http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-renames-azure-services – article talks about MS renaming services and essentially dropping the ‘Windows…’ out of it.

My experience has seen this will appeal to the non-MS types that see ‘Windows…’ as something they don’t want to go near.
I personally think it’s a good move as sure it’s Windows but the Azure Platform offers so much more…..

Here’s some of the proposed changes….

LIVE Meeting: Managing Windows Azure Applications

Event ID: 1032500972

LIVE Meeting: Ten Must-Have Tools for Windows Azure

Event ID: 1032500970

Local MS Developer pillar Andrew Coates spilled the beans on this next new language to come out of MS Research.

Db.NET or ‘D flat’ – F#, C# and the Cinderella of the 3 sisters ‘VB.NET’
(Last year I was introduced to F# over a 5 month project and absolutely loved the simplicity and freshness of it – async was simple, tasks, functions and code that would normally take 400 lines in C#, we were able to do in 100 in F#)

It promises:

- speed

- optimisation (I wonder if it’ll be smart enough to run tasks on different CPU cores?)

There is a focus on Orchestration – data Orchestration found here http://thenextlanguage.net/a-focus-on-orchestration/

Where it talks about “An example of the close collaboration between the product team and the company’s research arm is the use of Schenkerian Analysis in the compiler to maximize orchestration between sections of the code.”

Oooh I thought – let’s check out what this is Schenkerian Analysis and a quick check of Wikipedia reveals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenkerian_analysis

“Schenkerian analysis is a method of musical analysis of tonal music based on the theories of Heinrich Schenker. The goal of a Schenkerian analysis is to interpret the underlying structure of a tonal work. The theory's basic tenets can be viewed as a way of defining tonality in music. A Schenkerian analysis of a passage of music shows hierarchical relationships among its pitches, and draws conclusions about the structure of the passage from this hierarchy. The analysis is demonstrated through reductions of the music, using a specialized symbolic form of musical notation that Schenker devised to demonstrate various prolongational techniques. The concept of tonal prolongation, in which certain pitches determine the goal of other, subordinate pitches, is a cornerstone of the pitch hierarchy that Schenkerian analysis involves itself with.”

So tones, pitches and music is where this algorithm has its roots…I can see how you could take this analysis when applied to the frequency of music and apply it to the frequency of code items; data being hit etc.

I’ll crack open this VS.2011 extension and see what transpires…

Grab the TOOLS here - http://thenextlanguage.net/tools/

Should be an interesting month this April - http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/337290/australia_gets_azure_cloud_april/

Let’s see what the pricing will be… be great to handle alot of those data sovereignty issues.

It’s like waiting for Santa all over again

Pretty quick and Win8 is looking pretty slick.

It found all my drivers and in about 15 mins I was up and running.

Let’s see how we go over the next couple of weeks

I’m finally back home after a great trip to Seattle and to see some fellow VTSPs from all over the globe. Very switched on bunch.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to present and with Scotty at the demo controls, we steered a pretty good session.

Thanks to ‘all y-all’ whom was in the session and I hope you got as much out of it as I did.

Grab the Public Version of the slide Deck – HERE.

So as promised on the advice of John Brockmeyer here’s some current limitations of the Azure ‘Integration’ Services.

Easy but effective

<script type='text/javascript'>
var msg = "your big title goes here…";
msg = " ..... " + msg;pos = 0;
function scrollTitle() {
document.title = msg.substring(pos, msg.length) + msg.substring(0, pos); pos++;
if (pos > msg.length) pos = 0
window.setTimeout("scrollTitle()",300);
}
scrollTitle();
</script>

Folks I’ve decided to list some useful links and tips that I’ve come across as part of our work we do. This list will grow and expand as time goes on.

• Design/Pre Work
• Azure Naming conventions for Services, Containers, Blobs, Metadata,    Naming and Registry
• Hosted Service Names are < 63 chars (previously there was a bug with service names over 24 chars and not being able to rdp, not sure if this is fixed)
• Azure Icons for use in Visio and the like - http://davidpallmann.blogspot.com.au/2011/07/windows-azure-design-patterns-part-1.html (thanks David)
• SSL Connections terminate at the webroles
  
•  Admin/Subscriptions
• Currently each Role size has a minimum of 1.6GHz CPU
• Environment variables available in Windows Azure (well done Toddy)
• Hard limit of 20 storage accounts per subscriptions max – most will show smaller e.g. 5 or 8
• Troubleshooting Best Practice for Developing Windows Azure Applications WhitePaper
• Encrypting Connection Strings - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlazure/archive/2010/09/07/10058942.aspx
  
• Roles
• Role Architecture – great explanation
• Detecting whether you’re running in STAGING or PROD – it’s all in the deployment id.
• Worker Role - WaWorkerHost.exe – is the Windows Azure Worker Process
  
• Azure Storage
• HTTP Headers to use on Blob Services - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dd179371.aspx
• HTTP Commands on Blob Services - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dd135731.aspx
  
• SQL Azure
• Cloud Numerics – allows analytics to be performed in Azure using extended .NET libraries - here.
• Cloud Numerics Blog
  
• Azure Service Bus
• Creating new service identities – SBAzTool in Windows Azure Service Bus v1.5 SDK
• Service Bus is implemented on top of SQL Azure.
  
• WCF
• Turn on WCF Tracing – Azure World
  
• Monitoring
• External Party - http://www.paraleap.com/AzureWatch

While currently setting up a BizTalk 2010 developer machine, I’ve got to do a couple of others to do also for the team.

I figured ‘we surely can copy/clone this’ – here’s a handy link for SysPrep and we use files from the BizTalk SDK to work the magic.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee358636.aspx

Looking forward to it.

Enjoy.

Folks, here’s a great page showing which Azure OS and SDK applies to what version.

One to keep handy – get prepared for a v1.7 SDK release

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee924680.aspx

Hey guys,

Breeze is looking for some keen .NET Developers who have some SharePoint (2007/2010) experience and would like to accelerate their development accessing the latest technologies.

If that sounds like you please visit www.breeze.net/about/jobs.aspx, we’d love to hear from you.

Keep smiling,

Mick.

You know it’s a Friday when…who can spot the ‘yes/no/cancel’ buttons?