Entries tagged with windows azure - Channel 9

PDC09: Tour of Azure IT PAC

Jim O'Neil — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:09:00 GMT

One of the highlights of the Big Room floor at PDC 09 was an Azure IT PAC (Pre-assembled container), the unit of deployment within the Azure Data Centers. This particular model is the newest, Generation 4, and built to be deployed outside (versus the indoor models used in the Chicago and San Antonio facilities). The unit on the PDC floor was (of course) a prototype - it's 20 feet long versus the 40-foot standard, and has more glass for viewing than a real unit would have. Regardless, it really made the 'cloud' seem that much more concrete for me!

ARCast.TV - Cloud Computing is for Small Companies Too

Bob Familiar — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:03:00 GMT

Cloud Computing is often presented as an esoteric technology that is only interesting to large companies. In point of fact, small- and medium-sized companies will find the economics and technology opportunities very compelling. Shy Cohen and Michael Stiefel discuss why this is so, and why small- and medium-sized companies should look for opportunities in the cloud computing area.

Using Windows Azure storage from Ruby

Jean-Christophe Cimetiere — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:38:00 GMT

Johnny Halife, Partner Architect from Southworks started a few months ago a project aiming at providing a Windows Azure SDK for Ruby developers.

Still in beta, the SDK puts the Window Azure storage features ( table, storage & queues) very close to ruby developer.

Johnny was at PDC09, so we took the opportunity to talk and asked him to tell us more about this project and show a quick demo.

Additional links:

Johnny Halife’s blog: http://blogs.southworks.net/jhalife/
Download page for the Windows Azure SDK for Ruby: http://github.com/johnnyhalife/waz-storage
Project Documentation: http://waz-storage.heroku.com/rdoc/index.html
Windows Azure interoperability: www.windowsazure.com/interoperability
Interoperability Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/interoperability/

Windows Azure platform AppFabric SDK for PHP developers

Jean-Christophe Cimetiere — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:44:00 GMT

The Windows Azure platform AppFabric (formerly called .NET Services) SDK for PHP is the third in a series, the first of which was released a year ago. Equivalent SDKs for Java and Ruby are also available and they have been updated to reflect the latest version of the AppFabric.

The AppFabric SDK for PHP is an open source project developed by Persistent Systems Ltd. and is available today on Codeplex: http://dotnetservicesphp.codeplex.com/. Microsoft is providing funding and architectural guidance for this project.

Sumit Chawla, Technical PM/Architect from the Microsoft Interoperability Team gives more details about the scenarios and present a quick demo of the SDK in action with a sample PHP application.

Additional ressources:

GalaxyZoo: Citizen Science for Classifying Galaxies

Charles — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:34:00 GMT

Mike Taulty interviews Chris Lintott and Arfon Smith about the GalaxyZoo project. GalaxyZoo, hosted on GalaxyZoo.org, invites individuals to participate in Citizen Science and provides an easy to use interface for classifying galaxies.

Chris talks about the Galaxy Zoo and Citizen Science, followed by Arfon talking about the platform behind the project, and it’s migration from Rails/MySQL on Amazon to Windows Azure/SQL Azure.

Manuvir Das: Windows Azure One Year Later

Charles — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:47:00 GMT

Manuvir Das discusses the current state of Windows Azure. The last time we spoke was at last year's PDC when we announced Azure to the world. Here, we dig into hat's new today with Azure. How have people used Azure over the past year? What worked? What didn't work? Tune in. It's always great to chat with Manuvir and there's a lot of great info in this conversation.

Building on Azure: Siemens

Charles — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:30:00 GMT

Siemens, a Microsoft Partner, is using Azure for a remote service use case. By using Azure, Siemens doesn’t need to create a new IT department to manage clusters all over the world: Azure spins up the instances. This allows Siemens to only worry about computation, and Microsoft addresses the hardware, people, and IT costs. Gerald Kaefer, Siemens Architect, explains...

How Azure is being used in the real world - Azure Deep Dives

David Gristwood — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:31:00 GMT

Microsoft runs occasional Azure Deep Dive events, with a small numbers of customers and partners, to help accelerate their progress building real world solutions on the Azure Platform, and providing feedback to the product team. This video looks behind the scenes at one of these 5 day Azure Deep Dives, meets the Microsoft folk mentoring the sessions, and the customers and partners building their solutions.

