Azure Support

Backup is currently a major gap in the SQL Azure product, but with support for Database Copy TSQL command has given at least one option for directly backing up a SQL Azure database by copying a source Azure database to a newly created  Azure database.
The TSQL command structure below provides will produce a copy of [...]

Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta has just been released (download it here). LightSwitch is a tool for rapidly developing data-centric business applications. LightSwitch apps can be deployed on a variety of platforms – as WCF/SQL Server desktop apps, Silverlight/SQL Server web apps and also Windows Azure/SQL Azure apps.
Note that Azure deployment is not available in Beta 1, but [...]

The Azure CDN serves data which is cached at different global ‘edge’ locations.
Currently, there are 22 CDN locations:
Related Articles:Windows Azure CDN PricingUsing Azure CDN (Content Delivery Network) In Your App

The Azure CDN is priced in two tiers:

$0.15 per GB for data from European and North American locations.
$0.20 per GB for data from other locations.

In addition there is a flat charge of $0.01 per 10,000 transactions.
The CDN works by caching content at its 20 worldwide ‘edge’ locations, the first time that a file is requested [...]

The August update of the AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS) is the largest yet of the AppFabric updates and  features federated-identity  support for OpenID, Facebook, Google. Also in the August update are:
Integration with WIF (Windows Identity Foundation) and tooling.
Support for Active Directory Federation Server v2.0
Support for the SAML 1.1, SAML 2.0, and Simple Web Token (SWT) token formats
Support for OAuth [...]

There’s been a lot of buzz about the ‘hybrid’ cloud – the blending of on-premise services with cloud based services. CloudKick recently launched  CloudKick  Hybrid  a tool for monitoring cloud and on-premise servers from a single console (see story here), Nimsoft which has a similar monitoring tool was recently acquired by CA for $350m, hosting [...]

How does Azure stack up against its main rival, Amazon, in pricing?
Compute Instances
The standard compute instances sizes are very similar on both platforms – Small (1 core processor, 1.7GB RAM) , Large (4 core processors, 7GB RAM), Extra Large (8 core processors, 15GB RAM ). The only differences being that Azure offers slightly larger drive [...]

This review is an update of  my first impressions of Azure I wrote back when it first launched. Having used SQL and Windows Azure for two months since its full release I thought it would be best to write a updated review (especially since there have been a few updates to Azure since the February [...]

Mix was generally quiet on the Azure front – Windows Phone 7 developer news dominated everything else. But there were still a few worthwhile announcements :

“Dallas” data marketplace CTP 2 announced which extends the service with the addition of 25 new data sets.
oData protocol announced, this is a Microsoft sponsored data protocol which is [...]

At Mix 2010 Microsoft introduced the Windows Azure Command-Line Tools for PHP Developers which creates a deployment package for both the local Development Fabric and Windows Azure cloud. PHP developers use numerous different IDE’s and having a simple command line utility to create the packages independent of the IDE significantly eases the deployment of [...]