Azure Support » News

AppFabric Access Control Service Adds Support for OpenID, FaceBook, LiveID, Google ID

azuresupport — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 16:54:45 +0000

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 WRAP, WS-Trust, and WS-Federation protocols

Integrated and customizable Home Realm Discovery which allows end-users to choose their identity provider

OData-based Management Service which provides programmatic access to ACS configuration

Web Portal for administrative access to the ACS configuration

The update is available now in in the AppFabric LABS environment.

Azure Announcements at Mix 2010 [News]

azuresupport — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:56:12 +0000

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 due to be built into Sharepoint and Office. More details here
50GB database (available from June) , the previous limit was 10GB. Of more interest would have been smaller databases under the current 1GB smallest size.
Multiple Active Row Sets (MARS) support – this is a SQL Server feature available since 2005 which allows a user to run several SQL batches on an open connection at the same time.
SQL Azure Spatial Data support – allows SQL Azure to using map and query based on geographic variables. This is due in June but no news on how rich the support for spatial data will be.

PHP Command-Line Deployment Tool For Azure Introduced [News]

azuresupport — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:06:51 +0000

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 apps on Azure.

The project is on CodePlex here

Azure Tools Start to Arrive [News]

azuresupport — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:25:55 +0000

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 has been a slow but steady trickle of new tools coming to the market. On the SQL Azure front, Embarcadero’s dbArtisan for SQL Azure was released late 2009 and provides some basic functionality for working with SQL Azure databases (object management and editing) as well as some migration utilities. RedGate announced a beta for Azure enabled versions of both their SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare tools (details here). In should be noted that with SQL Server 2008 R2 many of the deficiencies of using SSMS to connect to SQL Azure databases (such as database objects not being visible) have been fixed and SSMS is now a useful tool for managing SQL Azure databases.

There are numerous open source and paid apps to interact with Azure storage such as Cerebrata’s Cloud Storage Studio or the Codeplex project Azure Storage Explorer .

For Windows Azure monitoring and diagnostics Cerebrata has announced a beta of Azure Diagnostics Manager which is a desktop WPF app which monitors event logs and as well as various performance metrics such as processor utilization etc.

With Mix just around the corner there should be some feature announcements from Microsoft at least (SQL Azure backup?) which will hopefully plug some of the gaps in the Azure platform.

SQL Azure Update – Ability to Move Between SQL Azure Editions Added [News]

azuresupport — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:48:03 +0000

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 = {1 | 10} GB)

}

Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) have also been added for health and performance monitoring.

In addition, Database Service Update 1 reduces some of the throttling limits – idle connections are now terminated after 30 minutes instead of 5 minutes and long running transactions can be run for longer (but no news on the exact threshold although it will be longer than the previous 5 minutes).

Windows Azure Drive Beta Launched [News]

azuresupport — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:58:58 +0000

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 API’s to access a durable drive, applications using these API’s can therefore be migrated to Windows Azure with minimal modification to the storage read/write code.

See the full announcement for more details.

[News] WordPress demo working on Azure

azuresupport — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:21:54 +0000

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, MySQL, and PHP. Whilst Mullenweg said there were no plans to move WordPress.com (the hosted WordPress service) to Azure he did say the they were testing Azure for blob storage.

Read Matt’s post on this demo here .

[News] Dallas Announced

azuresupport — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:51:02 +0000

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 REST and developers can use proxy C# proxy classes to interrogate the datasets.

Currently available datasets available through Dallas are the Associated Press, Citysearch, DATA.gov, infoUSA.com, NASA, National Geographic, the United Nations, and Weather Central.

SQL Azure Announcements at PDC 2010

azuresupport — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:41:31 +0000

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 – simply drag a report onto the design surface in an ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC Web Role and the deploy it to Azure and then the report will be visible on the web page. SQL Azure Reporting is currently in CTP and will only be available per invite later in 2010.

SQL Azure Data Sync CTP 2 was announced with the major new feature being the ability to sync different SQL Azure databases. You can sign up for the Data Sync and Reporting CTPs here

Project Houston which is an online tool for managing an querying SQL Azure databases is now named Database Manager for SQL Azure. This is essentially a lightweight and online version of SSMS and addresses some of the weaknesses of the quite frankly under-powered Azure developer portal.