How’d we get to the end of September already? Time flies when you’ve got good reading…speaking of which, here’s this week’s reading list. As usual, topics are wide-ranging…everything from experiments in deploying...

This week I’ve set aside some of the work I’ve been doing on using Azure Diagnostics to work on an internal training plan for other folks in my group here at Microsoft. The larger plan includes hands-on training for using Open Source Software...

Recently I've been thinking about roles and what makes the most sense for a deployment, mainly around the size of the role to pick. If you look at pricing and capabilities of the medium or larger roles you'll notice something interesting; two small roles...

This post is a cross-post from http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_swan/archive/2011/09/22/version-3-0-beta-of-the-sql-server-drivers-for-php-released.aspx . I’m re-posting it here because I want to make sure readers of this blog are aware of this release...

If you are interested in Node.js on Windows or Windows Azure, you’ll like this week’s reading list. There also some good reading related to WP7 development (the video about devices, OData, and Azure is excellent). Enjoy… Web Matrix...

In part 1 of this two part series, I showed how you can use a configuration file (the diagnostics.wadcfg file) to configure Azure diagnostics. However, that approach requires that you know all the diagnostic information that you want to collect before...

While Brian started discussing gathering Windows Azure diagnostics from PHP on Monday, I’m going to jump straight into scaling Windows Azure from Ruby and discuss gathering diagnostic information in a later post. Diagnostic information is great...

In this post, I’ll look at why getting diagnostic data for applications in the cloud is important for all applications (not just PHP), provide a short overview of what Windows Azure Diagnostics is, and show how to get diagnostics data for PHP applications...

Lots of great Azure-related links this week…everything from big announcements at the BUILD conference this week to a Ruby gem that allows you to call native C library functions. Enjoy (and learn!)… JUST ANNOUNCED @ BUILD: New Windows...

Active Record is an object-relational mapping (ORM) that makes it easy to work with databases. While there are other ORMs out there for Ruby, Active Record is very popular and I wanted to walk through using it with SQL Azure. Active Record can be installed...

Last week I wrote a couple of posts ( here and here ) about the command line tools in the Windows Azure SDK for PHP. And, as I pointed out in the latter of those posts, I found it necessary to extend the functionality of the command line tools. After...

It’s build week, and that means that Brian and I are anticipating some exciting announcements about the Windows Azure platform this week. We'll be watching closely and will share anything that relates to OSS or device development on the Windows...

Our reading list is all over the map this week – everything from helpful tools to conference announcements. My favorite this week is this one: http://things.smarx.com/ . But read on…there’s lots more good stuff… Exploring...

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time exploring the command line tools for the Windows Azure SDK for PHP . As I’ve done so, I found that I needed to add functionality in some areas (essentially, I needed the ability to access role instance...

I’ve been exploring the Windows Azure SDK for PHP command line tools that allow you to create, deploy, and manage new hosted services and web roles. In this post, I’ll walk you through a the basics of using the tools, but first I want to point...

Here’s the reading/news that we came across this week… NOW Available: Windows Azure Toolkit for Android : I loved Wade Wegner 's comment on Twitter this week: "Yes, hell froze over. We shipped the Windows #Azure Toolkit for #Android...

(Updated 7 Oct. 2011. Added Option 2.) If you are someone who is experimenting with PHP on Azure (or even if you have some experience in this area), it is often helpful to have remote access to your running deployments. Remotely accessing deployments...