Microsoft announced today that the Caching service has been released as a production service. The Caching service is a distributed, in-memory, application cache service that accelerates the performance of Windows Azure and SQL Azure applications by allowing you to keep data in-memory and saving you the need to retrieve that data from storage or database. There are going to be 6 different cache size options for you to choose from, varying from 128MB to 4GB. The prices of the different cache sizes are the following: · 128 MB cache for $45.00/month · 256 MB...

Yesterday I presented a 200 level session on Windows Azure over Live Meeting. This was the first of a three part series of Live Meetings regarding Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform. The session covered all of the fundamentals of Cloud Computing, the different types of cloud computing services (IAAS, PAAS, SAAS), and then went on discussing the Windows Azure Platform taking a deeper look into the Windows Azure OS (Computation, Storage, Management) namely Windows Azure. For those of you that missed it there will be a recording available soon at www.techdays.gr. till then you can download...

Last week I had the chance to talk about strating up with SQL Azure on a Microsoft’s Developers Day event. The things I’ve talked about included: How to create your database on the cloud, querying data, migrating Databases to SQL Azure. Tips and Tricks: SQL Azure firewall through API, Managing connections, Logging sessionId's, Throttling and latency, Transactions, Supportability. Overall the event (I think) went great, people seemed excited about this new technology and had a lot of questions (which is always nice as it shows interest). For all of you that didn’t have the opportunity to come listen...

Watching Vittorio Bertocci's Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) introductory talk at PDC as well as the recording of the excellent talk Microsoft Architect Hervey Wilson gave on this subject at PDC09 brought back wonderful memories of long discussions (and arguments ;-)) I had with Stelios, Manolis, Dimos and Stavros back when I was working at DOL, on Federated identity and Microsoft’s offerings on that area. To be honest I skimmed through Hervey's session rather too quickly, got a little confused, jumped over to Vittorio Bertocci’s session and then … gave up. I decided that I needed to look at the...

Are you intrigued with Cloud computing, are you considering Microsoft’s Windows Azure but don’t know whether this is going to actually save you money? Then visit Windows Azure ROI / TCO calculator and find out. After you agree to the terms, you’ll then have to fill in a one page questionnaire. The most important question is about the expected ‘growth profile’ of your application, i.e. steady, predictable or spiked growth, etc.   When you’re done with that you’ll be presented with a detailed cost estimate, which includes estimated costs for Windows Azure, SQL Azure, .NET Services and bandwidth costs. But that’s not all,...

Last week at Microsoft DevDays “Make Web not War” we had a rather passionate conversation on the features Microsoft’s cloud relational database engine (SQL Azure) offers today and how these are going to change the way we program today. In that direction I’m linking the page that Microsoft has put up in order to listen everyone's wishes on what features are the most important ones. So if you want to shape the future of SQL Azure, if you are passionate about Windows Azure and the SQL Azure relational database, then visit SQL Azure Feature Votting to vote...

If you’ve started playing around Microsoft Azure then you are probably going to appreciate this post ;-). I know I did. Kudos to Ryan Dunn On Tuesday an azure table Browser service was launched for developers at MyAzureStorage.com. The service was build using ASP.NET MVC on a rich AJAX interface.  and its goals are to provide developers an easy way to create, query, and manage their Windows Azure tables. with it you’ll be able to: ...

If you have already started playing around SQL Azure you will have probably stumbled on the limitation the SQL Management studio has. So I think you’ll find SQL Azure Explorer rather useful till Microsoft synchronizes its toolset with the Azure platform. SQL Azure Explorer is an addin for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 that will enable you to manage you SQL Azure Tables just live the Visual Studio Server explorer. Some of the main features right now is: SQL Azure Explorer which contains: ...

Ok you’ve developed your cloud application and you’re ready to publish it to Azure, wait a minute how are you going to upload your database to SQL Azure? Of course you just can’t do a backup – restore to the cloud so what are your options? Well actually there are two ways you could deploy a database to SQL Azure. With the first one you manually create your db schema installation script and run it using SQL Manager hopping that everything will work well (a lot of SQL features are just not there yet e.g. Multi Part Column...

A few weeks back Microsoft announced the first CTP of SQL Azure, its new cloud relational persistence offering. In this post I will show you how you can connect and query your SQL Azure DBs from your PC. There are two ways you can interact with SQL Azure, one is through the SQLCMD command line program and the other is through SQL Server Management studio. To connect to SQL Azure using the later, you need to follow these simple steps: Procure an activation code for SQL Azure (Since it is in CTP now). http://connect.microsoft.com ...