Search Results

Search found 20514 results on 821 pages for 'azure mobile services'.

Page 6/821 | < Previous Page | 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13  | Next Page >

  • Mobile cross-platform SDK for computationally intensive apps

    - by K.Steff
    I am aware of the PhoneGap toolkit for creating mobile applications for virtually all mobile platforms with a significant market share. However, the code in PhoneGap that is shared between the different platforms is written in JavaScript. While I like JS, I think it's hardly appropriate for computationally intensive tasks. The situation with Titanium is pretty much the same. So, is there any way that I can create a cross-platform mobile app that has the computationally intensive code shared between the platforms? Some context: Obviously, I don't want to implement the time consuming algorithm in many different languages, since this violates DRY, increases the chance for bugs slipping in at least one version and require boilerplate code to work. I've looked at Xamarin's MonoTouch and Mono for Android tools, but while they cover iOS and Android, they're not nearly as versatile for deployment as PhoneGap. On the other hand, (IMO) the statically typed nature of C# is more suited for intense computation than JS. Are there any other SDK/tools appropriate for the task that I don't know about or a point about the mentioned above that I've missed? Also, uploading data to a web service for processing is not an option, because of the traffic required.

    Read the article

  • SQLAuthority News – Whitepaper – SQL Azure vs. SQL Server

    - by pinaldave
    SQL Server and SQL Azure are two Microsoft Products which goes almost together. There are plenty of misconceptions about SQL Azure. I have seen enough developers not planning for SQL Azure because they are not sure what exactly they are getting into. Some are confused thinking Azure is not powerful enough. I disagree and strongly urge all of you to read following white paper written and published by Microsoft. SQL Azure vs. SQL Server by Dinakar Nethi, Niraj Nagrani SQL Azure Database is a cloud-based relational database service from Microsoft. SQL Azure provides relational database functionality as a utility service. Cloud-based database solutions such as SQL Azure can provide many benefits, including rapid provisioning, cost-effective scalability, high availability, and reduced management overhead. This paper compares SQL Azure Database with SQL Server in terms of logical administration vs. physical administration, provisioning, Transact-SQL support, data storage, SSIS, along with other features and capabilities. The content of this white paper is as following: Similarities and Differences Logical Administration vs. Physical Administration Provisioning Transact-SQL Support Features and Types Key Benefits of the Service Self-Managing High Availability Scalability Familiar Development Model Relational Data Model The above summary text is taken from white paper itself. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL White Papers, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQL Azure

    Read the article

  • Tulsa Azure Boot Camp

    - by dmccollough
    Windows Azure Boot Camp presented by HyperVize & TulsaTech When: Thursday July 1st and Friday July 2nd Registration: Click here. Where: TulsaTech Riverside Campus 801 East 91st Street Tulsa, Ok 74132-4008 Click here for a map. Summary Tulsa Windows Azure Boot Camp is a comprehensive 2 day training program for members of the development community in Tulsa Oklahoma. At the conclusion of this program, the attendees should have a deep understanding of Azure, BPOS, and advanced development techniques for both platforms. Who should attend: Web Developers, Backend Developers, SQL DBAs, Consultants, & IT Leaders who are interested in using Azure for development, data storage, or processing. Both days is suggested, but if you can't attend both days, contact us for a special one day pass. Schedule: Day one of the training sessions will be held from July 1st 2010 between the hours of 9AM and 4:30PM. Topics covered on day 1: Azure Basics, Web Development, & Data Storage. Day two of the training sessions will be held from July 2nd 2010 between the hours of 9AM and 4:30PM. Topics covered on day 2: Architecture, Business Value, SOA Development, SQL Azure, & Advanced Development. Pre-requisites: If you want to stay up to speed on the Windows Azure Labs you will need to install the tools and updates listed on the Windows Azure Boot Camp website: http://windowsazurebootcamp.com/whattobring Boot Camp Agenda Day 1 – July1st 2010:  · 8:30 – 9:00 - Registration · 9:00 – 10:00 - Module 1: Intro to Azure & Cloud Computing · 10:00 – 11:00 - Module 2: Using Web Roles · 11:00 – Noon - Lab 1 & workstation configuration · Noon – 1:00 - Lunch · 1:00 – 2:00 - Module 3: Blobs · 2:00 – 3:00 - Module 4: Tables · 3:00 – 4:00 - Module 5: Queues · 4:00 – ? - Q&A / Open Discussion Day 2 – July 2nd 2010: · 9:00 – 10:00 - Module 6: Building a business with Azure · 10:00 – 11:00 - Module 7: Cloud Scenarios · 11:00 – Noon - Module 8: SQL Azure · Noon – 1:00 - Lunch · 1:00 – 2:00 - Module 9: Basic Worker Roles · 2:00 – 3:00 - Module 10: Advanced Worker Roles · 3:00 – 4:00 - Module 11: Azure Diagnostics · 4:00 –    ??? - Module 12: App Fabric  

    Read the article

  • Azure eBook Update #1 &ndash; 16 authors so far!

    - by Eric Nelson
    I just wanted to share with folks where we are up to with the Windows Azure eBook (Check out the original post for full details) I have had lots of great submissions from folks with some awesome stuff to share on Azure. Currently we have 16 authors and 25 proposed articles. There is still a couple of days left to submit your proposal if you would like to get involved (see the original post ) and some topic suggestions below for which we don’t currently have authors. It is official – I’m excited! :-) Article Area Accepted Wikipedia Explorer: A case study how we did it and why. CaseSetudy Optional Patterns for the Windows Azure Platform (picking up 1 or 2 patterns that seem to be evolving) Architecture Optional Azure and cost-oriented architecture. Architecture Yes Code walkthrough of a comprehensive application submitted to newCloudApp contest CaseSetudy Yes Principles of highly scalable apps on Azure Compute Optional Auto-Scaling Azure Compute Yes Implementing a distributed cache using memcached with worker roles Interop Yes Building a content-based router service to direct requests to internal HTTP endpoints Compute Optional How to debug an Azure app by with a custom TraceListener & the AppFabric Service Bus AppFabric Yes How to host Java apps in Azure Interop Yes Bing Maps Tile Servers using Azure Blog Storage Interop Yes Tricks for storing time and date fields in Table Storage Storage Yes Service Runtime in Windows Azure Compute Yes Azure Drive Storage Optional Queries in Azure Table Storage Optional Getting RubyOnRails running on Azure Interop Yes Consuming Azure services within Windows Phone Interop Yes De-risking Your First Azure Project Architecture Yes Designing for failure Architecture Optional Connecting to SQL Azure In x Minutes SQLAzure Yes Using Azure Table Service as a NoSQL store via the REST API Storage Yes Azure Table Service REST API Storage Optional Threading, Scalability and Reliability in the Cloud Compute Yes Azure Diagnostics Compute Yes 5 steps to getting started with Windows Azure Introduction Yes The best tools for working with Windows Azure Tools Author Needed Understanding how SQL Azure works SQLAzure Author Needed Getting started with AppFabric Control Services AppFabric Author Needed Using the Microsoft Sync Framework with SQL Azure SQLAzure Author Needed Dallas - just a TV show or something more? Dallas Author Needed Comparing Azure to other cloud offerings Interop Author Needed Hybrid solutions using Azure and on-premise Interop Author Needed

    Read the article

  • Is Sql Azure useful without windows azure?

    - by KallDrexx
    I am currently doing some research to get some preliminary IT cost projections for a project, and I was looking at Azure. Since this is a startup, I do not want to deal with the IT operations myself and instead am looking at having it all professionally hosted. I am looking at azure due to the SLA assurances, already in place disaster recovery operations, and the reliability. I'm playing with some numbers, and I am wondering if hosting my database on Sql Azure is an option, while hosting the actual webpage on another host until I need the frontend scalability of Azure. Is this actually feasible or will the latency in requests between the web host and azure be too much and I would be better off hosting both on the same service?

