Azure Support

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 [...]

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 – [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]