Pie in the Sky (May 25, 2012)

Looking forward to a long weekend…so I can catch up on work. And of course, there is our weekly reading to catch up on…

• Startup Opstera Launches Free Cloud App Monitoring Service for Azure Startup Opstera Launches Free Cloud App Monitoring Service for Azure: "Opstera, a startup company launched back in January, is launching a free cloud app monitoring tool that will initially measure the quality of service (QoS) of Microsoft's Windows Azure platform and ultimately other platform as a service (PaaS) offerings. "
• Getting Started with the Service Bus Samples for Windows 8: "As part of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8, we recently released a sample library for accessing Service Bus from Windows 8 metro style applications and a sample metro app demonstrating how to use some basic Service Bus functionality. In this post, we'll take a quick tour around the sample app, get an introduction to the sample library and examine in detail how the sample library works."
• How to calculate what to move to the Windows Azure cloud: "A former Microsoft Windows Azure evangelist offers some advice for what to move to the cloud and when."
• Microsoft Announces Imagine Cup 2012 Worldwide Finalists: As a former teacher, I really like the Imagine Cup. Lots of great entries this year.
• Windows and Node: Writing Portable Code: A few of the pain points you can encounter when writing a node module that should work cross platform.
• A Gentle Reintroduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript: Short reintroduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript, along with pointers to resources.
• ISV Guest Post Series: Full Scale 180 Tackles Database Scaling with Windows Azure: Full Scale 180 talks about some scenarios where SQL Azure Federations might be a good candidate for scaling out your database.

Have a great weekend!

-Brian