March, 2012

Tomorrow (Thursday, 3/29/2012) at noon ET or 9am PT, we have our third screencast in the @home series: Diving into Windows Azure Storage Options ! During the first week of March 2012, my teammates Brian Hitney , Jim O’Neil , and I announced the re-launch...

My colleagues are now pooling their blogs into single feed  to provide up-to-date news for readers interested in the latest in cloud. US Cloud Connection site is now live with has added the ability to aggregate the Azure-related blog posts. My colleagues will provide details on the latest offerings and let you know about events across the US.

Be sure to check out the contributions of Bruno Terkaly, Sanjay Jain, Zhiming Xue, Adam Hoffman, and myself.

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This post is part of a series called “ Windows Azure for the ASP.NET Developer ” written by Rachel Appel , Adam Hoffman , and Peter Laudati . You can see the complete list of posts in the series at the US Cloud Connection site. Whether...

On most (or perhaps even all?) of the production servers I’ve worked on, antivirus/antimalware detection apps are often not installed for a variety of reasons – performance, risk of false positives or certain processes getting closed down unexpectedly...

I just saw a pretty cool video posted up on Channel 9. Elad Ben-Israel and Saar Yahalom from Microsoft Israel have been cooking up an interesting experiment in their development lair.  They have built an experimental platform for rapidly prototyping...

During the first week of March 2012, my teammates Brian Hitney , Jim O’Neil , and I announced the re-launch of the @home with Windows Azure project.  On March 15, we hosted a kick-off webcast providing an overview of the project.  I wanted to...

Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 helps you create Windows 8 Metro Style applications that can harness the power of Windows Azure.  The idea is to connect your Windows application to data in the cloud.

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Back when Windows 8 was announced at the //build conference in September 2011 , the Windows Azure team released a Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 to make it easy for developers to create Windows Metro Style applications that can harness the power...

While writing the series of posts, I kept running into more best practices. So here are a few more items you should consider in securing your Windows Azure application.

Here are some tools, coding tips, and best practices:

• Running on the Operating System
• Getting the latest security patches
• If you can, run in partial trust
• Error handling
• How to implement your retry logic
• Logging errors in Windows Azure
• Access to Azure Storage
• Access to Blobs
• Storing your connection string
• Gatekeepers patterns
• Rotating your storage keys
• Crypto services for your data security

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The Windows Azure team has announced additional savings to compute and storage customers. In addition to the SQL storage reductions announced last month, the new plan offers an Extra Small Compute at 2 cents per hour.

With these changes, a 24x7 Extra Small Compute instance with a 100MB SQL Azure DB costs less than $20 per month. The price of compute and storage continues to be consistent across all datacenters.

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