Background Is it possible to secure a website using Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) without interfering with an existing authentication method? e.g. – Could a website secured using an ASP.NET membership provider, with all the code and configuration that entails, be layered with additional code and...

Over the past month I have been working on a framework to allow composition and submission of MapReduce jobs using .Net. I have put together two previous blog posts on this, so rather than put together a third on the latest change I thought I would create a final composite post. To understand why lets...

As mentioned in my previous post Hadoop Streaming not only supports text streaming, but it also supports Binary Streaming. As such I wanted to put together a sample that supports processing Office documents. As before the code can be downloaded from: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Hadoop-Streaming-and...

As you may know Microsoft has recently announced plans for a Hadoop adoption for both Windows Server and Windows Azure . You can find out more about Hadoop and Windows Azure at Apache Hadoop-based Services for Windows Azure and Availability of Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Hadoop based Service...

This article is part of a series: Understanding and Using OData (1 of 4) OData Publication (2 of 4) – This article Analysing OData Feeds (3 of 4) Creating a Windows Phone 7 OData Client Application (4 of 4) Hopefully these articles will show you how to produce and publish an...

So, we’ve just released an update to Eye On Earth that adds in Birdseye support, the new style Bing Maps navigation controls, and also moves the system to the latest release of the Windows Azure SDK.  Check it out at http://www.eyeonearth.eu The new Bing Maps style navigation Viewing an air station...

There are many scenarios where you will need to do interrole communication when creating a solution using Windows Azure platform such as multiple web roles that need to recycle when a controller triggers an event. One way to achieve this goal is to create an event queue, modify the controller to enqueue...

Windows Azure Diagnostics enables you to collect diagnostic data from a service running in Windows Azure. The data collected is highly configurable and can include Windows Azure logs, IIS 7.0 logs, Windows Diagnostic infrastructure logs, Failed Request logs, Windows Event logs, Performance counters,...

Recently the Azure and security community published the “ Security Best Practices for Developing Windows Azure Application ” paper outlining the security considerations developers should consider when building a service on Windows Azure. As I have worked on Azure before and have an interest in security...

The Azure platform in the form of the Fabric Controller (FC) provides monitoring for a health of a role instance. The table below summarises common problems, their detection mechanism and the action taken by the fabric controller: Problem How Detected Fabric Action Role crashes Guest FC agent monitors...

As I get more and more familiar with the Azure platform, one thing that strikes me more than anything else is that Azure is is not an all or nothing thing. You can use the Azure platform as a component of your overall solution, or you can take advantage of individual services provided by the platform...

I was recently talking to a customer about the possibility of moving a web site from Linux to Windows Azure . The hosting costs of the application are not excessive, and the customer is happy with the service received. Nevertheless they were very interested in exploring the hosting costs and potential...

Memcached is a distributed cache used to help speeding up large scale web applications by taking pressure off the database. Memcached is used by many of the internet’s biggest sites. A distributed cache is one of the things that I’ve been hoping to see released for Windows Azure for quite a while...