    Read the article

  • FREE Online Azure Workshop includes a **FREE Azure Account**

    - by Jim Duffy
    My friend and all around good guy, Microsoft Developer Evangelist for the Carolinas, Brian Hitney, along with fellow Microsofties Jim O’Neil and John McClelland will be presenting a FREE Windows Azure online workshop tomorrow, Tuesday, May 4th from 7pm-9pm. What? You can’t make it Tuesday evening? Not to worry. This webcast will be repeated again a number of times over the next month or so. Taken from Brian’s blog post about it: “Elevate your skills with Windows Azure in this hands-on workshop! In this event we’ll guide you through the process of building and deploying a large scale Azure application. Forget about “hello world”! In less than two hours we’ll build and deploy a real cloud app that leverages the Azure data center and helps make a difference in the world. Yes, in addition to building an application that will leave you with a rock-solid understanding of the Azure platform, the solution you deploy will contribute back to Stanford’s Folding@home distributed computing project. There’s no cost to you to participate in this session; each attendee will receive a temporary, self-expiring, full-access account to work with Azure for a period of 2-weeks.” Did you catch that last sentence??  “each attendee will receive a temporary, self-expiring, full-access account to work with Azure for a period of 2-weeks.” A FREE, full-access, Windows Azure account to experiment and learn with? Now we’re talking. For more information check out Brian’s blog post or head here. Have a day. :-|

    Read the article

  • Web Development Trends: Mobile First, Data-Oriented Development, and Single Page Applications

    - by dwahlin
    I recently had the opportunity to give a keynote talk at an Intel conference about key trends in the world of Web development that I feel teams should be taking into account with projects. It was a lot of fun and I had the opportunity to talk with a lot of different people about projects they’re working on. There are a million things that could be covered for this type of talk (HTML5 anyone?) but I only had 60 minutes and couldn’t possibly cover them all so I decided to focus on 3 key areas: mobile, data-oriented development, and SPAs. The talk was geared toward introducing people (many who weren’t Web developers) to topics such as mobile first development (demos showed a few tools to help here), responsive design techniques, data binding techniques that can simplify code, and Single Page Application (SPA) benefits. Links to code demos shown during the presentation can be found at the end of the slide deck. Web Development Trends - What's New in the World of Web Development by Dan Wahlin

    Read the article

  • Oracle Retail Mobile Point-of-Service

    - by David Dorf
    When most people discuss mobile in retail, they immediately go to shopping applications.  While I agree the consumer side of mobile is huge, I believe its also important to arm store associates with mobile tools.  There are around a dozen major roll-outs of mobile POS to chain retailers, and all have been successful.  This does not, however, signal the demise of traditional registers.  Retailers will adopt mobile POS slowly and reduce the number of fixed registers over time, but there's likely to be a combination of both for the foreseeable future.  Even Apple retains at least one fixed register in every store, you just have to know where to look. The business benefits for mobile POS are pretty straightforward: 1. Faster checkout.  Walmart's CFO recently reported that for every second they shave off the average transaction time, they can potentially save $12M a year in labor.  I think its more likely that labor will be redeployed to enhance the customer experience. 2. Smarter associates.  The sales associates on the floor need the same access to information that consumers have, if not more.  They need ready access to product details, reviews, inventory, etc. to meet consumer expectations.  In a recent study, 40% of consumers said a savvy store associate can impact their final product selection more than a website. 3. Lower costs.  Mobile POS hardware (iPod touch + sled) costs about a fifth of fixed registers, not to mention the reclaimed space that can be used for product displays. But almost all Mobile POS solutions can claim those benefits equally.  Where there's differentiation is on the technical side.  Oracle recently announced availability of the Oracle Retail Mobile Point-of-Service, and it has three big technology advantages in the market: 1. Portable. We used a popular open-source component called PhoneGap that abstracts the app from the underlying OS and hardware so that iOS, Android, and other platforms could be supported.  Further, we used Web technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript, which are commonly known by many programmers, as opposed to ObjectiveC which is more difficult to find.  The screen can adjust to different form-factors and sizes, just like you see with browsers.  In the future when a new, zippy device gets released, retailers will have the option to move to that device more easily than if they used a native app. 2. Flexible.  Our Mobile POS is free with the Oracle Retail Point-of-Service product.  Retailers can use any combination of fixed and mobile registers, and those ratios can change as required.  Perhaps start with 1 mobile and 4 fixed per store, then transition over time to 4 mobile and 1 fixed without any additional software licenses.  Our scalable solution supports lots of combinations. 3. Consistent.  Because our Mobile POS is fully integrated to our traditional POS, the same business logic is reused.  Third-party Mobile POS solutions often handle pricing, promotions, and tax calculations separately leading to possible inconsistencies within the store.  That won't happen with Oracle's solution. For many retailers, Mobile POS can lower costs, increase customer service, and generally enhance a consumer's in-store experience.  Apple led the way, but lots of other retailers are discovering the many benefits of adding mobile capabilities in their stores.  Just be sure to examine both the business and technology benefits so you get the most value from your solution for the longest period of time.

    Read the article

  • Apps UX Launches Blueprints for Mobile User Experiences

    - by mvaughan
    By Misha Vaughan, Oracle Applications User ExperienceAt Oracle OpenWorld 2012 this year, the Oracle Applications User Experience (Apps UX) team announced the release of Mobile User Experience Functional Design Patterns. These patterns are designed to work directly with Oracle’s Fusion Middleware, specifically, ADF Mobile.  The Oracle Application Development Framework for mobile users enables developers to build one application that can be deployed to multiple mobile device platforms. These same mobile design patterns provide the guidance for Oracle teams to develop Fusion Mobile expenses. Application developers can use Oracle’s mobile design patterns to design iPhone, Android, or browser-based smartphone applications. We are sharing our mobile design patterns and their baked-in, scientifically proven usability to enable Oracle customers and partners to build mobile applications quickly.A different way of thinking and designing. Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo, Senior Manager of Mobile User Experiences for Apps UX, says mobile design has to be compelling. “It needs to be optimized for the device, and be visually rich and simple,” she said. “What is really key is that you are designing for a user’s most personal device, the device that they will have with them at all times of the day.”Katy Massucco, director of the overall design patterns site, said: “You need to start with a simplified task flow. Everything should be a natural interaction. The action should be relevant and leveraging the device. It should be seamless.”She suggests that developers identify the essential tasks that a user would want to do while mobile. “They need to understand the user and the context,” she added. ?A sample inline action design patternWhat people are sayingReactions to the release of the design patterns have been positive. Debra Lilley, Oracle ACE Director and Fusion User Experience Advocate (FXA), has already demo’ed Fusion Mobile Expenses widely.  Fellow Oracle Ace Director Ronald van Luttikhuizen, called it a “cool demo by @debralilley of the new mobile expenses app.” FXA member Floyd Teter says he is already cooking up some plans for using mobile design patterns.  We hope to see those ideas at Collaborate or ODTUG in 2013. For another perspective on why user experience is such an important focus for mobile applications, check out this video by John King, Director, and Monty Latiolais, President, both from ODTUG, or the Oracle Development Tools User Group.In a separate interview by e-mail, Latiolais wrote: “I enjoy the fact we can take something that, in the past, has been largely subjective, and now apply to it a scientifically proven look and feel. Trusting Oracle’s UX Design Patterns, the presentation really can become one less thing to worry about. As someone with limited ADF experience, that is extremely beneficial.”?King, who was also interviewed by e-mail, wrote: “User Experience is about making the task at hand as easy and error-free as possible. Oracle's UX labs worked hard to make the User Experience in the new Fusion Applications as good as possible; ADF makes adding tested, consistent, user experiences a declarative exercise by leveraging that work. As we move applications onto mobile platforms, user experience is the driving factor. Customers are "spoiled" by a bevy of fantastic applications, and ours cannot disappoint them. Creating applications that enable users to quickly and effectively accomplish whatever task is at hand takes thought and practice. Developers must become ’power users’ and then create applications that they and their users will love.”