Check out the video to see:

- The features in the Azure Platform that early adopters are finding most compelling

- The emerging architectural patterns being used, such as the use of queues for durable messaging

- Discussion of recently released features for Windows Azure, and some hints for new features being announced at the PDC

- Real customer and partner solutions that are being built on the Azure Platform.

C9 Conversations: Yousef Khalidi on Cloud Computing

Charles — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:46:00 GMT

Yousef Khalidi is a Distinguished Engineer with a rich history in both operating system design and distributed computing. Yousef is responsible for the overall design of Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud operating system (which includes the Azure development platform in addition to the "OS", aka Windows Azure). Windows Azure is an operating system in the sense that it supplies a host of core services, process scheduling and management, identity management, etc, that we typically expect from a general purpose operating system.

In this first installment of C9 Conversations (we sit down with various Microsoft technical leaders to discuss a wide range of topics related to general purpose computing; all in high quality video and audio (big thanks to Tina Summerford for producing this new series)), the topic is cloud computing. What is it, exactly? Why does it matter? What are the challenges involved in taking software to the cloud? What does that mean, exactly? Is Windows Azure an operating system by analogy? What is Windows Azure, exactly? And more..

Yousef will be presenting his ideas on cloud computing and its future at PDC09 as part of the Technical Leaders track. Make sure to attend his talk if you're interested in how Microsoft thinks about the future of cloud computing.

MSDN Flash Podcast 011 – Steve Marx on Windows Azure

Eric Nelson — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:36:00 GMT

Also known as “that’s where I left my shoe” (you will need to listen to understand that)

This is a bonus edition of the podcast recorded on the 6th of October in London with Steve Marx, Technical Strategist working on Windows Azure.

It starts slow and a little quiet, it needed a few edits (deletes!) as we battled with “what is still not public” but picks up to be a pretty useful look at the improvements we have made to Windows Azure over the last few months with a specific focus on storage.

Topics covered include:

Entity Group Transactions
StorageClient library
Queues
Blobs and Shared Access Signatures/Blob Container Access Policies
Communication between nodes without queues
Logging

Show Links:

Follow me or my team on twitter.

Hands on with SQL Azure (CTP 2)

David Gristwood — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:37:00 GMT

With the release of the second CTP (Community Tech Preview) of SQL Azure, many developers are starting to get to get to grips with SQL Azure. However, quite a few aren’t aware that many SQL Server features will also work against data stored in the cloud, in SQL Azure. In this video, David Gristwood and Keith Burns discuss these features, as Keith demos SQL Server Integration Services, Reporting Services, and BCP in action.

ISV Offers Cloud Solution to 1+ Million Teachers via Azure and Win 7

Abe Pachikara — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:26:00 GMT

How do you leapfrog from antiquated teaching tools to those of tomorrow and do so at 1/5^th normal costs while fighting poverty and illiteracy?

Learn how using cloud computing, Win 7 and an orchestration of software is enabling a cutting edge solution delivered from the US, via Windows Azure, into Nigeria and other emerging markets. Plus, it has the cost savings and technical chops that many orgs in the US would find relevant, particularly in today's economy.

Danny Kim, CTO of FullArmor discusses the problem he faced, how and why he chose Azure and the benefits that surprised him in terms of low cost, headaches avoided and agility gained.

ARCast.TV Special - Michael Stiefel on Software as a Service in the Cloud

Bob Familiar — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:33:00 GMT

The Architecture Innovation Cafe presents Michael Stiefel on Software as a Service in the Cloud - Architecting and building a Software as a Service application requires solving a series of problems that are independent of a particular software platform. Michael discusses three areas of focus for designing and building services so that you can leverage your work into new platforms such as Windows Azure.

Developing Windows Azure applications for PHP, Ruby, and Java, using Eclipse

Robert Hess — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:57:00 GMT

In our previous episode, Vijay Rajagopalan shared with us some of the details about a session he did at MIX09 which showed how Microsoft was providing support for building Silverlight applications using Eclipse on either Windows or even on other platforms as well.

