Plankytronixx

The UK ran a series of Windows Azure Bootcamps. Video screencasts of the labs are now available. I’ll divide them up in to Windows Azure labs and SQL Azure labs in the next few posts, plus a labs intro – just to keep everything neatly separated. Planky...

A paper on how cloud technologies increase business agility. Click the image to download. It’s a good paper for a developer to share with somebody from the business-side of an organisation to explain one aspect of the benefits of the cloud – agility....

Rock, Paper, Azure. A developer competition in which you could win $5,000. You download some Azure code, tune your bot with your own code and let it loose in to the competition to play rock, paper, azure (rock, paper, scissors) with the bots of other...

This video is a click-by-click, line-by-line screen-cam of how to authenticate using an on-premise Active Directory with a Windows Azure application. It uses Active Directory Federation Services V2.0 (ADFS 2.0) and Windows Azure’s App Fab Access Control...

We just finished Tech Days here in the UK. A week of talks and the Windows Azure bootcamp. Talks were held at Fulham Broadway cinema and we had absolutely massive screens to present on. Andrew “Deep fat” Fryer took these pics to give some idea of the...

Yes, it’s true . The news has been buzzing around the Internet and mainstream media channels this morning, but I now believe it 100%. My CEO, Steve Ballmer, just sent me an email (not personally you understand!) confirming it. There was one phrase in...

Here are all the links to the “other resources” from the bootcamps that ran last Wednesday: Visual Studio Web Express Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio (March 2011) Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 RTM - Express with Management...

There is still time to book on to the free Windows Azure half-day bootcamp running on 4th May at the Microsoft Campus in Reading, England. You can select either morning or afternoon. If you’ve never played with Windows Azure, never written an app, never...

The guys at Microsoft Research are doing some interesting things with parallel programming. It’s not an area I’ve ever had anything to do with, but one can see how the combination of Windows Azure and Dryad offer the novice parallel programmer access...

Some of you may not know there is a capability in System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 R2 (cumulative update 4) to monitor Windows Azure services. Among other cloud management technologies, my colleague, Simon May will be talking about this today...

The training kit has been updated for the 1.4 SDK and has new and updated labs added. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=413E88F8-5966-4A83-B309-53B7B77EDF78&displaylang=en Highlights are: · [New] Authenticating Users in a...

This day is about getting you up to speed on why you should be looking at the Windows Azure Platform, what tools and services it offers and how you can start to explore it to create new solutions, migrate elements of existing solutions or integrate with...

You may know there is a collection of Open Source Software packages ready and waiting to be installed in to Windows Azure. A project which built “accelerators” for popular CMS systems such as Umbraco, Drupal, Wordpress etc has been live and kicking for...

Web Role, Worker Role and VM Role are all designed to solve problems along the continuum of abstraction <==> control that I talked about in a previous post : We call it abstraction because the technology forces a greater separation between the OS...

In concert with my previous post regarding Server App-V , you might be interested to learn about the principles of this sort of technology. There is a session on desktop application virtualization which you can view here . Although this covers the specifics...

With all the pzazz of a Vegas Showgirl, Server App-V was announced at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas last week. Well, OK, Brad Anderson stood there in polo-shirt and chinos to make the announcement but he was as excited as a Vegas...

What goes around, comes around, as they say. There’s very little new: just variations on an existing idea. So it is with Cloud Computing. It seems to me that we are dragging the un-enlightened, kicking and screaming in to the 1950s. You know, that place...

If you are a UK developer looking to take advantage of cloud computing, but you haven’t yet taken the plunge, this free half-day of training is the quickest way to get up-to-speed with Microsoft’s offering; Windows Azure. We’ll take you from knowing nothing...

I’ll be covering how to set up ADFS 2.0 for authenticating to Windows Azure apps and Office 365. The talk is basically in 2 sections – integration with Windows Azure and integration with Office 365. So it’ll go: ADFS ==> App Fab ACS ==> Azure App...

As applications that are used by employees of large corporate enterprises start to work their way in to the cloud, it becomes obvious that a need to integrate the network and security infrastructures of both environments becomes important. I’ve made a...

Amazon, traditionally an IaaS cloud provider, has now introduced Beanstalk, a PaaS model for the cloud.  Their IaaS model has served them well: you provide a VM, they run it for you. To round out the model they provide additional services such as...

Whenever most of us think of OSS, we think in terms of a stack with Linux at the bottom, providing the OS platform and say PHP at the top with say a CMS app atop that. It’s often forgotten of course, that there’s a healthy and thriving community of developers...

The current SDK (1.3) and Tools for Visual Studio has been refreshed to 1.4. It’s mainly a stability release to address a few issues. Probably the nastiest bug-ette was the full IIS web role that recycled when the diagnostic store was full. The full bug...

What we need, in our dual-roles as both technologists and business-analysts, is a sort of kit bag of tools we can use to explain in simple, low-jargon, understandable language to say, the CIO or other C-level executive of a business, how a move to the...

The Mayor of London is an entertaining fellow. A regular on the TV news quiz “ Have I Got News For You ” (the clip is very funny…). Here he presents a Windows Phone 7 app using Windows Azure at the back end which allows Londoners to report grafitti, rubbish...