    Read the article

  • Announcing: Improvements to the Windows Azure Portal

    - by ScottGu
    Earlier today we released a number of enhancements to the new Windows Azure Management Portal.  These new capabilities include: Service Bus Management and Monitoring Support for Managing Co-administrators Import/Export support for SQL Databases Virtual Machine Experience Enhancements Improved Cloud Service Status Notifications Media Services Monitoring Support Storage Container Creation and Access Control Support All of these improvements are now live in production and available to start using immediately.  Below are more details on them: Service Bus Management and Monitoring The new Windows Azure Management Portal now supports Service Bus management and monitoring. Service Bus provides rich messaging infrastructure that can sit between applications (or between cloud and on-premise environments) and allow them to communicate in a loosely coupled way for improved scale and resiliency. With the new Service Bus experience, you can now create and manage Service Bus Namespaces, Queues, Topics, Relays and Subscriptions. You can also get rich monitoring for Service Bus Queues, Topics and Subscriptions. To create a Service Bus namespace, you can now select the “Service Bus” tab in the Windows Azure portal and then simply select the CREATE command: Doing so will bring up a new “Create a Namespace” dialog that allows you to name and create a new Service Bus Namespace: Once created, you can obtain security credentials associated with the Namespace via the ACCESS KEY command. This gives you the ability to obtain the connection string associated with the service namespace. You can copy and paste these values into any application that requires these credentials: It is also now easy to create Service Bus Queues and Topics via the NEW experience in the portal drawer.  Simply click the NEW command and navigate to the “App Services” category to create a new Service Bus entity: Once you provision a new Queue or Topic it can be managed in the portal.  Clicking on a namespace will display all queues and topics within it: Clicking on an item in the list will allow you to drill down into a dashboard view that allows you to monitor the activity and traffic within it, as well as perform operations on it. For example, below is a view of an “orders” queue – note how we now surface both the incoming and outgoing message flow rate, as well as the total queue length and queue size: To monitor pub/sub subscriptions you can use the ADD METRICS command within a topic and select a specific subscription to monitor. Support for Managing Co-Administrators You can now add co-administrators for your Windows Azure subscription using the new Windows Azure Portal. This allows you to share management of your Windows Azure services with other users. Subscription co-administrators share the same administrative rights and permissions that service administrator have - except a co-administrator cannot change or view billing details about the account, nor remove the service administrator from a subscription. In the SETTINGS section, click on the ADMINISTRATORS tab, and select the ADD button to add a co-administrator to your subscription: To add a co-administrator, you specify the email address for a Microsoft account (formerly Windows Live ID) or an organizational account, and choose the subscription you want to add them to: You can later update the subscriptions that the co-administrator has access to by clicking on the EDIT button, and then select or deselect the subscriptions to which they belong. Import/Export Support for SQL Databases The Windows Azure administration portal now supports importing and exporting SQL Databases to/from Blob Storage.  Databases can be imported/exported to blob storage using the same BACPAC file format that is supported with SQL Server 2012.  Among other benefits, this makes it easy to copy and migrate databases between on-premise and cloud environments. SQL Databases now have an EXPORT command in the bottom drawer that when pressed will prompt you to save your database to a Windows Azure storage container: The UI allows you to choose an existing storage account or create a new one, as well as the name of the BACPAC file to persist in blob storage: You can also now import and create a new SQL Database by using the NEW command.  This will prompt you to select the storage container and file to import the database from: The Windows Azure Portal enables you to monitor the progress of import and export operations. If you choose to log out of the portal, you can come back later and check on the status of all of the operations in the new history tab of the SQL Database server – this shows your entire import and export history and the status (success/fail) of each: Enhancements to the Virtual Machine Experience One of the common pain-points we have heard from customers using the preview of our new Virtual Machine support has been the inability to delete the associated VHDs when a VM instance (or VM drive) gets deleted. Prior to today’s release the VHDs would continue to be in your storage account and accumulate storage charges. You can now navigate to the Disks tab within the Virtual Machine extension, select a VM disk to delete, and click the DELETE DISK command: When you click the DELETE DISK button you have the option to delete the disk + associated .VHD file (completely clearing it from storage).  Alternatively you can delete the disk but still retain a .VHD copy of it in storage. Improved Cloud Service Status Notifications The Windows Azure portal now exposes more information of the health status of role instances.  If any of the instances are in a non-running state, the status at the top of the dashboard will summarize the status (and update automatically as the role health changes): Clicking the instance hyperlink within this status summary view will navigate you to a detailed role instance view, and allow you to get more detailed health status of each of the instances.  The portal has been updated to provide more specific status information within this detailed view – giving you better visibility into the health of your app: Monitoring Support for Media Services Windows Azure Media Services allows you to create media processing jobs (for example: encoding media files) in your Windows Azure Media Services account. In the Windows Azure Portal, you can now monitor the number of encoding jobs that are queued up for processing as well as active, failed and queued tasks for encoding jobs. On your media services account dashboard, you can visualize the monitoring data for last 6 hours, 24 hours or 7 days. Storage Container Creation and Access Control Support You can now create Windows Azure Storage storage containers from within the Windows Azure Portal.  After selecting a storage account, you can navigate to the CONTAINERS tab and click the ADD CONTAINER command: This will display a dialog that lets you name the new container and control access to it: You can also update the access setting as well as container metadata of existing containers by selecting one and then using the new EDIT CONTAINER command: This will then bring up the edit container dialog that allows you to change and save its settings: In addition to creating and editing containers, you can click on them within the portal to drill-in and view blobs within them.  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. We’ll have even more new features and enhancements coming later this month – including support for the recent Windows Server 2012 and .NET 4.5 releases (we will enable new web and worker role images with Windows Server 2012 and .NET 4.5, and support .NET 4.5 with Websites).  Keep an eye out on my blog for details as these new features become available. 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

    Read the article

  • Bad Spot to Be In: Playing Catch-up with Mobile Advertising

    - by Mike Stiles
    You probably noticed, there’s a mass migration going on from online desktop/laptop usage to smartphone/tablet usage.  It’s an indicator of how we live our lives in the modern world: always on the go, with no intention of being disconnected while out there. Consequently, paid as it relates to mobile advertising is taking the social spotlight. eMarketer estimated that in 2013, US adults would spend about 2 hours, 21 minutes a day on mobile, not counting talking time. More people in the world own smartphones than own toothbrushes (bad news I suppose if you’re marketing toothpaste). They’re using those mobile devices to access social networks, consuming at least 17% of their mobile time on them. Frankly, you don’t need a deep dive into mobile usage stats to know what’s going on. Just look around you in any store, venue or coffee shop. It’s really obvious…our mobile devices are now where we “are,” so that’s where marketers can increasingly reach us. And it’s a smart place for them to do just that. Mobile devices can be viewed more and more as shopping facilitators. Usually when someone is on mobile, they are not in passive research mode. They are likely standing near a store or in front of a product, using their mobile to seek reassurance that buying that product is the right move. They are the hottest of hot prospects. Consider that 4 out of 5 consumers use smartphones to shop, 52% of Americans use mobile devices for in-store for research, 70% of mobile searches lead to online action inside of an hour, and people that find you on mobile convert at almost 3x the rate as those that find you on desktop or laptop. But what are marketers doing? Enter statistics from Mary Meeker’s latest State of the Internet report. Common sense says you buy advertising where people are spending their eyeball time, right? But while mobile is 20% of media use and rising, the ad spend there is 4%. Conversely, while print usage is at 5% and falling, ad spend there is 19%. We all love nostalgia, but come on. There are reasons marketing dollar migration to mobile has not matched user migration, including the availability of mobile ad products and the ability to measure user response to mobile ads. But interesting things are happening now. First came Facebook’s mobile ad, which let app developers pay to get potential downloads. Then their mobile ad network was announced at F8, allowing marketers to target users across non-Facebook apps while leveraging the wealth of diverse data Facebook has on those users, a big deal since Nielsen has pointed out mobile apps make up 89% of the media time spent on mobile. Twitter has a similar play in motion with their MoPub acquisition. And now mobile deeplinks have arrived, which can take users straight to sub-pages of mobile apps for a faster, more direct shopper/researcher user experience. The sooner the gratification, the smoother and faster the conversion. To be clear, growth in mobile ad spending is well underway. After posting $13.1 billion in 2013, Gartner expects global mobile ad spending to reach $18 billion this year, then go to $41.9 billion by 2017. Cheap smartphones and data plans are spreading worldwide, further fueling the shift to mobile. Mobile usage in India alone should grow 400% by 2018. And, of course, there’s the famous statistic that mobile should overtake desktop Internet usage this year. How can we as marketers mess up this opportunity? Two ways. We could position ourselves in perpetual “catch-up” mode and keep spending ad dollars where the public used to be. And we could annoy mobile users with horrid old-school marketing practices. Two-thirds of users told Forrester they think interruptive in-app ads are more annoying than TV ads. Make sure your brand’s social marketing technology platform is delivering a crystal clear picture of your social connections so the mobile touch point is highly relevant, mobile optimized, and delivering real value and satisfying experiences. Otherwise, all we’ve done is find a new way to be unwanted. @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: Kate Mallatratt, freeimages.com

    Read the article

  • Transformation of Client/Server application to Windows Azure

    - by Visual WebGui
    Overview The economics of IT is changing rapidly, and organizations are searching to widen and secure availability of their systems and at the same time lower costs. The cloud concept was introduced to allow an IT consumption model where there is always as much computing power as needed when needed ('on-demand') and without having to invest in connectivity, servers, database access, storage space, CPU power and other infrastructure needs, just as we consume electricity. Running your systems on Microsoft...(read more)

    Read the article

  • Site Studio Mobile Example - WCM Reuse

    - by john.brunswick
    Mobile internet usage is growing by leaps and bounds and it is theorized that in the not-to-distant future it will eclipse traditional access via desktop browsers. Mary Meeker, a managing director at Morgan Stanley and head of their global technology research team, recently predicted that mobile usage will eclipse desktop usage within the next 5 years in an Events@Google series presentation. In order for organizations to reach their prospects, customers and business partners, they will need to make their content readily available on mobile devices. A few years ago it was fairly challenging to provide a special, separate, site to cater to mobile users using technologies like WML (Wireless Markup Language). Modern mobile browsers have rendered the need for this as irrelevant and now the focus has moved toward providing a browsing experience that works well on small screen sizes and is highly performant. What does all of this mean for Oracle UCM? Taking site content from an existing Site Studio site and targeting it for consumption for mobile devices is a very straightforward process that is aided by a number of native capabilities in the product. The example highlighted in this post takes advantage of dynamic conversion capabilities in Oracle UCM to enable site content to be created and updated via MS Office documents. These documents are then converted to a simple, clean HTML format for consumption in the desktop and mobile browsing experiences. To help better understand how this is possible the example below shows a fictional .COM and its mobile site counterpart that both leverage the same underlying content. The scenario is not complete or production ready, but highlights that a mobile experience may be best delivered by omitting portions of a site that would be present within the version served to desktop clients. If you have browsed CNet (news.com) on a mobile device it becomes quickly apparent that they are serving an optimized version for your mobile device. An iPhone style version can be accessed at http://iphone.cnet.com/. In order to do that they leveraged some work done for the iPhone iUi project developed by Joe Hewitt that provides mobile browsers an experience that is similar to what users may find in a native iPhone application. For our example parts of this framework are used (the CSS) and this approach provides a page that will degrade nicely over a wide range of mobile browsers, since it is comprised of lightweight HTML markup and CSS. The iPhone iUi framework also provides some nice JavaScript to enable animated transitions between pages, but for the widest range of mobile browser compatibility we will only incorporate the CSS and HTML DIV / UL based page markup in our example.

