 mismatched client libraries. Especially with MVC and partials it's pretty easy to break out your HTML logic into very small, atomic chunks, so it's actually easy to create small rendering islands that can be used via composition on the server, or via AJAX calls to small, tight partials that return HTML to the client. Although this is often frowned upon as to 'heavy', it worked really well in terms of developer effort as well as providing surprisingly good performance on devices. There's still plenty of jQuery and AJAX logic happening on the client but it's more manageable in small doses rather than trying to do the entire UI composition with JavaScript and/or 'not-quite-there-yet' template engines that are very difficult to debug. This is not an issue directly related to Web API of course, but something to think about especially for AJAX or SPA style applications. Summary Web API is a great new addition to the ASP.NET platform and it addresses a serious need for consolidation of a lot of half-baked HTTP service API technologies that came before it. Web API feels 'right', and hits the right combination of usability and flexibility at least for me and it's a good fit for true API scenarios. However, just because a new platform is available it doesn't meant that other tools or tech that came before it should be discarded or even upgraded to the new platform. There's nothing wrong with continuing to use MVC controller methods to handle API tasks if that's what your app is running now - there's very little to be gained by upgrading to Web API just because. But going forward Web API clearly is the way to go, when building HTTP data interfaces and it's good to see that Microsoft got this one right - it was sorely needed! Resources ASP.NET Web API AspConf Ask the Experts Session (first 5 minutes) © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• More Great Improvements to the Windows Azure Management Portal

  - by ScottGu

  Over the last 3 weeks we’ve released a number of enhancements to the new Windows Azure Management Portal.  These new capabilities include: Localization Support for 6 languages Operation Log Support Support for SQL Database Metrics Virtual Machine Enhancements (quick create Windows + Linux VMs) Web Site Enhancements (support for creating sites in all regions, private github repo deployment) Cloud Service Improvements (deploy from storage account, configuration support of dedicated cache) Media Service Enhancements (upload, encode, publish, stream all from within the portal) Virtual Networking Usability Enhancements Custom CNAME support with Storage Accounts All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using immediately.  Below are more details on them: Localization Support The Windows Azure Portal now supports 6 languages – English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Japanese. You can easily switch between languages by clicking on the Avatar bar on the top right corner of the Portal: Selecting a different language will automatically refresh the UI within the portal in the selected language: Operation Log Support The Windows Azure Portal now supports the ability for administrators to review the “operation logs” of the services they manage – making it easy to see exactly what management operations were performed on them.  You can query for these by selecting the “Settings” tab within the Portal and then choosing the “Operation Logs” tab within it.  This displays a filter UI that enables you to query for operations by date and time: As of the most recent release we now show logs for all operations performed on Cloud Services and Storage Accounts.  You can click on any operation in the list and click the “Details” button in the command bar to retrieve detailed status about it.  This now makes it possible to retrieve details about every management operation performed. In future updates you’ll see us extend the operation log capability to apply to all Windows Azure Services – which will enable great post-mortem and audit support. Support for SQL Database Metrics You can now monitor the number of successful connections, failed connections and deadlocks in your SQL databases using the new “Dashboard” view provided on each SQL Database resource: Additionally, if the database is added as a “linked resource” to a Web Site or Cloud Service, monitoring metrics for the linked SQL database are shown along with the Web Site or Cloud Service metrics in the dashboard. This helps with viewing and managing aggregated information across both resources in your application. Enhancements to Virtual Machines The most recent Windows Azure Portal release brings with it some nice usability improvements to Virtual Machines: Integrated Quick Create experience for Windows and Linux VMs Creating a new Windows or Linux VM is now easy using the new “Quick Create” experience in the Portal: In addition to Windows VM templates you can also now select Linux image templates in the quick create UI: This makes it incredibly easy to create a new Virtual Machine in only a few seconds. Enhancements to Web Sites Prior to this past month’s release, users were forced to choose a single geographical region when creating their first site.  After that, subsequent sites could only be created in that same region.  This restriction has now been removed, and you can now create sites in any region at any time and have up to 10 free sites in each supported region: One of the new regions we’ve recently opened up is the “East Asia” region.  