Azure Support

As at launch in January 2010  data on Azure is replicated three times in the Azure storage system, in addition the data is replicated across at least two geographic datacenters (although Microsoft did not provide any more details on the timing for replication across datacenters).

The Access Control service handles the validation of users of an Azure service. Developers can set up an Access Control for an Azure service and define the users that can access the service and what authorizations those users have.Users hitting the service will then seemlessly be channeled through the Access Control which will generate a [...]

The Service Bus is the Azure service for connecting different applications and services through Azure. Several application design patterns are possible using the Service Bus: Eventing – Notifying applications or devices of events and  passing instructions. At PDC an Azure ticketing application was demonstrated which allowed for physical tickets to be printed in several locations [...]

Data Sync is a set of tools and a run-time that lets you use SQL Azure as a backend. It is built on the Sync Framework and ADO.NET Sync Services and allows for on-premise databases to be synchronized with SQL Azure, alternatively you could create cache-mode clients which are only periodically synchronized with SQL Azure.

Azure is not a .NET only platform, the goal of Azure is to provide a cloud service which is agnostic to languages. Azure will support any language which is supported by Windows Server, in reality the supported for non-.NET languages and technologies will be stronger on Azure than Windows Server as Windows Server was tightly [...]

Dallas is an information services platform for distribution and consumption of data. The data could be real time data services, large unstructured datasets or any type of data. Data vendors can sign up to publish distribute their data on Dallas and developers can browse,discover and purchase the data on Dallas. Dallas is available as a [...]

So how do you know whether all the T-SQL syntaxes are working with SQL Azure? For the purpose of this example we will use the TSQL from the AdventureWorks database. Database First you need to create a database. You need to be logged in to the Master database to create a database. CREATE DATABASE AdventureWorks2008 [...]

Since the SQL Azure database services are in the cloud, you do not have to worry about high availability and scalability. SQL Azure will maintain a “Monthly Availability” of 99.9% during a calendar month. For example, you or your network administrators do not have to spend time on high availability which is taken care by [...]

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 [...]