Azure Support

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 PHP [...]

A major impediment to Windows Azure’s adoption is the lack of tools to assist developers and admins, for example – DBA’s have to jump through hoops to back up a SQL Azure database as there are no backups tools are SQL Azure doesn’t yet have a native backup facility. Over the past few months there [...]

SQL Azure Database Service Update 1 has just gone live with several improvements to SQL Azure. Most importantly it is now possible to programatically move between the 1GB and 10GB SQL Azure editions (previously users were forced to do a migration!). This can be done using the following syntax: ALTER DATABASE database_name { MODIFY (MAXSIZE [...]

Microsoft just announced the Beta availability of  Windows Azure Drive. Azure Drive joins the exiting storage lineup of blobs, tables and queues and is likely to be the last storage category to be introduced in 2010. Azure Drive is primarily intended for developers migrating existing apps to Azure. Drive storage uses  the standard Windows NTFS [...]

At PDC Matt Mullenweg demonstrated an self hosted WordPress install running on Azure. Seemed very strange to see on of the nets largest LAMP apps running on Azure. Microsoft has made big leaps in the past few years with running PHP and even MySQL on IIS. The WordPress installation Mullenweg demonstrated was running on Apache, [...]

At PDC Microsoft announced the CTP of  ‘Dallas‘  which is essentially a marketplace for data. Data vendors can use Dallas to market their datasets and developers can explore and purchase datasets to integrate into their applications. Dallas is on the PinPoint platform which is a broad marketplace for Windows technology vendors. Dallas is based on [...]

Microsoft saves its big announcements for Azure till its PDC conference, so what did we get at PDC 2010? The biggie was SQL Azure Reporting, this was a major announcement and a much requested feature for SQL Azure. In the demonstrations the compatibility with the SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services looked very good – [...]