This allows you to now deploy sites to North America, Europe and Asia simultaneously.  Private GitHub Repository Support This past week we also enabled Git based continuous deployment support for Web Sites from private GitHub and BitBucket repositories (previous to this you could only enable this with public repositories).  Enhancements to Cloud Services Experience The most recent Windows Azure Portal release brings with it some nice usability improvements to Cloud Services: Deploy a Cloud Service from a Windows Azure Storage Account The Windows Azure Portal now supports deploying an application package and configuration file stored in a blob container in Windows Azure Storage. The ability to upload an application package from storage is available when you custom create, or upload to, or update a cloud service deployment. To upload an application package and configuration, create a Cloud Service, then select the file upload dialog, and choose to upload from a Windows Azure Storage Account: To upload an application package from storage, click the “FROM STORAGE” button and select the application package and configuration file to use from the new blob storage explorer in the portal. Configure Windows Azure Caching in a caching enabled cloud service If you have deployed the new dedicated cache within a cloud service role, you can also now configure the cache settings in the portal by navigating to the configuration tab of for your Cloud Service deployment. The configuration experience is similar to the one in Visual Studio when you create a cloud service and add a caching role.  The portal now allows you to add or remove named caches and change the settings for the named caches – all from within the Portal and without needing to redeploy your application. Enhancements to Media Services You can now upload, encode, publish, and play your video content directly from within the Windows Azure Portal.  This makes it incredibly easy to get started with Windows Azure Media Services and perform common tasks without having to write any code. Simply navigate to your media service and then click on the “Content” tab.  All of the media content within your media service account will be listed here: Clicking the “upload” button within the portal now allows you to upload a media file directly from your computer: This will cause the video file you chose from your local file-system to be uploaded into Windows Azure.  Once uploaded, you can select the file within the content tab of the Portal and click the “Encode” button to transcode it into different streaming formats: The portal includes a number of pre-set encoding formats that you can easily convert media content into: Once you select an encoding and click the ok button, Windows Azure Media Services will kick off an encoding job that will happen in the cloud (no need for you to stand-up or configure a custom encoding server).  When it’s finished, you can select the video in the “Content” tab and then click PUBLISH in the command bar to setup an origin streaming end-point to it: Once the media file is published you can point apps against the public URL and play the content using Windows Azure Media Services – no need to setup or run your own streaming server.  You can also now select the file and click the “Play” button in the command bar to play it using the streaming endpoint directly within the Portal: This makes it incredibly easy to try out and use Windows Azure Media Services and test out an end-to-end workflow without having to write any code.  Once you test things out you can of course automate it using script or code – providing you with an incredibly powerful Cloud Media platform that you can use. Enhancements to Virtual Network Experience Over the last few months, we have received feedback on the complexity of the Virtual Network creation experience. With these most recent Portal updates, we have added a Quick Create experience that makes the creation experience very simple. All that an administrator now needs to do is to provide a VNET name, choose an address space and the size of the VNET address space. They no longer need to understand the intricacies of the CIDR format or walk through a 4-page wizard or create a VNET / subnet. This makes creating virtual networks really simple: The portal also now has a “Register DNS Server” task that makes it easy to register DNS servers and associate them with a virtual network. Enhancements to Storage Experience The portal now lets you register custom domain names for your Windows Azure Storage Accounts.  To enable this, select a storage resource and then go to the CONFIGURE tab for a storage account, and then click MANAGE DOMAIN on the command bar: Clicking “Manage Domain” will bring up a dialog that allows you to register any CNAME you want: Summary The above features are all now live in production and available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using them today.  Visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. One of the other cool features that is now live within the portal is our new Windows Azure Store – which makes it incredibly easy to try and purchase developer services from a variety of partners.  It is an incredibly awesome new capability – and something I’ll be doing a dedicated post about shortly. 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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• Conheça a nova Windows Azure

