azure

What is Windows Azure?

Announced today. Descriptions so far aren't super easy to wrap your mind around. Let's put together a good starting point for understanding Windows Azure. Strongly related to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/280037/what-is-a-cloud-os, but not enough to warrant closing. ...

Windows Azure for web developers vs Amazon EC2

I just watched the Windows Azure intro video and it left me feeling like it was a front end shell for hosted IIS instances. Can anyone who know more (possibily that was part of the beta) shed on why you would use this vs. EC2. it seemed easy enough but really didnt give specifics on how it works, why it works or why you would use this v...

To Azure or Not to Azure?

I don't know about you, but i'm rather excited by the newly developing 'Cloud' computing platform. In the past I have been rather hoo hum about it all, thinking it is going to be a passing fad. I'm developing a webservice at the moment, and I have had in the back of my mind the future scaling issues I will be facing. Being a small com...

What is a "Cloud OS"?

The term is getting 'hotter' with Microsoft Azure and Windows 7. What are the benefits + how does the status quo of desktop computing now change? Does the machine no longer need an OS installation (or a highly stripped down version of a typical OS)... what is needed to interact with the 'Cloud' ? Update: Received my first RTFM on SO to...

Is there a way to write to a memory stream, in a medium trust enviroment?

I am working working on the early release of Azure from Microsoft and am not able to write to a memory stream. Keep getting an exception. I fixed the issue by using a different technique to achieve my end goal, however I wanted to know if there is a way to do it. Given that Azure is a shared infrastructure I cannot change the security le...

What is a good pricing model for Windows Azure?

Windows Azure looks like a promising cloud platform. The big unknown right now is the pricing model. Microsoft says that they are still working on that, but it will be competitive. What do you think would make a good pricing model? Let's hope that Microsoft will take note of what a bunch of programmers want. Update: Azure Pricing:...

Is Azure an Operating System or a Framework?

MS is calling Azure an Operating System. To me, it feels much more like a framework. I am having a bit of trouble defining the two separately. I have a general intuition, but I am not articulate enough to really say if Azure is really an OS or just a framework sitting on top of Operating Systems. ...

What is the difference between an OS and a Framework?

I recently posted a question about Azure... is it really an OS? I understand the technical details, and I got a lot of fuzzy answers... I really want to know... what do you think is the difference between an OS and a Framework? Just for reference, Azure will be built on top of Hyper-V servers and the virtual machines will be running va...

SecurityException in ASP.net application

I have a web app which queries a Lucene index and it works just fine in a W2K3 server in my network. Now I got my azure code so I wanted to test the service uploading the app. In order to do that I had to install Vista (I did it in a Virtual machine) cause the Azure SDK won't install on an XP box. I created my Cloud Service, added the ...

Azure and Microsoft ASP.NET MVC

I just got my azure invitation code...yay! Are there any official samples for windows azure + MS asp.net MVC? I still don't get the storage providers and services that come with Azure, it's a bit confusing. I don't think MS have done a very good of explaining it. ...

Debugging Developer Fabric Issues - Service Not Starting Web Components

Hello, I am trying to get the Azure SDK up and running on my dev PC and have been having some issues. I have installed the SDK, tools for VS and am trying to run the samples. Every time I try to run the samples the Development Storage service starts and then the Developer Fabric tries to start. This is where is stops. The Developer Fa...

Using Windows Azure Service Bus From Silverlight

Is it possible to call services hosted on the Service Bus from a Silverlight application? I tried googling around but none of the results helped. Looking at the samples (EchoService) they are using a specific microsoft DLL to setup the authentication for the service. I cannot seem to add this DLL to my project (duh it is for the full ...

How do you use Active Directory in a "hosted solution"?

Yesterday I got a call from a Microsoft representative asking if we supply "hosted solutions", presumably as part of the big Windows Azure push. As soon as I got off that call, our marketing director came into my office and said the majority of our customers are demanding Active Directory integration in the next version. Then it occurred...

What IOC containers work with Windows Azure

I am getting to grips with Windows Azure. I usually use NInject as my IoC container in web apps. However, when trying to use it within an Azure web role I get a security exception (something to do with reflection permission). Has anyone used other IoC with Azure and had succcess? ...

If I deploy my web application to Windows Azure, do I need a traditional host?

I just started to read about this new technology... Does someone have some knowledge about it? ...

Is a cloud service suitable for this application?

I'm looking for details of the cloud services popping up (eg. Amazon/Azure) and am wondering if they would be suitable for my app. My application basically has a single table database which is about 500GB. It grows by 3-5 GB/Day. I need to extract text data from it, about 1 million rows at a time, filtering on about 5 columns. This ext...

What is my Azure Table Storage AccountName?

I'm trying to move some table storage in Azure from local storage to the cloud. I had been using the "devstoreaccount1" for local access, but I'm not sure what I need to put there for moving to the cloud. It's not the user account I used to sign up for my Azure accounts, is it? That's just my email address, and that didn't seem to wor...

Azure Demo Site

I'm planning to give some talks on Azure and ASP.NET MVC. I suspect that the blog site demo has been done to death. What other kinds of relatively simple and approachable (that is, ideas that don't require 10 minutes to describe what the site does) would you like to see used as the basis for a demo of Azure? ...

Recommend a C# Task Scheduling Library

I'm looking for a C# library, preferably open source, that will let me schedule tasks with a fair amount of flexibility. Specifically, I should be able to schedule things to run every N units of time as well as "Every weekday at XXXX time" or "Every Monday at XXXX time". More features than that would be nice, but not necessary. This i...

Live ID Web Authentication on Azure

I have a Silverlight application and want to use it, on Azure with Live ID web autentication. Now I search for a good tutorial or solution to use the Live Id Web Authentication in a Cloud application, to use it on Azure. Can someone help me? ...