Comments

C'mon, how can we take Azure seriously as an "open platform" as long as it's tied exclusively to Windows? Unable to deploy from any other platform hardly qualifies as "open" in my book.

Hi. This is cool stuff, but Martin, is there currently a smooth way to deploy to Azure from a non-windows machine? The Eclipse-plugin seems to be dependent on the Windows-only Azure SDK.

Is there some development being done here so you could push Java apps from Git directly into a Cloud Service for instance? I know you can do this for Azure Web Sites.

Any information would be appreciated!

@Alladin: I'm thinking the same thing about XAML + WebCLR as a good replacement for HTML+JS.

Sooner or later we need to ditch the God-awful HTML standard and the God-awful EcmaScript mess that we're currently using as basis for client web applications. Come on, HTML 5 isn't a solution at all, it's simply a patch that's 10 years too late.

XAML as an open loyalty-free standard with some kind of open loyalty-free runtime would have been a great solution here. However, it cannot be Microsoft or another privately-held actor that holds it - it must be W3C or some other neutral consortium.

This is the most exciting new tech since C# and .NET came out! JavaScript is near useless for bigger projects, and with this it has suddenly transformed into a beauty.

@nickharris:

Thanks for the quick reply, Nick!
Cross-database is almost always a bad design anyway (schemas anyone?). SQL VMs is cool but they don't provide real high-availability out-of-the-box the way Azure SQL Databases do, you know.

Really exciting stuff! I'm especially interested in the updates on Azure SQL Databases. Does the new Linked server stuff mean that you can have cross-database queries inside Azure as well, or only from on-premise SQL Server?

In real-world cross-database queries are used without a second thought, and porting over to azure is hard when this is not enabled..

I have to admit that I got really excited about Windows Phone 8 - much more so than I thought that I would. I already have a WinPhone7 and it's kind of starting to wear off a bit - I got the first one out in the market.

Now I really really want the new Windows Phone 8!

I crave a new phone experience besides the ultra dull and boring iOS and Android ones. Windows Phone IS really a fresh breeze, too bad they came so late into the SmartPhone revolution.

Thanks for the great intro into the new features, Mark!
The azure story is really kicking it up a notch this time!! Can't wait to migrate my apps

@philjay: Thanks a lot! I'll quit my whining now

@WadeWegner: Hi, thanks a lot for the post - it describes the situation in details, just as I wanted to know. But simply saying that the article was so brilliant there's nothing more to say isn't an actual argument for not covering the news. It's rather a good argument for presenting the article, no?