Simon Davies' Blog

UPDATE: The information in this post is now out of date please see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/07/06/windows-azure-deployments-and-the-virtual-ip-address.aspx   Recently I have seen a lot of questions asking how Windows Azure...

Since the commercial release of Windows Azure many questions have been asked about the relationship between the billing portal and the developer portal, for example: How does a subscription in the billing portal relate to the development portal? What...

A few weeks ago I posted about having Ruby on Rails running on Windows Azure . At the end of that post I promised that the next post I did would be to explain how to get it up and running. I still have not got around to writing that post  I have...

Earlier this year I posted about a demo I put together that showed messages flowing between applications on Windows Azure, Google App Engine and an on premise service. Recently Simon Guest produced a demo which he used at Tech Ed Berlin and QCon San Francisco...

Last week we announced the availability of some great new Windows Azure features in the November Windows Azure SDK . One of these features enables Worker Roles to receive network traffic from  both external and internal endpoints using HTTP, HTTPS...

The July CTP release of the Windows Azure SDK and tools is now available . There are a few new features in the release including: The ability to have more than one web and worker role type defined in a service, as was the case previously a service must...

Richard Prodger and Rob Blackwell from Active Web Solutions have just posted about an interesting application that enables the .Net Services Service Bus to used to remotely listen for traffic on any TCP port. This application enables traffic for specified...

A couple of weeks ago I posted about some new features that have been made available in the storage service. Steve Marx has a couple of posts about how to use some of these features. I also noticed that the updated whitepapers on table and blob storage...

The Bing maps team have put together a nice application running on Windows Azure that lets you explore the terabytes of updated data they publish each month. You can take a tour of the new hotspots or explore for yourself here . There’s also a short...

Hot on the heels of the updated Windows Azure May SDK and Tools CTP release the Windows Azure Storage Team have released some new features. Highlights include: Entity Group Transactions for Table Storage – operations can be batched together so that operations...

One of the many important questions that arises when talking to customers and partners about cloud computing is about security, privacy and reliability of systems when hosted in the cloud. The infrastructure that Microsoft runs to support both our services...

Windows Azure tools team have just released an update to the SDK and Tools, along with some general improvements in robustness and bug fixing the major feature is support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta full details at http://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2009...

Following on from yesterdays post on integration via the cloud using .Net Services and the .Net Service Bus I just noticed that there are a great set of White Papers for developers written by Pluralsight covering .Net Services and each of the three constituent...

A few weeks ago at the Architect Insight Conference I showed a very simple demonstration that highlights some of the building block services Microsoft is delivering in the cloud as part of the Azure Services Platform. My intention was to show off a couple...

The March CTP release of the Windows Azure SDK includes support for the IIS 7 FastCGI module which means that php applications can now be run in Windows Azure. I thought I’d take a look at how to set it up, I’ve not set up FastCGI on IIS7 on Windows Server...

The blog entry here talks about how to use a non default SQL Server instance as the store for the developer storage fabric in the Windows Azure SDK. The good news is that the March CTP fixes this issue. In order to specify a different SQL Server instance...

The March CTP release of Windows Azure has a number of interesting new features amongst them is the ability to run applications in full trust mode. Full trust mode in Windows Azure enables a number of scenarios not previously available, amongst these...

I’ve had a couple of conversations about Windows Azure over the past couple of weeks where the subject of Reflection has come up. As Windows Azure comes with its own Code Access Security policy many people are immediately jumping to the conclusion that...

UPDATE: The March Windows Azure CTP now enables the specification of the local SQL Server instance name, details are here The Windows Azure SDK comes with facilities to enable developers to be able to run Windows Azure applications on their local machine...

I’ve been pondering if I should blog or not for a long time, I’ve always found a number of reasons why I shouldn’t bother. Alongside the “Does the world really NEED another blog from someone working for Microsoft?” the major ones have been “What could...