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One of the most common complains about Azure roles is the time it takes to spin out a new role. When thinking about it, creating a new role has two stages: 1. Create a new VM with Windows Server 2008 installed 2. Install your application on it. The long part is the first one but the interesting part is the second. So why not spilt the two? Web-Deploy allow us to do exactly that. We create an empty web role (with the OS only) and then inject our site to it. Windows Azure Accelerator For Web...
If you are using SQL Management Studio to connect to your SQL Azure database you have to install the new version of the management studio. You can find it here . The reason is that major updates were done to the SQL Azure engine and the version number was incremented. If you do not upgrade you can expect errors in connectivity. Some of the immediate upgrades we can see is the support for co-administrator that will enable customers to specify multiple database administrators. Another important update...
One of the major missing parts in windows azure was the support for workflow. You could install a workflow on a web role but when multiple instances of the web role try to persist and load the same workflow instance an exception is thrown. Workflow was designed to run by a single host that persist its state to a single database. This concept does not fit to the cloud that uses multiple computing instances by design. Azure AppFabric provides the solution. A whole new host was developed especially...
As I wrote in my last post AppFabric is about to release a whole new exciting set of important capabilities. Windows azure AppFabric will be the new generation of middle-tier infrastructure. Well it is here. The CTP was released. This CTP release consists: (from the team blog) AppFabric Developer Tools - Enhancements to Visual Studio that enable to visually design and build end-to-end applications on the Windows Azure platform. AppFabric Application Manager – Powerful, yet easy way to host and manage...
Building, deploying and managing composite applications is a complex challenge. Such applications involve a large number of middleware infrastructures, each with its own configuration, management and development tools, runtime, and programming models. Developers as well as IT professionals have to put all the pieces together before the application can run. Windows Azure AppFabric provides the infrastructure and tools to unify these pieces so developers can build the application in a consistent way...
Last week the Windows Azure SDK 1.4.1 refresh was released. (SDK 1.4.1) The most important improvement is the support for web deploy . It was possible to execute web deploy in previous versions of the SDK but it was not easy. Andy Cross explains how easy it is to use web deploy with the new SDK in the following post . Installing the new SDK is a bit tricky. I recommend uninstalling the previous SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio and reinstalling everything using the web installer...
My friend Alik Levin who works in the identity group pointed me to a list videos containing detailed demos of the Access Control Service. WCF web service that uses ACS with WIF. Securing WCF Services with ACS Web site that uses ACS (with and without WIF) Securing Web Applications with ACS Delegation with ACS. Code Sample: OAuth 2.0 Delegation Integration with ADFS 2.0 How To: Configure AD FS 2.0 as an Identity Provider Integration with OpenID How To: Use Management Service to Configure an OpenID...
Enterprise Library provides many important applications blocks that can be used to simply the implementation of infrastructure most applications need. One of the most popular application block is the logging application block. The logging application block implements a simple to use yet powerful logger. You can plug-in listeners that will store the logs in many different locations such as file , Event log, and a database. many applications use the flat file listener and leverage its simplicity. When...
I wrote a lot about claim based Identity and access control. One of the big challenges in claim based access control is the creation of the STS. Fortunately the Azure platform has an offering in this domain – ACS AppFabric ACS Access Control Service implements a full STS in the cloud. It is simple yet powerful. The team created great videos explaining ACS and their integration with WIF. Watch and start using ACS. Manu
Geo distribution should be a basic property of Windows Azure yet up until today we could deploy our hosted services to a single data center. So where is geo distribution? The new Traffic Manager CTP changes that. Now we can deploy our service to a number of data centers but expose a single endpoint to our customers. After all it is only a question of DNS. Traffic Manager knows where are the deployments of our service so it will rout our customer to the best deployment according to the policy we define...
The April 2011 version of the training kit for was released!!! download it here The changes from the previous version are: NEW: Authenticating Users in a Windows Phone 7 App via ACS, OData Services and Windows Azure HOL NEW: Windows Azure Traffic Manager HOL NEW: Introduction to SQL Azure Reporting Services HOL UPDATED: Connecting Apps with Windows Azure Connect HOL (updated for Windows Azure Connect refresh) UPDATED: Windows Azure CDN HOL (updated for the Windows Azure CDN refresh) UPDATED: Introduction...
Windows Azure is a new platform. Thus many decision makers think that developing application on Windows Azure is too risky. In this post I would like to challenge that. Windows Azure is an operating for the cloud. It means that Windows Azure deals with abstracting the cloud to your application and storing data in Microsoft's data centers. It has nothing to do with the application itself. From the application point of view I would like to argue that the application should never know on which platform...
Bookmark is a simple mechanism for asynchronous triggering provided by Workflow 4.0. In a NativeActivity we create a bookmark and wait. In the host ( WorkflowApplication ) we resume the bookmark and continue execution. I think that the mechanism is too simple. For example: What about timeouts? Well it is impossible to set a timeout and limit the time the workflow will wait on the bookmark. I found a solution by creation a custom activity which wraps the activity that owns the bookmark and use...
I upgraded my Visual Studio 2010 and installed the new SP1, but then I found that "Add STS Reference" is gone. The add-in is in place but it does not work. It took me some time to find the solution: Run the command: devenv /ResetAddin Microsoft.IdentityModel.Tools.VS.VSAddin.FederationAddin Now everything is back to normal. Hope this will help. Manu
Traditional applications runs on a single server and auditing concerns a single machine. (i.e. one OS the monitor etc.) Logging infrastructure often produce a log file which is written to that same machine. In the cloud things are different. Application running runs on a grid of machines. Every Windows Azure role has many instances. Each machine can continue to log its state like in the traditional case but to see the whole picture all the information from all the machines must be collected. This...
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