Pie in the Sky (July 20, 2012)

I keep expecting things to slow down as we finally get into summer here in Redmond…but they aren’t! Lots happening this week, and lots of good reading…enjoy!

• Configure IIS websites on Windows Azure with startup tasks and AppCmd: Tips for using start-up tasks.
• FAQ : Microsoft Windows Azure PHP SDK: Answers to some frequently asked questions about the Windows Azure SDK for PHP.
• Additional Reserve Instance Capacity for Windows Azure Web Sites Preview: The Windows Azure team has more than doubled the number of available Windows Azure Web Sites Reserve Instances in the East US, West Europe, and North Europe datacenters.
• Windows Azure Storage – 4 Trillion Objects and Counting: Wow!
• Tweaking Windows Azure Web Sites: Maarten Balliauw shows you how to tweak your Windows Azure Websites configuration (specifically, he shows you how to enable more HTTP verbs).
• Open Source Software supported on Windows Azure: This isn't new, but (ironically) I just discovered this page this week.
• Getting Started with PHP on Windows Azure Web Sites: Cory Fowler gets you started with PHP on Windows Azure Websites.
• A Guided Tour of the Windows Azure Active Directory Developer Preview Sample Application: The Windows Azure Active Directory Developer Preview was released this week. This post give you a close look at a sample app that uses the service.
• Entity Framework magic Unicorn (and much more!) is now open source with take backs: Scott Hanselman talks about the new open source release of Entity Framework.
• Kinesis.io: Build gesture driven web applications with HTML, JS and Kinect. You can view some demos at http://kinesis.io/demos.
• Latency: The New Web Performance Bottleneck: New? It’s always been a bottleneck for me. At least for video games. J
• How to Assess Costs of using Windows Azure for your Applications: One of our colleges, Sidney Higa, talks the costs of using Windows Azure for an application.
• Data Series: How To Setup SQL Server on Windows Azure Virtual Machines: "One of the fastest ways to move database operations to the cloud is by moving your database onto an instance of SQL Server that is running on a Virtual Machine on Windows Azure." This article will show you how.

Have a great weekend!

-Brian