Pie in the Sky (October 19, 2012)

It's a late 'Friday' post again; my apologies. It's been a bit hectic leading up to the end of October. Here's the links we saved for you this week:

• The Cloud and the Whiteboard (VIDEO):  Cory Fowler  "demystifies Windows Azure using nothing other than a whiteboard."
• How to Create a Windows Azure Virtual Machine Image without using the Windows Azure Management Portal: This post covers two ways to create an Azure VM without using the portal. A third way is to use the Windows Azure Command Line Tools for Mac and Linux.
• Windows Azure Mobile Services—Now We Are Getting Somewhere: Glenn Gailey summarizes the latest updates to Windows Azure Mobile Services, including support for iOS.
• ReactiveCocoa for a better world: This framework for composing and transforming sequences of values (an open-sourced piece of the magic behind GitHub for Mac) aims to improve how native apps deal with lots of "waiting and reacting".
• Preview Refresh of the Microsoft Driver for Node.js for SQL Server: The latest release of the Microsoft Driver for Node.js for SQL Server has quite a few changes, including a name change and some changes to the GitHub branches.
• ES6 for Node: Depending on the version of Node you’re using, you may have access to some of the features coming in ECMAScript 6. This blog walks through some of these features and how to use them.
• Things I wish I knew about MongoDB a year ago: Some useful information for those of you planning on using MongoDB as part of your solution.
• CP Tent Posts Shortcode: Tent (http://tent.io) is something that I’ve been meaning to look more into, but haven’t had a chance yet. This is a plugin that lets you pull a lists of posts from a Tent server and display them on your WordPress site.
• Best Practices for the Design of Large-Scale Services on Windows Azure Cloud Services: While some of this is .NET specific, most of the information here is generally applicable when designing large-scale services.
• Deploying Ruby on Rails in Windows Azure using the Linux Command-Line tools: A walkthrough of using the command-line tools to create an Ubuntu VM on Windows Azure, and then create a Rails application.
• https://github.com/jbueza/dre: A new Node.js library to access Windows Azure Table storage. Inspired by MongooseJS.

Have a good weekend!

- Larry