When I interviewed Doug Hauger on video and asked a few of the slightly tougher questions, he intimated there’d be a new price point for compute in Windows Azure. He said “wait for the PDC” – well, not only was the announcement made by Bob Muglia at the...

The addition of the new VMRole to the existing Web and Worker Roles, opens up many new possibilities to developers of Windows Azure applications. First off – what is it? At first look it appears to be nothing more than a VM hosted on the Windows Azure...

…and why not? It means the range goes from Team Foundation Server (TFS) basic – a client install right up to TFS running as a service in the cloud. To get a team of developers working together with Visual Studio you’d normally install TFS on-premise....

Continuing from my Crypto Primer post, I said I’d describe SSL. I’m going to stick with the simple option – the one that doesn’t involve client authentication. That’s because almost all of us use SSL without client authentication when we go to a page...

Well, we had the Gartner Symposium in Florida last week. Just looking at the agenda, it’s pretty obvious that the cloud is exercising almost everybody, just by the pure number of sessions that feature in some way or other. Whether it be Saas, PaaS or...

So much of what I will write on this blog will assume a knowledge of crypto. I thought I’d create a post I could reference back to for many future posts to keep things simple and easy to understand. Algorithms and keys We all know what an algorithm is...

Having recently applied for a replacement passport, I was surprised at how easy it was. The binding between my old passport and the application-form being a couple of identical passport photos. Clearly somebody in the passport office office looks at the...

You get in to the office in the morning and hit CTRL-ALT-DEL to log in to your AD. SOme time later you click a desktop icon for a web-app running in your datacentre. You are taken straight to the application. No login. Why? The app is AD-integrated. It...

While he was visiting the UK, I managed to get some time with the General Manager of Windows Azure and put the questions to him that customers put to me. It’s captured on video. If you’ve ever had an unexpectedly large credit-card bill for your Azure...

It’s amazing how people can be influenced by a convincing speaker who makes points with conviction, but who happens to be behind the curve in terms of technological developments. I talked to somebody recently who was of the opinion that technical attacks...

I was reminded of a post I wrote on my old blog the other day by a situation that came up in discussion with a government customer. I thought I’d re-post it on my shiny new MSDN blog. ------------------------------------- cut here -------------------...

Here I am in my new T-Shirt: We had a little caption competition in the office for some of our products. For Azure, my colleague Martin Beeby (blogging at “ The Beebs ”) came up with: Shipping Containers have never been so sexy …but I thought, because...