Brian H. Prince

Wow! A year has come and gone and the second annual DogFood conference is done. We had 19 partners come together to put on a two day event for customers in Columbus, Ohio. We had attendees from four hours away! There were over 45 sessions. I was able to deliver a talk on using Azure. There were 400 attendees over the two days, and I think everyone had a lot of fun, and learned a lot. I want to thank everyone who came to my session, and please connect with me if you have more questions about Azure. The slides are here:

For some time now I have been working on a book with Chris Hay titled “ Azure in Action ”. The book will be published by Manning, hopefully around March 2010. We only have a few more chapters to write, and then we start the long editorial process. But I know many of you can not wait until March to get the book. This is where the MEAP comes in. MEAP stands for Manning Early Access Program, and it allows readers to read the first chapter for free, or buy the book now. If you buy the book early you get access to the draft chapters as they are written, and get access to an authors forum to provide us feedback on the book, and get questions answered. I was in the middle of writing another book for Manning when I mentioned that I was surprised they didn’t have a dedicated book for each part of the Windows Azure Platform. Later I found out this simple little comment set off a flurry (well, maybe a passel) of activity in setting up the other books in the series, and finding the write aut...

We recently wrapped up a 17 city road show covering real work experiences with Azure. We had both an IT Pro session, and a developer session. While we were in Nashville we webcasted the event. If you weren’t able to get to one of the events, now is your chance to see the recordings. We cover the architecture, and development of solutions running on Azure, as well as how to manage and provisions the solutions. Just because the app is running in the cloud doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be managed. You just aren’t spending as much time managing the underlying infrastructure. You can replay the videos, or download them for offline viewing. The IT Pro one has also been published to TechNet here . TechNet Events Presents: Real World Azure https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032425946&role=attend&pw=WE45G3T7   MSDN Events Presents: Real World Azure - Live Meeting https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032425948&role=attend&pw=E45W7...

My good friend Wes Brock just let me know that Wintellect will be offering a 2 day training course on how to build applications for Azure for $499. The course will be delivered by Paul Mehner, online. This is great news, so you don’t have to travel to sit in on the class. The training will be on October 21-22, 2009. The course will cover: Section 1 - Introduction and Overview of the Azure Services Platform · Intro to the Azure Services Platform · Intro to Windows Azure Services · Intro to .NET Services · Intro to SQL Azure (future) · Service Registration and setup Section 2 - Windows Azure Services · Visual Studio “Cloud Service” Projects · Configuration of your Windows Azure application · Deployment of your Windows Azure application · Load Balancing Infrastructure · Use of Azure with non-Microsoft technologies (future) Lab 1a: Setup of your Windows Azure Account Lab 1b: Develop and deploy your first Windows Azure Application Section 3 - Microsoft .NET ...

Looking for something to do this weekend? How about a series of small, low calorie, bite sized videos on how to work with Azure? Check these out. These are great training videos. Everyone is interested in Azure, and cloud computing, and everyone is looking for resources to get up to speed quickly. This is the next best thing to downloading the SDK and hacking out some code. Overall Page Visit here for the full summary of videos   Get Started Developing on Windows Azure? If you’re a developer and you’re new to Windows Azure, start here! You’ll see what you need to download and install, and how to create a simple “Hello World” Windows Azure application.   Deploy a Windows Azure Application You’ll see what it takes to move your application into the cloud – you’ll see how to request and re...

During the upcoming ArcReady tour, I will be sitting in on a KNOThead meeting. The meeting is at EdFinancial, and is from 5:30-8:00pm on 3/10/2008. We will talk about cloud computing, and how this shift is affecting our organizations, especially during this time of grapefruit. So come out for ArcReady, and hang around for the KNOThead meeting.   Location: EdFinancial Services, 150 N Seven Oaks Dr, Knoxville, TN

The third aspect of Azure storage is the table structure. BLOBs answer how to manage unstructured data in your cloud application, and tables answer how to manage your structured date. Tables, like the rest of Azure, are designed to be super scalable. You can easily store billions of rows, and terabytes of data, and still get great performance. Because the tables are part of Azure, the table data is always available, and triple replicated for reliability. Accessing tables is easy using ADO.NET Data Services, which should be familiar to most .NET developers. ADO.NET DS uses normal .NET classes and LINQ to access your data. If you don’t want to access sit with ADO.NET, you can easily use REST, so any platform can make queries and calls into the data. Each account can have many tables of data. Each table contains entities, which are like rows in a traditional database. Each entity is indentified with a composite key. The first half is the partition key , which identities which partit...