    Read the article

  • Mobile Java, shiny and new: Nokia Asha and Nokia SDK 2.0

    - by terrencebarr
    Nokia has announced a series of new S40 phones called “Asha” – mass-market devices with smart-phone features: Good-sized touch screens, 1 GHz processors, WiFi connectivity, social networking integration, and more. Prices starting around €60 retail. In case you don’t know, the S40 series is built on Java ME and has a huge deployed base in many parts of the world where price/performance is critical. Along with the new phones, Nokia is also making available the new Nokia SDK 2.0 for Java (beta), which enables developers to build rich Java applications with multi-touch, sensor support, an improved Maps API, and the Lightweight UI Toolkit (LWUIT) (more API & tools details). Furthermore, there is a host of developer information, the remote device access service, and even a porting guide to help you port your Android app to the new Asha platform. Last, but not least: More and better options to monetize your applications. Nokia has enabled in-app advertising and in-app purchasing, and improved the way applications can be discovered by customers. Nokia has seen downloads from the Nokia app store rise by 63%, now totaling billions. From what I’m hearing, the revenue opportunities on S40 for developers are often way better than what is typical for other smart-phone platforms (where competition is huge and consumers are fickle). Cheers, – Terrence Filed under: Mobile & Embedded Tagged: Asha Series, Java ME, Java ME SDK, Mobile Java, monetization, Nokia, S40

    Read the article

  • New Trusted Status awarded to first Mobile Java Developer

    - by Jacob Lehrbaum
    Java Verified has just announced that GameLoft is the first developer to receive its new Trusted Status!  Java Verified is an industry-recognized Java testing and signing program backed and funded by companies such as AT&T, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Oracle, Orange, Samsung and Vodafone, and chartered with making it easier for mobile developers to certify and deploy applications for use across the billions of mobile handsets that run the Java ME.  Because of its breadth and diversity, Java ME provides an unmatched opportunity to reach more than 3 billions consumers, but at the same time, developers are faced with the challenge of working with multiple distribution channels and a range of handsets. To this end, the Java Verified program provides a suite of tests that help to validate identity, functionality, integrity, and quality.  Since its rebirth in 2010 as an independent organization, the Java Verified program has been actively working to make it even easier to create and distribute Java ME apps.  Example initiatives include updates to the Unified Testing Criteria to make it easier to test "Simple Apps," community outreach to better understand and address developer pain-points  and a new "Trusted Status."  In the words of the Java Verified Program, Trusted Status is:a privileged status to be granted to developers who will have proven that the quality of their Java ME apps is of a consistently high standard. These are developers who will have earned the trust of Java Verified by demonstrating unfailingly that testing to the UTC standard is a crucial part of their product development activityThe first developer to be awarded this status is GameLoft.  By achieving Trusted Status Gameloft can now test their applications to the Java Verified standard without needing to provide Java Verified with the evidence.  The apps then automatically get signed with the Java Verified signature enabling GameLoft to benefit from reduced costs and time-to-market for their new Java ME applications from here on out.  Learn more about the exciting news or apply now for Trusted Status!

    Read the article

  • How to plan/manage multi-platform (mobile) products?

    - by PhD
    Say I've to develop an app that runs on iOS, Android and Windows 8 Mobile. Now all three platforms are technically in different program languages. The only 'reuse' that I can see is that of the boxes-and-lines drawings (UML :) charts and nothing else. So how do companies/programmers manage the variation of the same product across different platforms especially since the implementation languages differ? It's 'easier' in the desktop world IMO given the plethora of languages and cross-platform libraries to make your life easier. Not so in the mobile world. More so, product line management principles don't seem to be all that applicable - what is same and variant doesn't really matter - the application is the same (conceptually) and the implementation is variant. Some difficulties that come to mind: Bug Fixing: Applications maybe designed in a similar manner but the bug identification and fixing would be radically different. A bug on iOS may/may-not be existent for that on Android. Or a bug fix approach on one platform may not be the same on another (unless it's a semantic bug like a!=b instead of a==b which would require the same 'approach' to fixing in essence Enhancements: Making a change on one platform would be radically different than on another Code-Design Divergence: They way the code is written/organized, the class structures etc., could be very different given the different implementation environments - leading to further reuse of the (above) UML models. There are of course many others - just keeping the development in sync and making sure all applications are up to the same version with the same set of features etc. Seems the effort is 3x that of a single application. So how exactly does one manage this nightmarish situation? Some thoughts: Split application to client/server to minimize the effect to client side only (not always doable) Use frameworks like Unity-3D that could take care of the cross-platform problem (mostly applicable to games and probably not to other applications etc.) Any other ways of managing a platform line? What are some proven approaches to managing/taming the effects?

    Read the article

  • At $20/month Windows Azure host my website with 99.97% uptime

    - by Gopinath
    Couple of years ago a reliable and decent performing Windows hosting was not affordable to many enthusiastic developers who want to try a startup idea or build a hobby site. I tried to start an ASP.NET website few years ago to provide services like – Mobile Tracing, Vehicle Tracing. But due to high cost of Windows hosting I developed those services using PHP (not an easy task for .NET developer) and hosted on them Linux servers.  But with recent evolution of Windows Azure, hosting ASP.NET websites on highly reliable servers is affordable. Today anyone can host a high responsive and available ASP.NET website for just $20/month using Windows Azure. My website coziie.com is running on Windows Azure and serves close to quarter millions visitors a month with 99.97% of uptime and most of the page load times are less than 3 seconds. All I spend to run this website is just around $20, if you translate it to India rupees its roughly Rs.1000. The web sever of coziie.com is powered by a single Extra Small Web role instance and the backend is powered by a SQL Azure instance. Azure is quite impressive to provide 99.97% of uptime. Response times during peak are around 3 seconds and on nomarl loads it is around 1.5 seconds. Here is the report of uptime provided by Royal Pingdom over last one year For just $20/month Windows Azure takes care of the following apart from hosting Patches up Windows OS to the latest version Upgrades ASP.NET to the latest version – coziie.com is running on ASP.NET MVC 3 and soon I’ll upgrade it to ASP.NET MVC 4 Hosts data on latest and best version Sql Server database SQL Azure maintains 3 copies of database and automatically recovers in case of server failures and disasters. I never worry about database backups/restore. Provides staging environment for deploying applications for testing purpose and move them to production – I upgrade  twice a month on average With Windows Azure I no longer focus on server maintenance or data backups. They are taken up by Microsoft team and I just focus on building my website. Wish there is a low cost Linux version of Windows Azure so that I can stop worrying about server maintenance of this blog!! If you are looking for a Windows hosting, look no further than Windows Azure. If you find $20/month is a bit expensive to start with you may explore Azure Website (sort of shared hosted environment) which is free to start with and as your traffic grows you can move to paid hosting.

    Read the article

  • Move a SQL Azure server between subscriptions

    - by jamiet
    In September 2011 I published a blog post SSIS Reporting Pack v0.2 now available in which I made available the credentials of a sample database that one could use to test SSIS Reporting Pack. That database was sitting on a paid-for Azure subscription and hence was costing me about £5 a month - not a huge amount but when I later got a free Azure subscription through my MSDN Subscription in January 2012 it made sense to migrate the database onto that subscription. Since then I have been endeavouring to make that move but a few failed attempts combined with lack of time meant that I had not yet gotten round to it.That is until this morning when I heard about a new feature available in the Azure Management Portal that enables one to move a SQL Azure server from one subscription to another. Up to now I had been attempting to use a combination of SSIS packages and/or scripts to move the data but, as I alluded, I ran into a few roadblocks hence the ability to move a SQL Azure server was a godsend to me. I fired up the Azure Management Portal and a few clicks later my server had been successfully migrated, moreover the name of the server doesn't change and neither do any credentials so I have no need to go and update my original blog post either. Its easy to be cynical about SQL Azure (and I maintain a healthy scepticism myself) but that, my friends, is cool!You can read more about the ability to move SQL Azure servers between subscriptions from the official blog post Moving SQL Azure Servers Between Subscriptions.@Jamiet

    Read the article

  • Using the OAM Mobile & Social SDK to secure native mobile apps - Part 2 : OAM Mobile & Social Server configuration

