Azure Support

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 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 [...]

SQL Azure is essentially a cut down version of SQL Server and so we would expect that migrating from SQL Server to SQL Azure should be a straightforward task. However, in the first release of SQL Azure, the scripts generated by SQL Server Management Studio will require some extra cleanup since not all the SQL [...]

Migrating existing ASP.NET sites to Azure is a process that right now must be performed manually (no sign yet of a migration tool).  The Azure Web Role is very similar to an ASP.NET web project but has some significant differences which unfortunately mean that a straight copy of the project won’t do the trick. It [...]

The Windows Azure Drive enables Windows Azure apps to use existing NTFS APIs for accessing a durable drive.   This can ease the pain in migrating  existing Windows apps to Windows Azure. Using Azure Drive, the app can read or write to a lettered drive letter (e.g., C:) which represents a durable NTFS volume.  This drive [...]

In a previous tutorial we showed how to create and receive a message from queue , we can now adding polling The MessageQueue class in StorageClient contains the polling inbuilt  infrastructure and delivers the message via eventing: mqObj.MessageReceived += new MessageReceivedEventHandler(mqObj_MessageReceived); mqObj.PollInterval = 1000; // poll interval in milliseconds mqObj.StartReceiving(); // starts polling The event [...]

This simple tutorial demonstrates how to create a message on a queue and receive that message: 1. Set up Authentication Details and Create a New Queue The below code adds the the storage authentication details, creates a queue storage object (which is the storage container that the Message Queues are placed in), then creates a [...]

Web cams allow users to view video streaming in a real time or get specific frames upon request. However, the cams can’t store video for a long time due to the resources required for storing video or photo collections. With this in mind, we decided to build the Enterra WebCam Viewer. Enterra WebCam Viewer – [...]

SQL Azure Continuous Backup is one the two main methods for backing up databases which run  on  SQL Azure. Continuous Backup enables developers to backup a database on a continuous basis – as in the backup will not function as a standalone database but must be restored to the original database (in contrast to the [...]

SQL Azure Clone Backup is one of the two primary methods for backing up SQL Azure databases. Clone Backup is promised coming in H2 2010 – although there have been no announcements to date. The clone will create a single (perhaps scheduled) snapshot of a database at a point in time. The other main method [...]