  - by Leniel Macaferi

  Hoje estamos lançando um grande conjunto de melhorias para a Windows Azure. A seguir está um breve resumo de apenas algumas destas melhorias: Novo Portal de Administração e Ferramentas de Linha de Comando O lançamento de hoje vem com um novo portal para a Windows Azure, o qual lhe permitirá gerenciar todos os recursos e serviços oferecidos na Windows Azure de uma forma perfeitamente integrada. O portal é muito rápido e fluido, suporta filtragem e classificação dos dados (o que o torna muito fácil de usar em implantações/instalações de grande porte), funciona em todos os navegadores, e oferece um monte de ótimos e novos recursos - incluindo suporte nativo à VM (máquina virtual), Web site, Storage (armazenamento), e monitoramento de Serviços hospedados na Nuvem. O novo portal é construído em cima de uma API de gerenciamento baseada no modelo REST dentro da Windows Azure - e tudo o que você pode fazer através do portal também pode ser feito através de programação acessando esta Web API. Também estamos lançando hoje ferramentas de linha de comando (que, igualmente ao portal, chamam as APIs de Gerenciamento REST) para tornar ainda ainda mais fácil a criação de scripts e a automatização de suas tarefas de administração. Estamos oferecendo para download um conjunto de ferramentas para o Powershell (Windows) e Bash (Mac e Linux). Como nossos SDKs, o código destas ferramentas está hospedado no GitHub sob uma licença Apache 2. Máquinas Virtuais ( Virtual Machines [ VM ] ) A Windows Azure agora suporta a capacidade de implantar e executar VMs duráveis/permanentes ??na nuvem. Você pode criar facilmente essas VMs usando uma nova Galeria de Imagens embutida no novo Portal da Windows Azure ou, alternativamente, você pode fazer o upload e executar suas próprias imagens VHD customizadas. Máquinas virtuais são duráveis ??(o que significa que qualquer coisa que você instalar dentro delas persistirá entre as reinicializações) e você pode usar qualquer sistema operacional nelas. Nossa galeria de imagens nativa inclui imagens do Windows Server (incluindo o novo Windows Server 2012 RC), bem como imagens do Linux (incluindo Ubuntu, CentOS, e as distribuições SUSE). Depois de criar uma instância de uma VM você pode facilmente usar o Terminal Server ou SSH para acessá-las a fim de configurar e personalizar a máquina virtual da maneira como você quiser (e, opcionalmente, capturar uma snapshot (cópia instantânea da imagem atual) para usar ao criar novas instâncias de VMs). Isto te proporciona a flexibilidade de executar praticamente qualquer carga de trabalho dentro da plataforma Windows Azure.   A novo Portal da Windows Azure fornece um rico conjunto de recursos para o gerenciamento de Máquinas Virtuais - incluindo a capacidade de monitorar e controlar a utilização dos recursos dentro delas.  Nosso novo suporte à Máquinas Virtuais também permite a capacidade de facilmente conectar múltiplos discos nas VMs (os quais você pode então montar e formatar como unidades de disco). Opcionalmente, você pode ativar o suporte à replicação geográfica (geo-replication) para estes discos - o que fará com que a Windows Azure continuamente replique o seu armazenamento em um data center secundário (criando um backup), localizado a pelo menos 640 quilômetros de distância do seu data-center principal. Nós usamos o mesmo formato VHD que é suportado com a virtualização do Windows hoje (o qual nós lançamos como uma especificação aberta), de modo a permitir que você facilmente migre cargas de trabalho existentes que você já tenha virtualizado na Windows Azure.  Também tornamos fácil fazer o download de VHDs da Windows Azure, o que também oferece a flexibilidade para facilmente migrar cargas de trabalho das VMs baseadas na nuvem para um ambiente local. Tudo o que você precisa fazer é baixar o arquivo VHD e inicializá-lo localmente - nenhuma etapa de importação/exportação é necessária. Web Sites A Windows Azure agora suporta a capacidade de rapidamente e facilmente implantar web-sites ASP.NET, Node.js e PHP em um ambiente na nuvem altamente escalável que te permite começar pequeno (e de maneira gratuita) de modo que você possa em seguida, adaptar/escalar sua aplicação de acordo com o crescimento do seu tráfego. Você pode criar um novo web site na Azure e tê-lo pronto para implantação em menos de 10 segundos: O novo Portal da Windows Azure oferece suporte integrado para a administração de Web sites, incluindo a capacidade de monitorar e acompanhar a utilização dos recursos em tempo real: Você pode fazer o deploy (implantação) para web-sites em segundos usando FTP, Git, TFS e Web Deploy. Também estamos lançando atualizações para as ferramentas do Visual Studio e da Web Matrix que permitem aos desenvolvedores uma fácil instalação das aplicações ASP.NET nesta nova oferta. O suporte de publicação do VS e da Web Matrix inclui a capacidade de implantar bancos de dados SQL como parte da implantação do site - bem como a capacidade de realizar a atualização incremental do esquema do banco de dados com uma implantação realizada posteriormente. Você pode integrar a publicação de aplicações web com o controle de código fonte ao selecionar os links "Set up TFS publishing" (Configurar publicação TFS) ou "Set up Git publishing" (Configurar publicação Git) que estão presentes no dashboard de um web-site: Ao fazer isso, você habilitará a integração com o nosso novo serviço online TFS (que permite um fluxo de trabalho do TFS completo - incluindo um build elástico e suporte a testes), ou você pode criar um repositório Git e referenciá-lo como um remote para executar implantações automáticas. Uma vez que você executar uma implantação usando TFS ou Git, a tab/guia de implantações/instalações irá acompanhar as implantações que você fizer, e permitirá que você selecione uma implantação mais antiga (ou mais recente) para que você possa rapidamente voltar o seu site para um estado anterior do seu código. Isso proporciona uma experiência de fluxo de trabalho muito poderosa.   