    - by kanishkmahajan
    Objective  In the second part of this blog post I'll now cover configuration of OAM to secure our sample native apps developed using the iOS SDK. First, here are some key server side concepts: Application Profiles: An application profile is a logical representation of your application within OAM server. It could be a web (html/javascript) or native (iOS or Android) application. Applications may have different requirements for AuthN/AuthZ, and therefore each application that interacts with OAM Mobile & Social REST services must be uniquely defined. Service Providers: Service providers represent the back end services that are accessed by applications. With OAM Mobile & Social these services are in the areas of authentication, authorization and user profile access. A Service Provider then defines a type or class of service for authentication, authorization or user profiles. For example, the JWTAuthentication provider performs authentication and returns JWT (JSON Web Tokens) to the application. In contrast, the OAMAuthentication also provides authentication but uses OAM SSO tokens Service Profiles:  A Service Profile is a logical envelope that defines a service endpoint URL for a service provider for the OAM Mobile & Social Service. You can create multiple service profiles for a service provider to define token capabilities and service endpoints. Each service provider instance requires atleast one corresponding service profile.The  OAM Mobile & Social Service includes a pre-configured service profile for each pre-configured service provider. Service Domains: Service domains bind together application profiles and service profiles with an optional security handler. So now let's configure the OAM server. Additional details are in the OAM Documentation and this post simply provides an outline of configuration tasks required to configure OAM for securing native apps.  Configuration  Create The Application Profile Log on to the Oracle Access Management console and from System Configuration -> Mobile and Social -> Mobile Services, select "Create" under Application Profiles. You would do this  step twice - once for each of the native apps - AvitekInventory and AvitekScheduler. Enter the parameters for the new Application profile: Name:  The application name. In this example we use 'InventoryApp' for the AvitekInventory app and 'SchedulerApp' for the AvitekScheduler app. The application name configured here must match the application name in the settings for the deployed iOS application. BaseSecret: Enter a password here. This does not need to match any existing password. It is used as an encryption key between the client and the OAM server.  Mobile Configuration: Enable this checkbox for any mobile applications. This enables the SDK to collect and send Mobile specific attributes to the OAM server.  Webview: Controls the type of browser that the iOS application will use. The embedded browser (default) will render the browser within the application. External will use the system standalone browser. External can sometimes be preferable for debugging URLScheme: The URL scheme associated with the iOS apps that is also used as a custom URL scheme to register O/S handlers that will take control when OAM transfers control to device. For the AvitekInventory and the AvitekScheduler apps I used osa:// and client:// respectively. You set this scheme in Xcode while developing your iOS Apps under Info->URL Types.  Bundle Identifier : The fully qualified name of your iOS application. You typically set this when you create a new Xcode project or under General->Identity in Xcode. For the AvitekInventory and AvitekScheduler apps these were com.us.oracle.AvitekInventory and com.us.oracle.AvitekScheduler respectively.  Create The Service Domain Select create under Service domains. Create a name for your domain (AvitekDomain is what I've used). The name configured must match the service domain set in the iOS application settings. Under "Application Profile Selection" click the browse button. Choose the application profiles that you created in the previous step one by one. Set the InventoryApp as the SSO agent (with an automatic priority of 1) and the SchedulerApp as the SSO client. This associates these applications with this service domain and configures them in a 'circle of trust'.  Advance to the next page of the wizard to configure the services for this domain. For this example we will use the following services:  Authentication:   This will use the JWT (JSON Web Token) format authentication provider. The iOS application upon successful authentication will receive a signed JWT token from OAM Mobile & Social service. This token will be used in subsequent calls to OAM. Use 'MobileOAMAuthentication' here. Authorization:  The authorization provider. The SDK makes calls to this provider endpoint to obtain authorization decisions on resource requests. Use 'OAMAuthorization' here. User Profile Service:  This is the service that provides user profile services (attribute lookup, attribute modification). It can be any directory configured as a data source in OAM.  And that's it! We're done configuring our native apps. In the next section, let's look at some additional features that were mentioned in the earlier post that are automated by the SDK for the app developer i.e. these are areas that require no additional coding by the app developer when developing with the SDK as they only require server side configuration: Additional Configuration  Offline Authentication Select this option in the service domain configuration to allow users to log in and authenticate to the application locally. Clear the box to block users from authenticating locally. Strong Authentication By simply selecting the OAAMSecurityHandlerPlugin while configuring mobile related Service Domains, the OAM Mobile&Social service allows sophisticated device and client application registration logic as well as the advanced risk and fraud analysis logic found in OAAM to be applied to mobile authentication. Let's look at some scenarios where the OAAMSecurityHandlerPlugin gets used. First, when we configure OAM and OAAM to integrate together using the TAP scheme, then that integration kicks off by selecting the OAAMSecurityHandlerPlugin in the mobile service domain. This is how the mobile device is now prompted for KBA,OTP etc depending on the TAP scheme integration and the OAM users registered in the OAAM database. Second, when we configured the service domain, there were claim attributes there that are already pre-configured in OAM Mobile&Social service and we simply accepted the default values- these are the set of attributes that will be fetched from the device and passed to the server during registration/authentication as device profile attributes. When a mobile application requests a token through the Mobile Client SDK, the SDK logic will send the Device Profile attributes as a part of an HTTP request. This set of Device Profile attributes enhances security by creating an audit trail for devices that assists device identification. When the OAAM Security Plug-in is used, a particular combination of Device Profile attribute values is treated as a device finger print, known as the Digital Finger Print in the OAAM Administration Console. Each finger print is assigned a unique fingerprint number. Each OAAM session is associated with a finger print and the finger print makes it possible to log (and audit) the devices that are performing authentication and token acquisition. Finally, if the jail broken option is selected while configuring an application profile, the SDK detects a device is jail broken based on configured policy and if the OAAM handler is configured the plug-in can allow or block access to client device depending on the OAAM policy as well as detect blacklisted, lost or stolen devices and send a wipeout command that deletes all the mobile &social relevant data and blocks the device from future access. 1024x768 Social Logins Finally, let's complete this post by adding configuration to configure social logins for mobile applications. Although the Avitek sample apps do not demonstrate social logins this would be an ideal exercise for you based on the sample code provided in the earlier post. I'll cover the server side configuration here (with Facebook as an example) and you can retrofit the code to accommodate social logins by following the steps outlined in "Invoking Authentication Services" and add code in LoginViewController and maybe create a new delegate - AvitekRPDelegate based on the description in the previous post. So, here all you will need to do is configure an application profile for social login, configure a new service domain that uses the social login application profile, register the app on Facebook and finally configure the Facebook OAuth provider in OAM with those settings. Navigate to Mobile and Social, click on "Internet Identity Services" and create a new application profile. Here are the relevant parameters for the new application profile (-also we're not registering the social user in OAM with this configuration below, however that is a key feature as well): Name:  The application name. This must match the name of the of mobile application profile created for your application under Mobile Services. We used InventoryApp for this example. SharedSecret: Enter a password here. This does not need to match any existing password. It is used as an encryption key between the client and the OAM Mobile and Social service.  Mobile Application Return URL: After the Relying Party (social) login, the OAM Mobile & Social service will redirect to the iOS application using this URI. This is defined under Info->URL type and we used 'osa', so we define this here as 'osa://' Login Type: Choose to allow only internet identity authentication for this exercise. Authentication Service Endpoint : Make sure that /internetidentityauthentication is selected. Login to http://developers.facebook.com using your Facebook account and click on Apps and register the app as InventoryApp. Note that the consumer key and API secret gets generated automatically by the Facebook OAuth server. Navigate back to OAM and under Mobile and Social, click on "Internet Identity Services" and edit the Facebook OAuth Provider. Add the consumer key and API secret from the Facebook developers site to the Facebook OAuth Provider: Navigate to Mobile Services. Click on New to create a new service domain. In this example we call the domain "AvitekDomainRP". The type should be 'Mobile Application' and the application credential type 'User Token'. Add the application "InventoryApp" to the domain. Advance the next page of the wizard. Select the  default service profiles but ensure that the Authentication Service is set to 'InternetIdentityAuthentication'. Finish the creation of the service domain.

    Read the article

  • Upload File to Windows Azure Blob in Chunks through ASP.NET MVC, JavaScript and HTML5