In today’s episode Vijay shares with us the details regarding some new interoperability support which will similarly allow PHP developers to use the Eclipse IDE to develop for and deploy to Windows Azure, and provide Java developers with a new Windows Azure SDK, making their life much easier when they use Windows Azure storage services in particular. He’ll also describe how Microsoft is working to make sure that Eclipse itself is a great Windows 7 application and how it will enable developers to write applications which can take full advantage of special Windows 7 features.

And you can find more information about these interoperability tools here:

msdn tv - Nachrichten für Entwickler (Ausgabe vom 21.10.2009)

Jan Schenk — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:08:00 GMT

Zum Windows 7 Launch heute ein Interview mit den beiden Windows Product Marketing Managern Ben Basaric und Thorsten Stockmann. Sie berichten über Produktfeatures, die vielfältigen Aktivitäten im Vorfeld der Markteinführung und über ihre größten Laster: das sind die, von denen in diesen Tagen palettenweise das neue Betriebssystem wegverkauft wird.
In den Kurznachrichten News zur Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, zur Versionskontrolle mit dem “Visual Source Safe”-Nachfolger Team Foundation Server Basic Installation, zu neuen SharePoint-Tutorials bei “MSDN Solve”, einem MSDN-Gewinnspiel rund um Windows Azure und zur Windows Azure Premiere beim Cloud Launch Day 2009 im November.
Zum Schluss noch ein Hinweis für Cineasten: unser Interviewpartner Ben Basaric ist auch Akteur in vier Aufsehen erregenden LowCost-Werbevideos „Wir lieben Windows 7“, die es in den Geschmacksrichtungen Ei, Käse, Gemüse und Villarriba auf www.youtube.com zu sehen gibt.

msdn tv verkörpert ein neues Video-Nachrichtenformat, und hat seinen Ursprung auf MSDN Online (http://www.msdn-online.de/msdntv/). Alle zwei Wochen präsentiert Ihnen Jan Schenk, Developer Evangelist mit Hut, die wichtigsten Neuigkeiten für Entwickler, Hintergrundberichte und Interviews zu aktuellen Technologien sowie Highlights von Messen und Konferenzen. Das ganze kompakt, in weniger als 15 Minuten erfrischend jung verpackt , und sowohl als Download für Ihren Rechner oder im Online-Player per Streaming.

msdn tv is a German-speaking new and innovative video news series, and has originally been featured exclusively on the German MSDN Online Platform (http://www.msdn-online.de/msdntv/). Hatted Developer Evangelist Jan Schenk biweekly presents latest news for developers, background-stories and interviews concerning current and upcoming technologies, as well as video-highlights from fairs and conferences. Packed into less than 15 minutes, these news videos feature a fresh informative style, and are downloadable as well as available per streaming online player.

SI WMP Handles Client Need in 10 Days Using Azure

Abe Pachikara — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:07:00 GMT

Frank Campise speaks with Erik Brown, tech lead at West Monroe Partners (WMP). The client need: “provide an interactive map for the Taste of Chicago in 10 calendar days." Designed, tested, provisioned and deployed. The event gets approximately 3 million attendees so it was possible to get 2,000 to 50,000 hits in a day.

They chose Windows Azure, so they could focus their precious time on the solution for the City of Chicago client. As a result, WMP: delivered a richer solution than anticipated within the 10 day deadline; had peace of mind that the infrastructure solution will “work” regardless the traffic they get.

After the video, read the full case study and then dive into Azure:

· Get a free CTP account

· Download the fab training kit

· Look thru the latest whitepapers

David Chappell in conversation about Windows Azure and the cloud

David Gristwood — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:17:00 GMT

“If I ruled the world”, says David Chappell, “I would make the phrase ‘private cloud’ illegal”. In conversation with David Gristwood, David Chappell, during his recent world tour, discusses Windows Azure, its importance and role in the partner ecosystem, and other cloud players, such as Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com, VMware and more.

Eduify Head of Marketing Speaks About Choosing Azure

Abe Pachikara — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 23:39:00 GMT

Anand Iyer speaks with Dan Merritts from startup Eduify about the criteria used to choose a cloud computing provider and why they ultimately chose Windows Azure. See a demo of their product and hear how well Azure is meeting Eduify's expectations.

