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 [...]

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 [...]

The development fabric is a high-fidelity simulation of the Windows Azure cloud environment on a local development. The development fabric is designed for developing  and testing  and all Windows Azure apps should be fully tested on the dev fabric before being deployed. The development fabric UI  can be started in any of the following ways:

Debugging [...]

VM (Virtual Machine) sizes in Azure can be configured in Visual Studio by double clicking the relevant Role and selecting the VM size from the dropdown:

Azure has four predefined VM’s :

Small: 1 core processor, 1.7GB RAM, 250GB hard disk  - $0.12 per hour
Medium: 2 core processors, 3.5GB RAM, 500GB hard disk – $0.24 per hour
Large: [...]

Windows Azure can be deployed  in any of six data centers around the world – South Central US, North Central US, West Europe, East Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia. ( Microsoft has pledged to increase the number of gelocated data centers going forward. Developers should consider geolocation for any of the following reasons:

Performance — The [...]

The Windows Azure diagnostics service runs side-by-side with your role instance and collects diagnostics data as dictated by the configuration. The diagnostics service saves the data to your Windows Azure storage service if it is configured to do so. The diagnostics service can also be communicated with remotely from on-premise apps (a good example of [...]