    - by Shaun
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/07/01/upload-file-to-windows-azure-blob-in-chunks-through-asp.net.aspxMany people are using Windows Azure Blob Storage to store their data in the cloud. Blob storage provides 99.9% availability with easy-to-use API through .NET SDK and HTTP REST. For example, we can store JavaScript files, images, documents in blob storage when we are building an ASP.NET web application on a Web Role in Windows Azure. Or we can store our VHD files in blob and mount it as a hard drive in our cloud service. If you are familiar with Windows Azure, you should know that there are two kinds of blob: page blob and block blob. The page blob is optimized for random read and write, which is very useful when you need to store VHD files. The block blob is optimized for sequential/chunk read and write, which has more common usage. Since we can upload block blob in blocks through BlockBlob.PutBlock, and them commit them as a whole blob with invoking the BlockBlob.PutBlockList, it is very powerful to upload large files, as we can upload blocks in parallel, and provide pause-resume feature. There are many documents, articles and blog posts described on how to upload a block blob. Most of them are focus on the server side, which means when you had received a big file, stream or binaries, how to upload them into blob storage in blocks through .NET SDK.  But the problem is, how can we upload these large files from client side, for example, a browser. This questioned to me when I was working with a Chinese customer to help them build a network disk production on top of azure. The end users upload their files from the web portal, and then the files will be stored in blob storage from the Web Role. My goal is to find the best way to transform the file from client (end user’s machine) to the server (Web Role) through browser. In this post I will demonstrate and describe what I had done, to upload large file in chunks with high speed, and save them as blocks into Windows Azure Blob Storage.   Traditional Upload, Works with Limitation The simplest way to implement this requirement is to create a web page with a form that contains a file input element and a submit button. 1: @using (Html.BeginForm("About", "Index", FormMethod.Post, new { enctype = "multipart/form-data" })) 2: { 3: <input type="file" name="file" /> 4: <input type="submit" value="upload" /> 5: } And then in the backend controller, we retrieve the whole content of this file and upload it in to the blob storage through .NET SDK. We can split the file in blocks and upload them in parallel and commit. The code had been well blogged in the community. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public ActionResult About(HttpPostedFileBase file) 3: { 4: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 5: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 6: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(file.FileName); 7: var blockDataList = new Dictionary<string, byte[]>(); 8: using (var stream = file.InputStream) 9: { 10: var blockSizeInKB = 1024; 11: var offset = 0; 12: var index = 0; 13: while (offset < stream.Length) 14: { 15: var readLength = Math.Min(1024 * blockSizeInKB, (int)stream.Length - offset); 16: var blockData = new byte[readLength]; 17: offset += stream.Read(blockData, 0, readLength); 18: blockDataList.Add(Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)), blockData); 19:  20: index++; 21: } 22: } 23:  24: Parallel.ForEach(blockDataList, (bi) => 25: { 26: blob.PutBlock(bi.Key, new MemoryStream(bi.Value), null); 27: }); 28: blob.PutBlockList(blockDataList.Select(b => b.Key).ToArray()); 29:  30: return RedirectToAction("About"); 31: } This works perfect if we selected an image, a music or a small video to upload. But if I selected a large file, let’s say a 6GB HD-movie, after upload for about few minutes the page will be shown as below and the upload will be terminated. In ASP.NET there is a limitation of request length and the maximized request length is defined in the web.config file. It’s a number which less than about 4GB. So if we want to upload a really big file, we cannot simply implement in this way. Also, in Windows Azure, a cloud service network load balancer will terminate the connection if exceed the timeout period. From my test the timeout looks like 2 - 3 minutes. Hence, when we need to upload a large file we cannot just use the basic HTML elements. Besides the limitation mentioned above, the simple HTML file upload cannot provide rich upload experience such as chunk upload, pause and pause-resume. So we need to find a better way to upload large file from the client to the server.   Upload in Chunks through HTML5 and JavaScript In order to break those limitation mentioned above we will try to upload the large file in chunks. This takes some benefit to us such as - No request size limitation: Since we upload in chunks, we can define the request size for each chunks regardless how big the entire file is. - No timeout problem: The size of chunks are controlled by us, which means we should be able to make sure request for each chunk upload will not exceed the timeout period of both ASP.NET and Windows Azure load balancer. It was a big challenge to upload big file in chunks until we have HTML5. There are some new features and improvements introduced in HTML5 and we will use them to implement our solution.   In HTML5, the File interface had been improved with a new method called “slice”. It can be used to read part of the file by specifying the start byte index and the end byte index. For example if the entire file was 1024 bytes, file.slice(512, 768) will read the part of this file from the 512nd byte to 768th byte, and return a new object of interface called "Blob”, which you can treat as an array of bytes. In fact,  a Blob object represents a file-like object of immutable, raw data. The File interface is based on Blob, inheriting blob functionality and expanding it to support files on the user's system. For more information about the Blob please refer here. File and Blob is very useful to implement the chunk upload. We will use File interface to represent the file the user selected from the browser and then use File.slice to read the file in chunks in the size we wanted. For example, if we wanted to upload a 10MB file with 512KB chunks, then we can read it in 512KB blobs by using File.slice in a loop.   Assuming we have a web page as below. User can select a file, an input box to specify the block size in KB and a button to start upload. 1: <div> 2: <input type="file" id="upload_files" name="files[]" /><br /> 3: Block Size: <input type="number" id="block_size" value="512" name="block_size" />KB<br /> 4: <input type="button" id="upload_button_blob" name="upload" value="upload (blob)" /> 5: </div> Then we can have the JavaScript function to upload the file in chunks when user clicked the button. 1: <script type="text/javascript"> 1: 2: $(function () { 3: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 4: }); 5: });</script> Firstly we need to ensure the client browser supports the interfaces we are going to use. Just try to invoke the File, Blob and FormData from the “window” object. If any of them is “undefined” the condition result will be “false” which means your browser doesn’t support these premium feature and it’s time for you to get your browser updated. FormData is another new feature we are going to use in the future. It could generate a temporary form for us. We will use this interface to create a form with chunk and associated metadata when invoked the service through ajax. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: if (window.File && window.Blob && window.FormData) { 4: alert("Your brwoser is awesome, let's rock!"); 5: } 6: else { 7: alert("Oh man plz update to a modern browser before try is cool stuff out."); 8: return; 9: } 10: }); Each browser supports these interfaces by their own implementation and currently the Blob, File and File.slice are supported by Chrome 21, FireFox 13, IE 10, Opera 12 and Safari 5.1 or higher. After that we worked on the files the user selected one by one since in HTML5, user can select multiple files in one file input box. 1: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 2: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 3: var file = files[i]; 4: var fileSize = file.size; 5: var fileName = file.name; 6: } Next, we calculated the start index and end index for each chunks based on the size the user specified from the browser. We put them into an array with the file name and the index, which will be used when we upload chunks into Windows Azure Blob Storage as blocks since we need to specify the target blob name and the block index. At the same time we will store the list of all indexes into another variant which will be used to commit blocks into blob in Azure Storage once all chunks had been uploaded successfully. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10:  11: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 12: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 13: var blockSizeInKB = $("#block_size").val(); 14: var blockSize = blockSizeInKB * 1024; 15: var blocks = []; 16: var offset = 0; 17: var index = 0; 18: var list = ""; 19: while (offset < fileSize) { 20: var start = offset; 21: var end = Math.min(offset + blockSize, fileSize); 22:  23: blocks.push({ 24: name: fileName, 25: index: index, 26: start: start, 27: end: end 28: }); 29: list += index + ","; 30:  31: offset = end; 32: index++; 33: } 34: } 35: }); Now we have all chunks’ information ready. The next step should be upload them one by one to the server side, and at the server side when received a chunk it will upload as a block into Blob Storage, and finally commit them with the index list through BlockBlobClient.PutBlockList. But since all these invokes are ajax calling, which means not synchronized call. So we need to introduce a new JavaScript library to help us coordinate the asynchronize operation, which named “async.js”. You can download this JavaScript library here, and you can find the document here. I will not explain this library too much in this post. We will put all procedures we want to execute as a function array, and pass into the proper function defined in async.js to let it help us to control the execution sequence, in series or in parallel. Hence we will define an array and put the function for chunk upload into this array. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4:  5: // start to upload each files in chunks 6: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 7: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 8: var file = files[i]; 9: var fileSize = file.size; 10: var fileName = file.name; 11: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 12: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 13: ... ... 14:  15: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 16: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 17: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 18: }); 19: }); 20: } 21: }); 22: }); As you can see, I used File.slice method to read each chunks based on the start and end byte index we calculated previously, and constructed a temporary HTML form with the file name, chunk index and chunk data through another new feature in HTML5 named FormData. Then post this form to the backend server through jQuery.ajax. This is the key part of our solution. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 15: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 16: // load blob based on the start and end index for each chunks 17: var blob = file.slice(block.start, block.end); 18: // put the file name, index and blob into a temporary from 19: var fd = new FormData(); 20: fd.append("name", block.name); 21: fd.append("index", block.index); 22: fd.append("file", blob); 23: // post the form to backend service (asp.net mvc controller action) 24: $.ajax({ 25: url: "/Home/UploadInFormData", 26: data: fd, 27: processData: false, 28: contentType: "multipart/form-data", 29: type: "POST", 30: success: function (result) { 31: if (!result.success) { 32: alert(result.error); 33: } 34: callback(null, block.index); 35: } 36: }); 37: }); 38: }); 39: } 40: }); Then we will invoke these functions one by one by using the async.js. And once all functions had been executed successfully I invoked another ajax call to the backend service to commit all these chunks (blocks) as the blob in Windows Azure Storage. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.series(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: }); That’s all in the client side. The outline of our logic would be - Calculate the start and end byte index for each chunks based on the block size. - Defined the functions of reading the chunk form file and upload the content to the backend service through ajax. - Execute the functions defined in previous step with “async.js”. - Commit the chunks by invoking the backend service in Windows Azure Storage finally.   Save Chunks as Blocks into Blob Storage In above we finished the client size JavaScript code. It uploaded the file in chunks to the backend service which we are going to implement in this step. We will use ASP.NET MVC as our backend service, and it will receive the chunks, upload into Windows Azure Bob Storage in blocks, then finally commit as one blob. As in the client side we uploaded chunks by invoking the ajax call to the URL "/Home/UploadInFormData", I created a new action under the Index controller and it only accepts HTTP POST request. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: } 8: catch (Exception e) 9: { 10: error = e.ToString(); 11: } 12:  13: return new JsonResult() 14: { 15: Data = new 16: { 17: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 18: error = error 19: } 20: }; 21: } Then I retrieved the file name, index and the chunk content from the Request.Form object, which was passed from our client side. And then, used the Windows Azure SDK to create a blob container (in this case we will use the container named “test”.) and create a blob reference with the blob name (same as the file name). Then uploaded the chunk as a block of this blob with the index, since in Blob Storage each block must have an index (ID) associated with so that finally we can put all blocks as one blob by specifying their block ID list. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 8: var index = int.Parse(Request.Form["index"]); 9: var file = Request.Files[0]; 10: var id = Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)); 11:  12: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 13: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 14: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 15: blob.PutBlock(id, file.InputStream, null); 16: } 17: catch (Exception e) 18: { 19: error = e.ToString(); 20: } 21:  22: return new JsonResult() 23: { 24: Data = new 25: { 26: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 27: error = error 28: } 29: }; 30: } Next, I created another action to commit the blocks into blob once all chunks had been uploaded. Similarly, I retrieved the blob name from the Request.Form. I also retrieved the chunks ID list, which is the block ID list from the Request.Form in a string format, split them as a list, then invoked the BlockBlob.PutBlockList method. After that our blob will be shown in the container and ready to be download. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult Commit() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 8: var list = Request.Form["list"]; 9: var ids = list 10: .Split(',') 11: .Where(id => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(id)) 12: .Select(id => Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(int.Parse(id)))) 13: .ToArray(); 14:  15: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 16: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 17: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 18: blob.PutBlockList(ids); 19: } 20: catch (Exception e) 21: { 22: error = e.ToString(); 23: } 24:  25: return new JsonResult() 26: { 27: Data = new 28: { 29: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 30: error = error 31: } 32: }; 33: } Now we finished all code we need. The whole process of uploading would be like this below. Below is the full client side JavaScript code. 1: <script type="text/javascript" src="~/Scripts/async.js"></script> 2: <script type="text/javascript"> 3: $(function () { 4: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 5: // assert the browser support html5 6: if (window.File && window.Blob && window.FormData) { 7: alert("Your brwoser is awesome, let's rock!"); 8: } 9: else { 10: alert("Oh man plz update to a modern browser before try is cool stuff out."); 11: return; 12: } 13:  14: // start to upload each files in chunks 15: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 16: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 17: var file = files[i]; 18: var fileSize = file.size; 19: var fileName = file.name; 20:  21: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 22: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 23: var blockSizeInKB = $("#block_size").val(); 24: var blockSize = blockSizeInKB * 1024; 25: var blocks = []; 26: var offset = 0; 27: var index = 0; 28: var list = ""; 29: while (offset < fileSize) { 30: var start = offset; 31: var end = Math.min(offset + blockSize, fileSize); 32:  33: blocks.push({ 34: name: fileName, 35: index: index, 36: start: start, 37: end: end 38: }); 39: list += index + ","; 40:  41: offset = end; 42: index++; 43: } 44:  45: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 46: var putBlocks = []; 47: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 48: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 49: // load blob based on the start and end index for each chunks 50: var blob = file.slice(block.start, block.end); 51: // put the file name, index and blob into a temporary from 52: var fd = new FormData(); 53: fd.append("name", block.name); 54: fd.append("index", block.index); 55: fd.append("file", blob); 56: // post the form to backend service (asp.net mvc controller action) 57: $.ajax({ 58: url: "/Home/UploadInFormData", 59: data: fd, 60: processData: false, 61: contentType: "multipart/form-data", 62: type: "POST", 63: success: function (result) { 64: if (!result.success) { 65: alert(result.error); 66: } 67: callback(null, block.index); 68: } 69: }); 70: }); 71: }); 72:  73: // invoke the functions one by one 74: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 75: async.series(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 76: var data = { 77: name: fileName, 78: list: list 79: }; 80: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 81: if (!result.success) { 82: alert(result.error); 83: } 84: else { 85: alert("done!"); 86: } 87: }); 88: }); 89: } 90: }); 91: }); 92: </script> And below is the full ASP.NET MVC controller code. 1: public class HomeController : Controller 2: { 3: private CloudStorageAccount _account; 4: private CloudBlobClient _client; 5:  6: public HomeController() 7: : base() 8: { 9: _account = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("DataConnectionString")); 10: _client = _account.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 11: } 12:  13: public ActionResult Index() 14: { 15: ViewBag.Message = "Modify this template to jump-start your ASP.NET MVC application."; 16:  17: return View(); 18: } 19:  20: [HttpPost] 21: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 22: { 23: var error = string.Empty; 24: try 25: { 26: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 27: var index = int.Parse(Request.Form["index"]); 28: var file = Request.Files[0]; 29: var id = Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)); 30:  31: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 32: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 33: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 34: blob.PutBlock(id, file.InputStream, null); 35: } 36: catch (Exception e) 37: { 38: error = e.ToString(); 39: } 40:  41: return new JsonResult() 42: { 43: Data = new 44: { 45: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 46: error = error 47: } 48: }; 49: } 50:  51: [HttpPost] 52: public JsonResult Commit() 53: { 54: var error = string.Empty; 55: try 56: { 57: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 58: var list = Request.Form["list"]; 59: var ids = list 60: .Split(',') 61: .Where(id => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(id)) 62: .Select(id => Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(int.Parse(id)))) 63: .ToArray(); 64:  65: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 66: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 67: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 68: blob.PutBlockList(ids); 69: } 70: catch (Exception e) 71: { 72: error = e.ToString(); 73: } 74:  75: return new JsonResult() 76: { 77: Data = new 78: { 79: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 80: error = error 81: } 82: }; 83: } 84: } And if we selected a file from the browser we will see our application will upload chunks in the size we specified to the server through ajax call in background, and then commit all chunks in one blob. Then we can find the blob in our Windows Azure Blob Storage.   Optimized by Parallel Upload In previous example we just uploaded our file in chunks. This solved the problem that ASP.NET MVC request content size limitation as well as the Windows Azure load balancer timeout. But it might introduce the performance problem since we uploaded chunks in sequence. In order to improve the upload performance we could modify our client side code a bit to make the upload operation invoked in parallel. The good news is that, “async.js” library provides the parallel execution function. If you remembered the code we invoke the service to upload chunks, it utilized “async.series” which means all functions will be executed in sequence. Now we will change this code to “async.parallel”. This will invoke all functions in parallel. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.parallel(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: }); In this way all chunks will be uploaded to the server side at the same time to maximize the bandwidth usage. This should work if the file was not very large and the chunk size was not very small. But for large file this might introduce another problem that too many ajax calls are sent to the server at the same time. So the best solution should be, upload the chunks in parallel with maximum concurrency limitation. The code below specified the concurrency limitation to 4, which means at the most only 4 ajax calls could be invoked at the same time. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.parallelLimit(putBlocks, 4, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: });   Summary In this post we discussed how to upload files in chunks to the backend service and then upload them into Windows Azure Blob Storage in blocks. We focused on the frontend side and leverage three new feature introduced in HTML 5 which are - File.slice: Read part of the file by specifying the start and end byte index. - Blob: File-like interface which contains the part of the file content. - FormData: Temporary form element that we can pass the chunk alone with some metadata to the backend service. Then we discussed the performance consideration of chunk uploading. Sequence upload cannot provide maximized upload speed, but the unlimited parallel upload might crash the browser and server if too many chunks. So we finally came up with the solution to upload chunks in parallel with the concurrency limitation. We also demonstrated how to utilize “async.js” JavaScript library to help us control the asynchronize call and the parallel limitation.   Regarding the chunk size and the parallel limitation value there is no “best” value. You need to test vary composition and find out the best one for your particular scenario. It depends on the local bandwidth, client machine cores and the server side (Windows Azure Cloud Service Virtual Machine) cores, memory and bandwidth. Below is one of my performance test result. The client machine was Windows 8 IE 10 with 4 cores. I was using Microsoft Cooperation Network. The web site was hosted on Windows Azure China North data center (in Beijing) with one small web role (1.7GB 1 core CPU, 1.75GB memory with 100Mbps bandwidth). The test cases were - Chunk size: 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, 4MB. - Upload Mode: Sequence, parallel (unlimited), parallel with limit (4 threads, 8 threads). - Chunk Format: base64 string, binaries. - Target file: 100MB. - Each case was tested 3 times. Below is the test result chart. Some thoughts, but not guidance or best practice: - Parallel gets better performance than series. - No significant performance improvement between parallel 4 threads and 8 threads. - Transform with binaries provides better performance than base64. - In all cases, chunk size in 1MB - 2MB gets better performance.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