Being a startup, Eduify was keen on using cloud computing to help preserve its cash position. They evaluated options based on time-to-market, the management requirements placed upon their internal teams, and the ability to integrate existing capabilties via service bus (to tap properties important to their customers such as Facebook Connect and Live Messenger).

After the video, dive into Azure: get a free CTP account, download the fab training kit and look thru the latest whitepapers.

MSDN TV - Från lokalt till molnet

Johan Lindfors — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:16:00 GMT

Under Microsoft summit passade jag på att visa hur enkelt det kan vara att flytta en lokalt exekverande applikation till molnet. Först genom att istället för en lokal databas, peka om applikationen till en databas i molnet, sedan flytta hela ASP.NET MVC projektet till Windows Azure. Här är en inspelning av demot för dig som inte hade möjlighet att vara där.

ARCast.TV - Clemens Vasters on Architecture Implications of the Internet Service Bus

Bob Familiar — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:40:00 GMT

Companies need infrastructure to integrate services for internal enterprise systems, services running at business partners, and systems accessible on the public Internet. And companies need be able to start small and scale rapidly. Joe Shirey talks to Clemens Vasters, senior program manager on the Windows Azure team, about the architectural implications of the Internet Services Bus and .NET Services.

Introducing Simple API for Cloud Application Services

Jean-Christophe Cimetiere — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:21:00 GMT

Zend Technologies today launched the Simple API for Cloud Application Services project , “a new open source initiative that allows developers to use common application services in the cloud, while enabling them to unlock value-added features available from individual providers.”
The initial goal of the project is to provide a set of programming interfaces for PHP developers to facilitate the development of applications that have basic cloud storage needs.

Vijay Rajagopalan, Principal Architect, from the Interoperability Technical Strategy team at Microsoft gives an overview of the Simple API for Cloud Application Services and details the initial contribution from Microsoft.

Related links:

Simple API for Cloud project site www.simplecloud.org.
Blog post: Microsoft, Zend and others announce Simple API for Cloud Application Services
July CTP of Windows Azure for PHP Released and support in Zend Framework
Windows Azure SDK for PHP

Windows Azure Developer Contest Winners

Paul Sanford — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:33:00 GMT

Learn how Laith Yousif created his winning Windows Azure application!

George Moore: Windows Azure Business Model for Developers - An Introduction

Charles — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:03:00 GMT

21 year Microsoft veteran and Software Architect George Moore is involved in defining and implementing an effective strategy for taking Windows Azure from technology preview to enterprise business ready. Specifically, George is responsible for all integration of all Azure services (Windows Azure, SQL Azure, .NET Services) to other systems at Microsoft. This includes the billing system integration across all Azure services, the business owner portal, and the developer portal for all Azure services.

Here, we get to know a bit more about the thinking behind the commercialization of Windows Azure (which you will learn more about in great detail at PDC 09). We also learn more about George and his 21 years at the company. He's been a part of some very interesting and innovative technologies over the years not the least of which is the CCR (he led the team that created it).

Tune in. This is classic C9. Human. Insightful. Unscripted.

Enjoy

Deploying Applications on Windows Azure

Ryan Dunn — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:55:00 GMT

Windows Azure features a very powerful, yet simple deployment model. By focusing on your application and abstracting away the infrastructure details, you can deploy almost any app with minimal fuss.

Watch me show you how easy this is by using a cool list sharing and management application we built called 'myTODO'. You can download the source for the app as well.

Related Videos

What is Windows Azure?
Windows Azure Storage Overview

Related Demos

Deploying Windows Azure Services

Chris Auld - PDC09 Architecting and Developing for Windows Azure

Robert Hess — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:05:00 GMT

At the PDC, we typically have some additional "pre conference" workshops which provide very indepth and hands on access to a few select technologies. Chris Auld, Director of Strategy for Intergen, is preparing a workshop that will be diving deep into the capabilities of Windows Azure. In this episode of The Knowledge Chamber, he shares with me some of the details off what he is planning on covering and why he is so excited about Windows Azure.

You can find more details about this workshop on the PDC09 website here:

Architecting and Developing for Windows Azure

Since Chris is still working on the content, you have a chance to let him know things that you'd specifically like to see featured. If you're planning on attending his workshop, please drop a note in the comments and let him know what you'd like to see.