A Windows Azure agora permite que você implante até 10 web-sites em um ambiente de hospedagem gratuito e compartilhado entre múltiplos usuários e bancos de dados (onde um site que você implantar será um dos vários sites rodando em um conjunto compartilhado de recursos do servidor). Isso te fornece uma maneira fácil para começar a desenvolver projetos sem nenhum custo envolvido. Você pode, opcionalmente, fazer o upgrade do seus sites para que os mesmos sejam executados em um "modo reservado" que os isola, de modo que você seja o único cliente dentro de uma máquina virtual: E você pode adaptar elasticamente a quantidade de recursos que os seus sites utilizam - o que te permite por exemplo aumentar a capacidade da sua instância reservada/particular de acordo com o aumento do seu tráfego: A Windows Azure controla automaticamente o balanceamento de carga do tráfego entre as instâncias das VMs, e você tem as mesmas opções de implantação super rápidas (FTP, Git, TFS e Web Deploy), independentemente de quantas instâncias reservadas você usar. Com a Windows Azure você paga por capacidade de processamento por hora - o que te permite dimensionar para cima e para baixo seus recursos para atender apenas o que você precisa. Serviços da Nuvem (Cloud Services) e Cache Distribuído (Distributed Caching) A Windows Azure também suporta a capacidade de construir serviços que rodam na nuvem que suportam ricas arquiteturas multicamadas, gerenciamento automatizado de aplicações, e que podem ser adaptados para implantações extremamente grandes. Anteriormente nós nos referíamos a esta capacidade como "serviços hospedados" - com o lançamento desta semana estamos agora rebatizando esta capacidade como "serviços da nuvem". Nós também estamos permitindo um monte de novos recursos com eles. Cache Distribuído Um dos novos recursos muito legais que estão sendo habilitados com os serviços da nuvem é uma nova capacidade de cache distribuído que te permite usar e configurar um cache distribuído de baixa latência, armazenado na memória (in-memory) dentro de suas aplicações. Esse cache é isolado para uso apenas por suas aplicações, e não possui limites de corte. Esse cache pode crescer e diminuir dinamicamente e elasticamente (sem que você tenha que reimplantar a sua aplicação ou fazer alterações no código), e suporta toda a riqueza da API do Servidor de Cache AppFabric (incluindo regiões, alta disponibilidade, notificações, cache local e muito mais). Além de suportar a API do Servidor de Cache AppFabric, esta nova capacidade de cache pode agora também suportar o protocolo Memcached - o que te permite apontar código escrito para o Memcached para o cache distribuído (sem que alterações de código sejam necessárias). O novo cache distribuído pode ser configurado para ser executado em uma de duas maneiras: 1) Utilizando uma abordagem de cache co-localizado (co-located). Nesta opção você aloca um percentual de memória dos seus roles web e worker existentes para que o mesmo seja usado ??pelo cache, e então o cache junta a memória em um grande cache distribuído.  Qualquer dado colocado no cache por uma instância do role pode ser acessado por outras instâncias do role em sua aplicação - independentemente de os dados cacheados estarem armazenados neste ou em outro role. O grande benefício da opção de cache "co-localizado" é que ele é gratuito (você não precisa pagar nada para ativá-lo) e ele te permite usar o que poderia ser de outra forma memória não utilizada dentro das VMs da sua aplicação. 2) Alternativamente, você pode adicionar "cache worker roles" no seu serviço na nuvem que são utilizados unicamente para o cache. Estes também serão unidos em um grande anel de cache distribuído que outros roles dentro da sua aplicação podem acessar. Você pode usar esses roles para cachear dezenas ou centenas de GBs de dados na memória de forma extramente eficaz - e o cache pode ser aumentado ou diminuído elasticamente durante o tempo de execução dentro da sua aplicação: Novos SDKs e Ferramentas de Suporte Nós atualizamos todos os SDKs (kits para desenvolvimento de software) da Windows Azure com o lançamento de hoje para incluir novos recursos e capacidades. Nossos SDKs estão agora disponíveis em vários idiomas, e todo o código fonte deles está publicado sob uma licença Apache 2 e é mantido em repositórios no GitHub. O SDK .NET para Azure tem em particular um monte de grandes melhorias com o lançamento de hoje, e agora inclui suporte para ferramentas, tanto para o VS 2010 quanto para o VS 2012 RC. Estamos agora também entregando downloads do SDK para Windows, Mac e Linux nos idiomas que são oferecidos em todos esses sistemas - de modo a permitir que os desenvolvedores possam criar aplicações Windows Azure usando qualquer sistema operacional durante o desenvolvimento. Muito, Muito Mais O resumo acima é apenas uma pequena lista de algumas das melhorias que estão sendo entregues de uma forma preliminar ou definitiva hoje - há muito mais incluído no lançamento de hoje. Dentre estas melhorias posso citar novas capacidades para Virtual Private Networking (Redes Privadas Virtuais), novo runtime do Service Bus e respectivas ferramentas de suporte, o preview público dos novos Azure Media Services, novos Data Centers, upgrade significante para o hardware de armazenamento e rede, SQL Reporting Services, novos recursos de Identidade, suporte para mais de 40 novos países e territórios, e muito, muito mais. Você pode aprender mais sobre a Windows Azure e se cadastrar para experimentá-la gratuitamente em http://windowsazure.com.  Você também pode assistir a uma apresentação ao vivo que estarei realizando às 1pm PDT (17:00Hs de Brasília), hoje 7 de Junho (hoje mais tarde), onde eu vou passar por todos os novos recursos. Estaremos abrindo as novas funcionalidades as quais me referi acima para uso público poucas horas após o término da apresentação. Nós estamos realmente animados para ver as grandes aplicações que você construirá com estes novos recursos. Espero que ajude, - Scott   Texto traduzido do post original por Leniel Macaferi.