    Read the article

  • SQL SERVER – Generate Database Script for SQL Azure

    - by pinaldave
    When talking about SQL Azure the common complain I hear is that the script generated from stand-along SQL Server database is not compatible with SQL Azure. This was true for some time for sure but not any more. If you have SQL Server 2008 R2 installed you can follow the guideline below to generate script which is compatible with SQL Azure. As above images are very clear I will not write more about them. SQL Azure does not support filegroups. Let us generate script for any table created on PRIMARY filegroup for standalong SQL Server and compare it with the script generated for SQL Azure. You can clearly see that there is no filegroup in the code generated for SQL Azure. Give it a try and please your comment here about what do you think about the same. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Add-On, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQL Azure

    Read the article

  • iOS Support with Windows Azure Mobile Services – now with Push Notifications

    - by ScottGu
    A few weeks ago I posted about a number of improvements to Windows Azure Mobile Services. One of these was the addition of an Objective-C client SDK that allows iOS developers to easily use Mobile Services for data and authentication.  Today I'm excited to announce a number of improvement to our iOS SDK and, most significantly, our new support for Push Notifications via APNS (Apple Push Notification Services).  This makes it incredibly easy to fire push notifications to your iOS users from Windows Azure Mobile Service scripts. Push Notifications via APNS We've provided two complete tutorials that take you step-by-step through the provisioning and setup process to enable your Windows Azure Mobile Service application with APNS (Apple Push Notification Services), including all of the steps required to configure your application for push in the Apple iOS provisioning portal: Getting started with Push Notifications - iOS Push notifications to users by using Mobile Services - iOS Once you've configured your application in the Apple iOS provisioning portal and uploaded the APNS push certificate to the Apple provisioning portal, it's just a matter of uploading your APNS push certificate to Mobile Services using the Windows Azure admin portal: Clicking the “upload” within the “Push” tab of your Mobile Service allows you to browse your local file-system and locate/upload your exported certificate.  As part of this you can also select whether you want to use the sandbox (dev) or production (prod) Apple service: Now, the code to send a push notification to your clients from within a Windows Azure Mobile Service is as easy as the code below: push.apns.send(deviceToken, {      alert: 'Toast: A new Mobile Services task.',      sound: 'default' }); This will cause Windows Azure Mobile Services to connect to APNS (Apple Push Notification Service) and send a notification to the iOS device you specified via the deviceToken: Check out our reference documentation for full details on how to use the new Windows Azure Mobile Services apns object to send your push notifications. Feedback Scripts An important part of working with any PNS (Push Notification Service) is handling feedback for expired device tokens and channels. This typically happens when your application is uninstalled from a particular device and can no longer receive your notifications. With Windows Notification Services you get an instant response from the HTTP server.  Apple’s Notification Services works in a slightly different way and provides an additional endpoint you can connect to poll for a list of expired tokens. As with all of the capabilities we integrate with Mobile Services, our goal is to allow developers to focus more on building their app and less on building infrastructure to support their ideas. Therefore we knew we had to provide a simple way for developers to integrate feedback from APNS on a regular basis.  This week’s update now includes a new screen in the portal that allows you to optionally provide a script to process your APNS feedback – and it will be executed by Mobile Services on an ongoing basis: This script is invoked periodically while your service is active. To poll the feedback endpoint you can simply call the apns object's getFeedback method from within this script: push.apns.getFeedback({       success: function(results) {           // results is an array of objects with a deviceToken and time properties      } }); This returns you a list of invalid tokens that can now be removed from your database. iOS Client SDK improvements Over the last month we've continued to work with a number of iOS advisors to make improvements to our Objective-C SDK. The SDK is being developed under an open source license (Apache 2.0) and is available on github. Many of the improvements are behind the scenes to improve performance and memory usage. However, one of the biggest improvements to our iOS Client API is the addition of an even easier login method.  Below is the Objective-C code you can now write to invoke it: [client loginWithProvider:@"twitter"                     onController:self                        animated:YES                      completion:^(MSUser *user, NSError *error) {      // if no error, you are now logged in via twitter }]; This code will automatically present and dismiss our login view controller as a modal dialog on the specified controller.  This does all the hard work for you and makes login via Twitter, Google, Facebook and Microsoft Account identities just a single line of code. My colleague Josh just posted a short video demonstrating these new features which I'd recommend checking out: Summary The above features are all now live in production and are 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 Mobile Services today. Visit the Windows Azure Mobile Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with Mobile Services. 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

    Read the article

  • Controlling azure worker roles concurrency in multiple instance

    - by NER1808
    I have a simple work role in azure that does some data processing on an SQL azure database. The worker basically adds data from a 3rd party datasource to my database every 2 minutes. When I have two instances of the role, this obviously doubles up unnecessarily. I would like to have 2 instances for redundancy and the 99.95 uptime, but do not want them both processing at the same time as they will just duplicate the same job. Is there a standard pattern for this that I am missing? I know I could set flags in the database, but am hoping there is another easier or better way to manage this. Thanks

    Read the article

  • SyncToBlog #10 Lots of Azure and Cloud Links including MIX10 videos

    - by Eric Nelson
    Just getting a few interesting cloud links “down on paper”. I last did one of these on Azure in Feb 20010. Cloud Links: Article on Debugging in the Cloud http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/azurescale  A sample app that demonstrates monitoring and automatically scaling an Azure application in response to dropping performance etc. Basically a console app that checks perf stats and then uses the Service Management API to spin up new instances when needed. Azure In Action book is imminent :) Running Memcached in Windows Azure from the MS UK team Using Microsoft Codename Dallas as a data source for Drupal also from the MS UK team I often mention them – but this post is the biz! Metodi on fault and upgrade domains Detailed blog post on comparing Azure AppFabric Service Bus REST support to the free Faye Ruby+JavaScript gem that implements the JSON publish/subscribe protocol Bayeux. AppFabric LABS allow you to test out and play with experimental AppFabric technologies. Details of the upcoming VM support in Windows Azure Nice series of posts from J D Meier in the Patterns and Practice team How To Use ASP.NET Forms Auth with Azure Tables  How To Use ASP.NET Forms Auth with Roles in Azure Tables How To Use ASP.NET Forms Auth with SQL Server on Windows Azure And sessions from MIX10 held March 15th to 17th: Lap around the Windows Azure Platform – Steve Marx Building and Deploying Windows Azure Based Applications with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – Jim Nakashima Building PHP Applications using the Windows Azure Platform – Craig Kitterman, Sumit Chawla Using Ruby on Rails to Build Windows Azure Applications – Sriram Krishnan Microsoft Project Code Name “Dallas": Data for your apps – Moe Khosravy Using Storage in the Windows Azure Platform – Chris Auld Building Web Applications with Windows Azure Storage – Brad Calder Building Web Application with Microsoft SQL Azure – David Robinson Connecting Your Applications in the Cloud with Windows Azure AppFabric – Clemens Vasters Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Azure: A Match Made for the Web – Matt Kerner Something for everyone :)

    Read the article

  • Free Windows Azure event next Monday in London (29th March)

    - by Eric Nelson
    I just heard that we still have spaces for this event happening next week (29th March 2010). Whilst the event is designed for start-ups, I’m sure nobody would notice if you snuck in :-) Just keep it to yourself ;-) Register using invitation code: 79F2AB. Hope to see you there. The agenda is looking pretty swish: 09:00 – 09:30 Registration 09:30 - 10:15 Keynote  ‘I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now....’– John Taysom, Active Seed Investor 10:15 - 10:45   The Microsoft Vision for Cloud Computing – Steve Clayton, Director Software + Services, EMEA 10:45 - 11:00   Break 11:00 - 12:30 “Windows Azure in Real World” – hear from startups that have built their business around the Azure platform, moderated by Alistair Beagley, Azure UK Developer and Platform Lead 12:30 - 13:15 Lunch and networking  13:15 - 14:15  Breakout Tracks, moderated by our Azure Experts 1. Windows Azure Technical Overview - David Gristwood, Application Architect, Microsoft 2. SQL Azure Technical Overview – Eric Nelson, Application Architect, Microsoft 3. Commercial insight into Windows Azure and what this means for BizSpark Start-ups - Simon Karn, Commercial Lead, UK Windows Azure Incubation Team, Microsoft 14:15 - 14:30 Session change over 14:30 - 15:30   Breakout Tracks, moderated by our Azure Experts 1. SQL Azure Technical Overview (repeat) - Eric Nelson, Application Architect, Microsoft 2. Deep dive into Windows Azure – Neil Kidd, Architect, Microsoft Technology Centre 3. Lessons Learnt - Windows Azure in the Real World interactive session – Two customers hosted by Matt Deacon, Enterprise Architect, Microsoft 15:30 - 16:00 Break & Session change over 16:00 - 17:00 Breakout Tracks, moderated by our Azure Experts 1. PHP / Ruby on Azure Simon Davies, Architect, UK Windows Azure Incubation Team, Microsoft 2. Commercial insight into Windows Azure and what this means for BizSpark Start-ups (repeat) - Simon Karn, Commercial Lead, UK Windows Azure Incubation Team, Microsoft 3. Lessons Learnt - Windows Azure in the Real World interactive session #2 Two customers hosted by Matt Deacon, Enterprise Architect, Microsoft 17:00 - 18:00 Pitches and Judging 18:15 Wrap-up and close 18:15 - 20:00 Drinks & Networking

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13  | Next Page >