Pie in the Sky (October 12, 2012)

Hope for good reading weather this weekend, because our reading list this week has lots to choose from. Enjoy (and, as always, learn)…

• Open Sourcing May Be Worth the Risk: "Going open source can be a scary proposition, but it can also bear fruit. Not only will you discover bugs in your products and services, but you can discover new opportunities of all sorts — new markets, new ideas for products, and new sources of talent."
• Cascadia.js: If you work with JavaScript and are in the Seattle area from November 8-9th, you might want to attend CascadiaJS.
• Harnessing the Awesome Power of Streams: James Halliday did a presentation at LXJS 2012 on using streams with JavaScript and you can watch it on YouTube.
• Riak is now available on Windows Azure: Good news if you need to use Riak for a Windows Azure solution.
• New Service Bus Experience on Windows Azure: The preview portal has been updated with new bits to support working with Service Bus Queues and Topics (topics = publish-subscribe.)
• Microsoft Cloud Analysis Tool and Infrastructure Optimization Tool: J.D. Meier talks about these two tools.
• Using Azure Web Sites to market your Windows App: A short article on standing up WordPress in a Windows Azure Web Site.
• What PartitionKey and RowKey are for in Windows Azure Table Storage: Maarten Balliauw breaks down what the Partition and Row keys are for in the Windows Azure Table Service.
• Announcing: Improvements to the Windows Azure Portal: Scott Guthrie covers all the recent improvements in the Windows Azure Portal.
• W3C’s Web Platform Docs – Your “Go To” for All Things Web Development: "W3C’s Web Platform Docs is a community site designed to be a comprehensive and authoritative resource for developers to help them build modern web applications that will work across browsers and devices, and share their own expertise, which will further the goal of web platform interoperability and same markup."
• Windows Azure Media Service–Part I (Introduction): If you've wondered what this "Media Services" thing is, this is a good post to start with.
• MongoDB OData provider now supports arrays and nested collections: There's an OData provider for MongoDB? Yep. And it now supports arrays and nested collections. :-)
• http://connectionstrings.com/: A one-stop reference for connection string formats for tons of data stores.
• Windows Azure Cloud Service or Web Site: Where am I Deployed?: Cory Fowler looks at how to use environment variables in discovery code.
• Introducing AzureFS: "AzureFS is an open source command-line tool to mount Windows Azure Blob Storag...on your local file system and play with it just like you [do]with your local files."

Have a great weekend!

-Brian