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• Anunciando: Grandes Melhorias para Web Sites da Windows Azure

  - by Leniel Macaferi

  Estou animado para anunciar algumas grandes melhorias para os Web Sites da Windows Azure que introduzimos no início deste verão.  As melhorias de hoje incluem: uma nova opção de hospedagem adaptável compartilhada de baixo custo, suporte a domínios personalizados para websites hospedados em modo compartilhado ou em modo reservado usando registros CNAME e A-Records (o último permitindo naked domains), suporte para deployment contínuo usando tanto CodePlex e GitHub, e a extensibilidade FastCGI. Todas essas melhorias estão agora online em produção e disponíveis para serem usadas imediatamente. Nova Camada Escalonável "Compartilhada" A Windows Azure permite que você implante e hospede até 10 websites em um ambiente gratuito e compartilhado com múltiplas aplicações. Você pode começar a desenvolver e testar websites sem nenhum custo usando este modo compartilhado (gratuito). O modo compartilhado suporta a capacidade de executar sites que servem até 165MB/dia de conteúdo (5GB/mês). Todas as capacidades que introduzimos em Junho com esta camada gratuita permanecem inalteradas com a atualização de hoje. Começando com o lançamento de hoje, você pode agora aumentar elasticamente seu website para além desta capacidade usando uma nova opção "shared" (compartilhada) de baixo custo (a qual estamos apresentando hoje), bem como pode usar a opção "reserved instance" (instância reservada) - a qual suportamos desde Junho. Aumentar a capacidade de qualquer um desses modos é fácil. Basta clicar na aba "scale" (aumentar a capacidade) do seu website dentro do Portal da Windows Azure, escolher a opção de modo de hospedagem que você deseja usar com ele, e clicar no botão "Salvar". Mudanças levam apenas alguns segundos para serem aplicadas e não requerem nenhum código para serem alteradas e também não requerem que a aplicação seja reimplantada/reinstalada: A seguir estão mais alguns detalhes sobre a nova opção "shared" (compartilhada), bem como a opção existente "reserved" (reservada): Modo Compartilhado Com o lançamento de hoje, estamos introduzindo um novo modo de hospedagem de baixo custo "compartilhado" para Web Sites da Windows Azure. Um website em execução no modo compartilhado é implantado/instalado em um ambiente de hospedagem compartilhado com várias outras aplicações. Ao contrário da opção de modo free (gratuito), um web-site no modo compartilhado não tem quotas/limite máximo para a quantidade de largura de banda que o mesmo pode servir. Os primeiros 5 GB/mês de banda que você servir com uma website compartilhado é grátis, e então você passará a pagar a taxa padrão "pay as you go" (pague pelo que utilizar) da largura de banda de saída da Windows Azure quando a banda de saída ultrapassar os 5 GB. Um website em execução no modo compartilhado agora também suporta a capacidade de mapear múltiplos nomes de domínio DNS personalizados, usando ambos CNAMEs e A-records para tanto. O novo suporte A-record que estamos introduzindo com o lançamento de hoje oferece a possibilidade para você suportar "naked domains" (domínios nús - sem o www) com seus web-sites (por exemplo, http://microsoft.com além de http://www.microsoft.com). Nós também, no futuro, permitiremos SSL baseada em SNI como um recurso nativo nos websites que rodam em modo compartilhado (esta funcionalidade não é suportada com o lançamento de hoje - mas chagará mais tarde ainda este ano, para ambos as opções de hospedagem - compartilhada e reservada). Você paga por um website no modo compartilhado utilizando o modelo padrão "pay as you go" que suportamos com outros recursos da Windows Azure (ou seja, sem custos iniciais, e você só paga pelas horas nas quais o recurso estiver ativo). Um web-site em execução no modo compartilhado custa apenas 1,3 centavos/hora durante este período de preview (isso dá uma média de $ 9.36/mês ou R$ 19,00/mês - dólar a R$ 2,03 em 17-Setembro-2012) Modo Reservado Além de executar sites em modo compartilhado, também suportamos a execução dos mesmos dentro de uma instância reservada. Quando rodando em modo de instância reservada, seus sites terão a garantia de serem executados de maneira isolada dentro de sua própria VM (virtual machine - máquina virtual) Pequena, Média ou Grande (o que significa que, nenhum outro cliente da Windows azure terá suas aplicações sendo executadas dentro de sua VM. Somente as suas aplicações). Você pode executar qualquer número de websites dentro de uma máquina virtual, e não existem quotas para limites de CPU ou memória. Você pode executar seus sites usando uma única VM de instância reservada, ou pode aumentar a capacidade tendo várias instâncias (por exemplo, 2 VMs de médio porte, etc.). Dimensionar para cima ou para baixo é fácil - basta selecionar a VM da instância "reservada" dentro da aba "scale" no Portal da Windows Azure, escolher o tamanho da VM que você quer, o número de instâncias que você deseja executar e clicar em salvar. As alterações têm efeito em segundos: Ao contrário do modo compartilhado, não há custo por site quando se roda no modo reservado. Em vez disso, você só paga pelas instâncias de VMs reservadas que você usar - e você pode executar qualquer número de websites que você quiser dentro delas, sem custo adicional (por exemplo, você pode executar um único site dentro de uma instância de VM reservada ou 100 websites dentro dela com o mesmo custo). VMs de instâncias reservadas têm um custo inicial de $ 8 cents/hora ou R$ 16 centavos/hora para uma pequena VM reservada. Dimensionamento Elástico para Cima/para Baixo Os Web Sites da Windows Azure permitem que você dimensione para cima ou para baixo a sua capacidade dentro de segundos. Isso permite que você implante um site usando a opção de modo compartilhado, para começar, e em seguida, dinamicamente aumente a capacidade usando a opção de modo reservado somente quando você precisar - sem que você tenha que alterar qualquer código ou reimplantar sua aplicação. Se o tráfego do seu site diminuir, você pode diminuir o número de instâncias reservadas que você estiver usando, ou voltar para a camada de modo compartilhado - tudo em segundos e sem ter que mudar o código, reimplantar a aplicação ou ajustar os mapeamentos de DNS. Você também pode usar o "Dashboard" (Painel de Controle) dentro do Portal da Windows Azure para facilmente monitorar a carga do seu site em tempo real (ele mostra não apenas as solicitações/segundo e a largura de banda consumida, mas também estatísticas como a utilização de CPU e memória). Devido ao modelo de preços "pay as you go" da Windows Azure, você só paga a capacidade de computação que você usar em uma determinada hora. Assim, se o seu site está funcionando a maior parte do mês em modo