Here is a great post by Mike Wood over on simple talk about Windows Azure Service Bus Brokered Messaging.
Enjoy!
Tag: Windows Azure
Windows Azure Web Sites: How Application Strings and Connection Strings Work
Great article on how Windows Azure Web Sites: How Application Strings and Connection Strings Work.
Windows Azure Web Sites has a handy capability whereby developers can store key-value string pairs in Azure as part of the configuration information associated with a website. At runtime, Windows Azure Web Sites automatically retrieves these values for you and makes them available to code running in your website. Developers can store plain vanilla key-value pairs as well as key-value pairs that will be used as connection strings.
Since the key-value pairs are stored behind the scenes in the Windows Azure Web Sites configuration store, the key-value pairs don’t need to be stored in the file content of your web application. From a security perspective that is a nice side benefit since sensitive information such as Sql connection strings with passwords never show up as cleartext in a web.config or php.ini file.
Enjoy!
What Windows 8 Developers Should Know About The Cloud
Great post by Bruno Terkaly on What Windows 8 Developers Should Know About The Cloud.
- Client-side developers do need to embrace the cloud. The increasing popularity of connected devices like tablet computers and smartphones is having a direct effect on the adoption rate of personal cloud services. You can expect both connected devices and cloud services to grow together.
- This trend has been accelerating over the past couple of years. Mobile and portable devices have limited internal storage and rely heavily on cloud services.
Enjoy!
Windows Azure Mobile Services – Backend for Your Windows 8, iOS, and Android Apps
Mobile app developers don’t need to care about servers and clouds, push notification services and databases. Windows Azure Mobile Services is a cloud-based offering that provides a complete backend for mobile apps including data access and push notifications, enabling you to focus on the mobile app infrastructure and code and forget about the server management intricacies. In this talk we’ll build a backend for a Windows 8 app, an iOS app, and an Android app — all accessing the same data store and server-side triggers.
Video: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/WindowsAzure/AzureConf2012/B01
References
WebsiteSpark Members Now Have Access To Windows Azure Benefits
Microsoft’s WebsiteSpark program has been updated to now include Windows Azure benefits. If you’re a member of this program then you should have or will be receiving an email to update your account.
You will need to login to your WebsiteSpark account and then click to update your account to include the new Windows Azure benefits.
Here is what is included…
WebsiteSpark members can now get up to $1400 in annual Windows Azure resources to design, develop and deploy their site in the cloud. You will also get to keep at no charge, an Expression Web license upon completion of the 3 year program.
Here is additional information about the WebsiteSpark Azure Offer Details:
In order to take advantage of these additional program benefits, you will need to do this prior to 12/18/2012.
Exploring Windows Azure
If you don’t already know what Windows Azure is, then it’s Microsoft’s public cloud.
Microsoft’s Windows Azure is flexible, open and rock solid. Windows Azure allows you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any OS, Language, Database or Tool and it has a 99.95% monthly SLA.
One of the new features I noticed is FREE Web Sites. It allows you to start for free and scale as you go.
When they say open, they have greatly expanded the development languages, framework and tools available, all of which are open source and available on github. Cool!
There are also changes in what servers you can use. Apart from Windows, you can now also install Linux as well in virtual machines.
Azure is really transforming into a cloud that isn’t just limited to the Microsoft technology stack, not that there is nothing wrong with that. I love Microsoft technologies, but I think Microsoft make a smart decision to open up and allows Linux, mySql and other languages to be used.
Speaking of languages, there is now support for 5 major languages and then some.
Languages
Developer Features
Data Storage
- Blob Service
- Table Service
- SQL Database
- SQL Reporting
- Hadoop
Messaging and Integration
- Service Bus Queues
- Service Bus Topics
- Queue Service
- Service Bus Relay
Additional Features
- Caching (AppFabric)
- Access Control
- Diagnostics
- Autoscaling
- Media Services
- SendGrid Email Service
- Twilio
Free Trial
With the free trial you can…
- Quickly deploy websites to a highly scalable cloud environment
- Easily deploy and manage virtual machines running Windows Server and Linux
- Create highly scalable applications in a rich PaaS environment
- Create, manage and distribute media in the cloud
The free trial contains:
| compute | 750 small compute hours per month |
| web sites | 10 shared web sites |
| relational database | 1 GB SQL database instance |
| storage | 20 GB with 1,000,000 storage transactions |
| bandwidth | unlimited inbound and 20 GB outbound |
There is a lot that can be done with Windows Azure and the only way to know if it’s right for you and your organization is to give it a try and see what you think.
Get started now:
The Flying Maverick 