When you create a Windows Azure application, you’ll pick a subscription to put it under. This is a billing container - underneath that, you’ll deploy a Hosted Service. That holds the Web and Worker Roles that you’ll deploy for your applications...

This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for year. You can read my first book review here . The book I chose for November 2011 was: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott...

A new term - well, perhaps not that new - has come up and I’m actually very excited about it. The term is Data Scientist, and since it’s new, it’s fairly undefined. I’ll explain what I think it means, and why I’m excited about it. In general, I’ve found...

Note - please pay attention to the date of this post. As much as I attempt to make the information below accurate, the nature of distributed computing means that components, units and pricing will change over time. The definitive costs for Microsoft Windows...

I’ve explained before that Windows Azure is a Platform as a Service - at its simplest, that means that you write software and Azure runs it for you. But what if you are a shop that normally buys “off the shelf” software, and the only software you write...