compartilhado (a $ 1.3 cents/hora ou R$ 2,64 centavos/hora), mas há um final de semana em que ele fica muito popular e você decide aumentar sua capacidade colocando-o em modo reservado para que seja executado em sua própria VM dedicada (a $ 8 cents/hora ou R$ 16 centavos/hora), você só terá que pagar os centavos/hora adicionais para as horas em que o site estiver sendo executado no modo reservado. Você não precisa pagar nenhum custo inicial para habilitar isso, e uma vez que você retornar seu site para o modo compartilhado, você voltará a pagar $ 1.3 cents/hora ou R$ 2,64 centavos/hora). Isto faz com que essa opção seja super flexível e de baixo custo. Suporte Melhorado para Domínio Personalizado Web sites em execução no modo "compartilhado" ou no modo "reservado" suportam a habilidade de terem nomes personalizados (host names) associados a eles (por exemplo www.mysitename.com). Você pode associar múltiplos domínios personalizados para cada Web Site da Windows Azure. Com o lançamento de hoje estamos introduzindo suporte para registros A-Records (um recurso muito pedido pelos usuários). Com o suporte a A-Record, agora você pode associar domínios 'naked' ao seu Web Site da Windows Azure - ou seja, em vez de ter que usar www.mysitename.com você pode simplesmente usar mysitename.com (sem o prefixo www). Tendo em vista que você pode mapear vários domínios para um único site, você pode, opcionalmente, permitir ambos domínios (com www e a versão 'naked') para um site (e então usar uma regra de reescrita de URL/redirecionamento (em Inglês) para evitar problemas de SEO). Nós também melhoramos a interface do usuário para o gerenciamento de domínios personalizados dentro do Portal da Windows Azure como parte do lançamento de hoje. Clicando no botão "Manage Domains" (Gerenciar Domínios) na bandeja na parte inferior do portal agora traz uma interface de usuário personalizada que torna fácil gerenciar/configurar os domínios: Como parte dessa atualização nós também tornamos significativamente mais suave/mais fácil validar a posse de domínios personalizados, e também tornamos mais fácil alternar entre sites/domínios existentes para Web Sites da Windows Azure, sem que o website fique fora do ar. Suporte a Deployment (Implantação) contínua com Git e CodePlex ou GitHub Um dos recursos mais populares que lançamos no início deste verão foi o suporte para a publicação de sites diretamente para a Windows Azure usando sistemas de controle de código como TFS e Git. Esse recurso fornece uma maneira muito poderosa para gerenciar as implantações/instalações da aplicação usando controle de código. É realmente fácil ativar este recurso através da página do dashboard de um web site: A opção TFS que lançamos no início deste verão oferece uma solução de implantação contínua muito rica que permite automatizar os builds e a execução de testes unitários a cada vez que você atualizar o repositório do seu website, e em seguida, se os testes forem bem sucedidos, a aplicação é automaticamente publicada/implantada na Windows Azure. Com o lançamento de hoje, estamos expandindo nosso suporte Git para também permitir cenários de implantação contínua integrando esse suporte com projetos hospedados no CodePlex e no GitHub. Este suporte está habilitado para todos os web-sites (incluindo os que usam o modo "free" (gratuito)). A partir de hoje, quando você escolher o link "Set up Git publishing" (Configurar publicação Git) na página do dashboard de um website, você verá duas opções adicionais quando a publicação baseada em Git estiver habilitada para o web-site: Você pode clicar em qualquer um dos links "Deploy from my CodePlex project" (Implantar a partir do meu projeto no CodePlex) ou "Deploy from my GitHub project"  (Implantar a partir do meu projeto no GitHub) para seguir um simples passo a passo para configurar uma conexão entre o seu website e um repositório de código que você hospeda no CodePlex ou no GitHub. Uma vez que essa conexão é estabelecida, o CodePlex ou o GitHub automaticamente notificará a Windows Azure a cada vez que um checkin ocorrer. Isso fará com que a Windows Azure faça o download do código e compile/implante a nova versão da sua aplicação automaticamente.  Os dois vídeos a seguir (em Inglês) mostram quão fácil é permitir esse fluxo de trabalho ao implantar uma app inicial e logo em seguida fazer uma alteração na mesma: Habilitando Implantação Contínua com os Websites da Windows Azure e CodePlex (2 minutos) Habilitando Implantação Contínua com os Websites da Windows Azure e GitHub (2 minutos) Esta abordagem permite um fluxo de trabalho de implantação contínua realmente limpo, e torna muito mais fácil suportar um ambiente de desenvolvimento em equipe usando Git: Nota: o lançamento de hoje suporta estabelecer conexões com repositórios públicos do GitHub/CodePlex. Suporte para repositórios privados será habitado em poucas semanas. Suporte para Múltiplos Branches (Ramos de Desenvolvimento) Anteriormente, nós somente suportávamos implantar o código que estava localizado no branch 'master' do repositório Git. Muitas vezes, porém, os desenvolvedores querem implantar a partir de branches alternativos (por exemplo, um branch de teste ou um branch com uma versão futura da aplicação). Este é agora um cenário suportado - tanto com projetos locais baseados no git, bem como com projetos ligados ao CodePlex ou GitHub. Isto permite uma variedade de cenários úteis. Por exemplo, agora você pode ter dois web-sites - um em "produção" e um outro para "testes" - ambos ligados ao mesmo repositório no CodePlex ou no GitHub. Você pode configurar um dos websites de forma que ele sempre baixe o que estiver presente no branch master, e que o outro website sempre baixe o que estiver no branch de testes. Isto permite uma maneira muito limpa para habilitar o teste final de seu site antes que ele entre em produção. Este vídeo de 1 minuto (em Inglês) demonstra como configurar qual branch usar com um web-site. Resumo Os recursos mostrados acima estão agora ao vivo em produção e disponíveis para uso imediato. Se você ainda não tem uma conta da Windows Azure, você pode inscrever-se em um teste gratuito para começar a usar estes recursos hoje mesmo. Visite o O Centro de Desenvolvedores da Windows Azure (em Inglês) para saber mais sobre como criar aplicações para serem usadas na nuvem. Nós teremos ainda mais novos recursos e melhorias chegando nas próximas semanas - incluindo suporte para os recentes lançamentos do Windows Server 2012 e .NET 4.5 (habilitaremos novas imagens de web e work roles com o Windows Server 2012 e NET 4.5 no próximo mês). Fique de olho no meu blog para detalhes assim que esses novos recursos ficarem disponíveis. 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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• Meet the New Windows Azure