The other day I discussed using Queues in Azure , and why you would want to. Today, we will talk about using BLOBs. First a bit about BLOBs. BLOB stands for B inary L arge OB ject, and is a way to store binary data. Up until now, whenever I used BLOBs it was as a column type in SQL Server and Oracle Server. This was always challenging for me because the APIs to store and read BLOBs were a pain, and hard to use. At least for me. The other problem was related to maintenance on the database server. Your database will get very big, very quickly by storing images and videos in the database. There may be some very good reasons for you to do this, but for me, in the past, the tax was too high. The approach I generally took was to store the image in a folder somewhere, and store the path and filename in the database. This did create a maintenance issue, in that we have to backup the file folder, and make sure it was transactionally in sync with the database backup. That is a whole different ...

The Northwest .NET Users Group has been kind enough to invite me to speak at their February meeting. It will be on 2/17 at 6:00p – 8:00p, located at 333 North Summit Street, Toledo, Oh . I will be speaking on cloud computing, what it can mean to you, and what the Azure Services Platform is. Given enough time, we will even look at some code. I hope to see you there!

Many modern systems are now being designed with SOA principles in mind. This usually means they are designed as a composite application of several services working together. As part of this structure, you usually need a way for the different services to communicate. A common way is to use an Enterprise Service Bus, or even just naked, direct SOAP calls. This works when the systems are synchronous in nature. But if the service you are leveraging is very asynchronous, meaning it is more like a back end processor, or bulk processor, then you are likely going to end up working with queues. The advantage to queues is that they help enforce some loose coupling to your architecture. Just make sure that you pick a queue-ing technology that supports the protocols the consumers will need (ie SOAP, REST, COM+, etc.) If you are working with Azure, then you can easily leverage the queue infrastructure already build into the storage fabric of Azure. Before you dive in, there are a few things you...

Where: QSI Training Center, 440 Polaris Parkway, Suite 500 When: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 @ 5:30 – 7:00 p.m. RSVP: Natalie Marsch @ nmarsch@quicksolutions.com *Food & beverages will be served at 5:30 p.m. Title: Cloud Computing with Windows Azure Speaker: James Bender Description: Cloud computing is poised to be the next big breakthrough in Enterprise computing. Companies like Amazon, Google, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft are making large investments in this new paradigm and positioning themselves to be leaders in this new space. But why is cloud computing so important? This session will answer that question and help you as a developer and/or architect get a handle on cloud computing. You will also see how easy cloud computing can be with Microsoft Azure in a variety of Enterprise scenarios. Bio: James is an Architect with Quick Solutions and has been involved in software development and architecture for 13 years. He has worked as a developer and archit...

Wally McClure is a great leader in our .NET community. He is a very active podcaster and author. He tours our area regularly, speaking on SQL Performance, ASP.NET, and is now diving head first into Azure. Some things he has been up to lately? - Published an ebook on ASP.NET 3.5 SP1: http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/WroxTitle/New-Features-in-ASP-NET-3-5-Service-Pack-1.productCd-0470457341.html - Several podcasts on Azure: http://aspnetpodcast.com/CS11/blogs/asp.net_podcast/archive/2008/12/22/asp-net-podcast-show-132-windows-azure-blob-storage-video.aspx http://aspnetpodcast.com/CS11/blogs/asp.net_podcast/archive/2008/12/25/asp-net-podcast-show-133-windows-azure-table-storage-video.aspx - A lap around ASP.NET 3.5 SP1: http://aspnetpodcast.com/CS11/blogs/asp.net_podcast/archive/2008/12/05/asp-net-podcast-show-130-david-and-wally-talk-about-net-3-5-service-pack-1.aspx - Caching in a 3.5 SP1 world: http://aspnetpodcast.com/CS11/blogs/asp.net_podcast/archive/2008/12/04/asp-ne...