… it means that .Net Services workflow will not ship as part of Version 1 of the Azure Services Platform. For more details, and the reasons why, see: http://blogs.msdn.com/netservicesannounce/archive/2009/06/12/upcoming-important-changes-to-net-workflow...

Ok, so I didn’t get to go to MIX, but we watched the keynote in the MTC boardroom this afternoon – it was almost like being there – no jet lag, no hangover, nice comfy leather seats, coffee on tap – ok, no point me trying to hide it I'm jealous of those...

I’ve just found out about an attempt to start a UK based Windows Azure community. The initial meeting is on 31st March in London. Details are … We would like to invite you to a session titled “Windows Azure Update, What it is & What it isn’t” including...

The SQL Data Services team are making some big changes – ACE (Authority, Container, Entity) is no longer going to be supported and they are moving to expose TDS – TDS is the protocol that you are using to talk to your current SQL Servers! I know that...

Simon has just started a, long overdue, blog. He is an Architect Evangelist – yes I know we’ve heard all the Evangelist jokes and if I could change the job tile I would – in DPE in the UK and specialises in our latest and greatest emerging technologies...

For a while now I have been using a class that wraps and adds extra functionality to the queue in the StorageLib sample in the Windows Azure SDK. There are a few benefits that this wrapper provides, so I thought it might be time to share: Strongly...

Ok, last update on this subject, but we can now confirm that we will be in Cambridge on 10th Feb delivering the Azure Briefing. For more details, see: http://blogs.msdn.com/ukisvdev/archive/2009/01/14/new-dates-for-azure-technical-briefing-announced.aspx...

I am pleased to say that we have managed to arrange a couple more dates/locations for the Azure Technical Briefing. They are 11th Feb in Edinburgh and 13th Feb in Bradford . For more details, please see: http://blogs.msdn.com/ukisvdev/archive/2009/01...

We are running a couple of briefings on the Microsoft cloud technology stack for ISVs in the next few weeks. I’ll be doing a bit on Windows Azure but the Live Platform and SQL Services will also be on the agenda. If you are interested in finding out about...

On a recent POC we found a bit of a problem with the time it was talking to deploy our application to Azure’s staging environment then deploy it into production. Now I must point out that we had a token that allowed us to have quite a lot of machine instances...

One thing that you need to consider when designing your Azure application is " what is the minimum deployment "? If your application has 5 different queues with a worker role to read each queue, we are going to want at least 2 instances per...

After the last 2 blog entries, we have our worker process's main loop feed back into Azure's heath checking system. If we go unhealthy, Azure will notice and will eventually restart the worker role. However, this is a bit heavy handed; what if the failure...

Last week, for a Azure POC, we implemented something similar to the pattern shown in Part 1 . One revision, that I asked to be made, was to surround the DateTime access code with a lock statement; I was worried that updating a DateTime struct would not...

Building a decoupled, queue based system is will give you the ability to scale and the opportunity to create a highly available application. By dispatching work to multiple back end worker roles we are building a system that can survive unfortunate events...

If you are developing a queue based system in Windows Azure - and lets face it, if you want a highly scalable and reliable application, you going to be using queue - you are going to have to deal with poison messages. A poison message is a message that...

If you want to see the raw requests that the storage client is sending to your developer storage, the rather disturbingly named Fiddle Tool is what you are looking for. Normally network monitoring tools aren't going to see traffic to 127.0.0.1, but fiddler...

When you are using a Windows Azure queue, you have to be quite particular how you name it. The rules are: The queue name must be a valid Domain Name System (DNS) name, conforming to the following naming rules: A queue name must start with...

In order to raise awareness of men's health issues, November has been turned into a moustache growing charity event, check out:   http://www.movember.com/ I'm currently deciding if this is a good idea - I would be up for it except that I have to...

Windows Azure provides two main things - a place to run your code and a place to store your data. When you are reading this keep in mind that Windows Azure is built for writing and hosting highly scalable and available applications - it is not about just...

I thought it might be useful if I give some recommendations on the sessions I found the most useful at this years PDC. I tended to avoid most of the sessions on Windows Azure as I figured that I would know most of the content already - my theory is that...

If you haven't already installed it, get your hands on a copy of IE7 Pro - If you are running IE8, don't worry about the name, it works just fine. This tools adds lots of nice features to IE including mouse gestures, spell checking, easy in page searching...

I was one of the lucky ones to get to PDC this year, but if you didn't, all the sessions are available to watch for free ! You even get the choice of video format including lower res options; allowing you to take the PDC with you where every you go. Ok...

Ok, so the Channel 9 video we did is a too little long for an introduction to the MOB Guardian project . For a briefer overview and why AWS and the RNLI are looking to use Azure to help save lives at sea, have a look at: RNLI and AWS Mob Guardian Windows...

This week I have been fortunate to attend the Professional Developers Conference in LA. The PDC is the main occasion when Microsoft reveal some of what the product groups have been working on and indicate the direction that the MS platform and dev stack...

Ok, so that was a pretty geeky title, but somehow seems appropriate for my first blog entry. This is just a quick post to say hello, so here goes ... Hello, I'm Neil Kidd; I work for Microsoft in the UK as an Architect in the Microsoft Technology Centre...