UPDATE: The information in this post is now out of date please see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/07/06/windows-azure-deployments-and-the-virtual-ip-address.aspx   Recently I have seen a lot of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 allocates IP addresses to services. At this time...

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 is the difference between the Account Owner and the...

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 had quite a lot of people contact me and ask me for...

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 have at least one role of one type defined but can...

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 have been published, one thing in particular caught...

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 video intro to it here and more info on Chris Pendleton...

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 are performed atomically where those operations...

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/2009/05/28/may-ctp-of-the-windows-azure-tools-and-sdk...

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 before and I don't know anything about php,...

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 simply issue the command dsint /sqlinstance:<your...

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 are: Executing code in assemblies that require Full...

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 this must mean that Reflection is not allowed, this...

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, one of these is the Development Storage Service...

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 I possibly add that isn’t already out there?” and ...