  - by ScottGu

  Today we are releasing a major set of improvements to Windows Azure.  Below is a short-summary of just a few of them: New Admin Portal and Command Line Tools Today’s release comes with a new Windows Azure portal that will enable you to manage all features and services offered on Windows Azure in a seamless, integrated way.  It is very fast and fluid, supports filtering and sorting (making it much easier to use for large deployments), works on all browsers, and offers a lot of great new features – including built-in VM, Web site, Storage, and Cloud Service monitoring support. The new portal is built on top of a REST-based management API within Windows Azure – and everything you can do through the portal can also be programmed directly against this Web API. We are also today releasing command-line tools (which like the portal call the REST Management APIs) to make it even easier to script and automate your administration tasks.  We are offering both a Powershell (for Windows) and Bash (for Mac and Linux) set of tools to download.  Like our SDKs, the code for these tools is hosted on GitHub under an Apache 2 license. Virtual Machines Windows Azure now supports the ability to deploy and run durable VMs in the cloud.  You can easily create these VMs using a new Image Gallery built-into the new Windows Azure Portal, or alternatively upload and run your own custom-built VHD images. Virtual Machines are durable (meaning anything you install within them persists across reboots) and you can use any OS with them.  Our built-in image gallery includes both Windows Server images (including the new Windows Server 2012 RC) as well as Linux images (including Ubuntu, CentOS, and SUSE distributions).  Once you create a VM instance you can easily Terminal Server or SSH into it in order to configure and customize the VM however you want (and optionally capture your own image snapshot of it to use when creating new VM instances).  This provides you with the flexibility to run pretty much any workload within Windows Azure.   The new Windows Azure Portal provides a rich set of management features for Virtual Machines – including the ability to monitor and track resource utilization within them.  Our new Virtual Machine support also enables the ability to easily attach multiple data-disks to VMs (which you can then mount and format as drives).  You can optionally enable geo-replication support on these – which will cause Windows Azure to continuously replicate your storage to a secondary data-center at least 400 miles away from your primary data-center as a backup. We use the same VHD format that is supported with Windows virtualization today (and which we’ve released as an open spec), which enables you to easily migrate existing workloads you might already have virtualized into Windows Azure.  We also make it easy to download VHDs from Windows Azure, which also provides the flexibility to easily migrate cloud-based VM workloads to an on-premise environment.  All you need to do is download the VHD file and boot it up locally, no import/export steps required. Web Sites Windows Azure now supports the ability to quickly and easily deploy ASP.NET, Node.js and PHP web-sites to a highly scalable cloud environment that allows you to start small (and for free) and then scale up as your traffic grows.  You can create a new web site in Azure and have it ready to deploy to in under 10 seconds: The new Windows Azure Portal provides built-in administration support for Web sites – including the ability to monitor and track resource utilization in real-time: You can deploy to web-sites in seconds using FTP, Git, TFS and Web Deploy.  We are also releasing tooling updates today for both Visual Studio and Web Matrix that enable developers to seamlessly deploy ASP.NET applications to this new offering.  The VS and Web Matrix publishing support includes the ability to deploy SQL databases as part of web site deployment – as well as the ability to incrementally update database schema with a later deployment. You can integrate web application publishing with source control by selecting the “Set up TFS publishing” or “Set up Git publishing” links on a web-site’s dashboard: Doing do will enable integration with our new TFS online service (which enables a full TFS workflow – including elastic build and testing support), or create a Git repository that you can reference as a remote and push deployments to.  Once you push a deployment using TFS or Git, the deployments tab will keep track of the deployments you make, and enable you to select an older (or newer) deployment and quickly redeploy your site to that snapshot of the code.  This provides a very powerful DevOps workflow experience.   Windows Azure now allows you to deploy up to 10 web-sites into a free, shared/multi-tenant hosting environment (where a site you deploy will be one of multiple sites running on a shared set of server resources).  This provides an easy way to get started on projects at no cost. You can then optionally upgrade your sites to run in a “reserved mode” that isolates them so that you are the only customer within a virtual machine: And you can elastically scale the amount of resources your sites use – allowing you to increase your reserved instance capacity as your traffic scales: Windows Azure automatically handles load balancing traffic across VM instances, and you get the same, super fast, deployment options (FTP, Git, TFS and Web Deploy) regardless of how many reserved instances you use. With Windows Azure you pay for compute capacity on a per-hour basis – which allows you to scale up and down your resources to match only what you need. Cloud Services and Distributed Caching Windows Azure also supports the ability to build cloud services that support rich multi-tier architectures, automated application management, and scale to extremely large deployments.  Previously we referred to this capability as “hosted services” – with this week’s release we are now referring to this capability as “cloud services”.  We are also enabling a bunch of new features with them. Distributed Cache One of the really cool new features being enabled with cloud services is a new distributed cache capability that enables you to use and setup a low-latency, in-memory distributed cache within your applications.  This cache is isolated for use just by your applications, and does not have any throttling limits. This cache can dynamically grow and shrink elastically (without you have to redeploy your app or make code changes), and supports the full richness of the AppFabric Cache Server API (including regions, high availability, notifications, local cache and more).  In addition to supporting the AppFabric Cache Server API, it also now supports the Memcached protocol – allowing you to point code written against Memcached at it (no code changes required). The new distributed cache can be setup to run in one of two ways: 1) Using a co-located approach.  In this option you allocate a percentage of memory in your existing web and worker roles to be used by the cache, and then the cache joins the memory into one large distributed cache.  Any data put into the cache by one role instance can be accessed by other role instances in your application – regardless of whether the cached data is stored on it or another role.  The big benefit with the “co-located” option is that it is free (you don’t have to pay anything to enable it) and it allows you to use what might have been otherwise unused memory within your application VMs. 2) Alternatively, you can add “cache worker roles” to your cloud service that are used solely for caching.  These will also be joined into one large distributed cache ring that other roles within your application can access.  You can use these roles to cache 10s or 100s of GBs of data in-memory very effectively – and the cache can be elastically increased or decreased at runtime within your application: New SDKs and Tooling Support We have updated all of the Windows Azure SDKs with today’s release to include new features and capabilities.  Our SDKs are now available for multiple languages, and all of the source in them is published under an Apache 2 license and and maintained in GitHub repositories. The .NET SDK for Azure has in particular seen a bunch of great improvements with today’s release, and now includes tooling support for both VS 2010 and the VS 2012 RC. We are also now shipping Windows, Mac and Linux SDK downloads for languages that are offered on all of these systems – allowing developers to develop Windows Azure applications using any development operating system. Much, Much More The above is just a short list of some of the improvements that are shipping in either preview or final form today – there is a LOT more in today’s release.  These include new Virtual Private Networking capabilities, new Service Bus runtime and tooling support, the public preview of the new Azure Media Services, new Data Centers, significantly upgraded network and storage hardware, SQL Reporting Services, new Identity features, support within 40+ new countries and territories, and much, much more. You can learn more about Windows Azure and sign-up to try it for free at http://windowsazure.com.  You can also watch a live keynote I’m giving at 1pm June 7th (later today) where I’ll walk through all of the new features.  We will be opening up the new features I discussed above for public usage a few hours after the keynote concludes.  We are really excited to see the great applications you build with them. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Question about API and Web application code sharing

