As usual, this week’s work led Larry and me to a varied assortment of reading topics…everything from a comparison of cloud offerings to changes in Node.js v0.06. Be sure not to miss the announcement about lowered Windows Azure storage costs…...

I have a confession to make; In college, I was the guy who wrote his flowcharts after writing the program (yes flowcharts describing program flow, it’s been that long since I was in college.) It just seemed a worthless exercise to me at the time...

In recent months, I’ve been diving deeply into the how’s and why’s of running PHP applications on the Windows Azure Platform. That has meant becoming intimately familiar with the Windows Azure SDK for PHP , the centerpiece for PHP on...

Once again, here’s the list of interesting reading that Larry and I ran across this week in our travels across the web. My personal favorite is the first link…running memcached for PHP applications in Windows Azure… Running Memcached...

In my last post , I looked at the session handling functionality that is built into the Windows Azure SDK for PHP , which uses Azure Tables or Azure Blobs for storing session data. As I wrote that post, I wondered how easy it would be to use SQL Azure...

One of the challenges in building a distributed web application is in handling sessions. When you have multiple instances of an application running and session data is written to local files (as is the default behavior for the session handling functions...

As Brian mentioned in an earlier post , we’ve been working on an internal training plan for our team around using OSS languages with Windows Azure. Brian posted some resources for PHP, so it’s my turn with some Node and Ruby resources. ...

LOTS of very exciting news this week! As you will see from the first few links, Microsoft has announced that it is working on Hadoop for Winodws Server and Windows Azure, AND it is working on a SQL Server ODBC driver for Linux. Those are two big steps...

Windows Phone 7 supports push notifications that let you do things like send alerts to a WP7 application, or update the tile (icon) for an application. The notifications are sent using the Microsoft Push Notification Service (MPNS), a free service that...

This week’s reading list is lengthy and heavy…perfect for a rainy weekend (as is forecast for the Seattle area). This week’s list includes two white papers, one looking at a class of algorithms for distributed load balancing, and the...

One of the core value propositions of Windows Azure is the ability to have automatic, elastic scalability for your applications (i.e. automatically increase or decrease the number of instances on which your application is running based on some criteria...

Since the release of version 4.0 of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP , one of the missing pieces has been the ability to package Worker roles as part of a deployment. As of this past weekend, that is no longer the case. Maarten Balliauw , the main contributor...

Recently I was trying to figure out how to allow users to login to a Ruby (Sinatra) web site using an identity service such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc. I ended up using Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS) since it has built-in support...