  - by opendd

  This is a design question. I have a multi part application with several user types. There is a user client for the patient that interacts with a web service. There is an API evolving behind the web service that will be exposed to institutional "users" and an interface for clinicians, researchers and admin types. The patient UI is Flex. The clinician/admin portion of the application is RoR. The API is RoR/rack based. The web service component is Java WS. All components access the same data source. These components are deployed as separate components to their own subdomains. This decision was made to allow for scaling the components individually as needed. Initially, the decision was made to split the code for the RoR Web application from the RoR API. This decision was made in the interests of security and keeping the components focused on specific tasks. Over the course of time, there is necessarily going to be overlap and I am second guessing my decision to keep the code totally separate. I am noticing code being lifted from the admin side being lifted, modified and used in the API. This being the case, I have been considering merging the Ruby based repositories. I am interested in ideas and insight on this situation along with the reasoning behind your thoughts. Thanks.

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• Free cloud web service development

  - by hyde

  I am looking for a free (as in beer) combination of services, for learning "cloud SW development" and very small scale private use (say, a private streamlined web shopping&todo list with simple auth). The combination should include the full set of needed services: DVCS service (like github) A cloud service to run the backend code A suitable data storage service (preferably not SQL), accessed by the backend (if not included in the backend service) A web service, serving the web pages seen by user, to access the backend functionality A "cloud IDE" (ideally one, two is ok too) for both backend and HTML/javascript coding If (backend) deployment uses some CI, then that Other points: Backend programming language can be anything, except VB or PHP Everything has to be in the cloud, nothing permanent on a local PC (graphics is not part of the question) Looking for ready-to-use service combination, not a virtual server where I can set anything up myself I don't care if service insists on displaying ads in the user web UI "Cheap" and "free trial" are ok too, if "free" does not exist As per example use case, storage, CPU and bandwidth quota requirements are negligible Google finds several services of course, all requiring at least registration before testing, so I'm looking for a known-good combination, so ideal answer starts with "I use this service combo: ...", contains links to services and brief description and personal experiences.

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• Java(standard, non standard) or Non Java based Web developement [closed]

  - by LivingThing

  I am new to web development. Initially i thought i would be learning LAMP or WAMP to acquire web developement skills but recently i came across Standard Java based (JSP, servlets) and Non standard Java based (GWT). My question is related to if and how LAMP can be compared with Java (standarad or non stadard) technologies. Is LAMP even comparable to Java based tech or it does something else or something more or less ? what requirement for a web developement projects require the choice that which of these 'technologies' should be choosen ? Thank YOu

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• Hosting a website with Windows Azure

  - by Rev

  I may be completely misunderstanding what Azure is but is it possible for me to host a basic website on Windows Azure? I have a site that I've built in HTML and CSS that I'd like to upload to Azure but I can't figure out any way to do this. The site claims I can use it for web hosting, but if I can't FTP then I'm not sure how to do this. Is there a simple tutorial somewhere? I couldn't find anything close to what I'm looking for through searching.

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• “I could use a little help here” or “I can do it myself, thank you” for Cloud Projects

  - by BuckWoody

  Windows Azure allows you to write code in languages within the .NET stack, you can use Java, C++, PHP, NodeJS and others. Code is code - other than keeping things stateless, using a Web or Worker Role in Azure is not all that different from working with an on-premises system. However…. Working in a scalable, component-based stateless architecture that can use federated security is not all that common for many developers. Some are used to owning the server, scaling up, and state-full paradigms that have a single security domain. Making the transition whilst trying to create a new software application or even port a previous one can be daunting. Sure, we have absolutely tons of free training, kits, videos, online books and more to learn on your own, but some things like architecture can be pivotal as you move along. So the question is, should you just strike out on your own for a Cloud project, or get Microsoft Consulting Services or another partner to work with you on your first one? I use a few decision points to help guide the projects I assist in. Note: I’m a huge fan of having help that ends up giving you training and leaves you in charge. If you do engage with someone to help you, make sure you keep this clear and take more and more ownership yourself as the project progresses. How much time do you have? Usually the first thing I ask is about the timeline for the project. It doesn’t matter how skilled you are, if you have a short window to get things done it’s better to get help - especially if this is your first cloud project. Having someone that knows the platform well can save you amazing amounts of time. If you have longer, then start with the training in the link above and once you feel confident, jump in. How complex is the project? If there are a lot of moving parts, it’s best to engage a partner. The reason is that certain interactions - particularly things like Service Bus or Data Integration  - can be quite different than what you may have encountered before. How many people do you have? I have a “pizza rule” about projects I’ve used in my career - if it takes over two pizzas to feed everyone on the project, it’s too big and will fail. That being said, one developer and a one-week deadline does not a good project make, usually. It’s best to have at least one architect (or someone in that role) guiding the project along, and at least two developers to work on a cloud project. That’s a generalization of course, since I’ve seen great software on Azure with one developer writing code all by herself, but for more complex projects, more (to a point) is better. The nice thing about bringing on a partner is that you don’t have to hire them full time - they help you and then they go away. How critical is the project? There’s no shame in using some help. If the platform is new, if the project is large and complex, and if it is critical to the business, you should engage a partner. That’s regardless of Cloud or anything else - get some help. You don’t want to hit your company’s bottom line in a negative way, but you have to innovate and get them a competitive advantage. Do your research, make sure the partner is qualified to help you, and get it done. Don’t let these questions scare you off. There are lots of projects you can implement on Windows and SQL Azure with nothing other than the Software Development Kit (SDK) that you get for free with Windows Azure. And assistance comes in many forms - sometimes just phone support, a friend you can ask. Microsoft Consulting Services or any of our great partners. You can get help on just the architecture piece or have them show you how to write the code. They’ll get involved as little or as much as you like.

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