Today, Microsoft has made the long-awaited announcement that Windows Azure is coming to Australia ! Of course it’s been possible for Aussies to deploy and use applications in Windows Azure for some time, but this has always required deploying to overseas...

Summary: Even though Windows Azure does a great job of keeping your VMs running, only you know exactly what it means for your own apps to be healthy. This post and sample code shows a pattern for implementing custom health checks that can report the health...

Summary: Startup scripts declared in ServiceDefinition.csdef work well in most cases, but if you need to modify IIS configuration you’ll need to run your scripts from your role’s OnStart method. This post includes some sample code that can do this using...

In my last post on zipping IIS log files in Windows Azure, my ServiceDefinition.csdef file included the following code to set an environment variable to the value of a local resource path: < Task commandLine ="Startup\ScheduleLogFileZipAndDeleteTask...

Summary: If your Windows Azure-hosted website is really popular, the IIS log files can start to get pretty big. To prevent them from filling up your local VM’s quota and to minimise storage size and transfer bandwidth, you can zip the log files...

Summary : If you ever have a need to restrict access to your Windows Azure deployment to known IP address ranges, you can do this by programmatically modifying the Windows Firewall. You’ll need to do this both at startup, and whenever your role...

Windows Azure Diagnostics provides a great way for operations staff, developers and testers to find out what’s going on within a Windows Azure PaaS (Cloud Service) deployment. In a nutshell, it lets you specify what types of logs you are interested in...

Introduction If you’re a regular user of both SharePoint and Lync, you’ve probably seen that SharePoint integrates with Lync by showing users’ presence on the page, and giving you a nice hover dialog allowing you to collaborate with them. But did you...

Most Australians will recognise ABC iView as the country's best online TV service. In recent years they have done a good job of expanding to multiple platforms including PS3, Xbox 360, iOS and many smart TVs. Unfortunately one platform that is close to...

A few months ago I posted on how to automate deployment of Windows Azure projects using MSBuild. While the approach documented in that post continues to work, Windows Azure SDK 1.6 has introduced some new capabilities for managing Windows Azure credentials...

Just a quick note that I’ve edited my previous post Using MSBuild to deploy to multiple Windows Azure environments based on some changes to the platform that have come with the Windows Azure SDK 1.5 and Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets 2.0. The...

Introduction In my last post , I showed how to use Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus Queues with WCF. Service Bus Queues provide a great mechanism for asynchronous communication between between two specific applications or services. However in complex...

In 2008 I posted a series of blog articles about how to use MSMQ, WCF and IIS together. I chose to use this architecture as it combined the scalability and resiliency benefits of durable asynchronous messaging, with the simplicity and power of the WCF...

What is an Environment? Anyone who has worked on a software development project will be familiar with the concept of an “environment”. Simply put, an environment is a set of infrastructure that you can deploy your application to, supporting...

Many developers choose to use service oriented techniques to break large systems into smaller, loosely coupled services. Frequently, each service will be hosted on a different machine and use WS-* protocols for standards-based communication. However there...

Bubble Charts are a great way to visualise data that has three numerical values for each point. Two of the values are plotted on the X and Y axis, while the other is represented via the diameter of the bubble. Excel also supports Bubble Charts with...

Update 6 December 2011: Windows Azure SDK 1.6 includes some significant changes to how credentials and publishing settings are managed, so I've written a new post Automated Build and Deployment with Windows Azure SDK 1.6 which shows how to leverage these...

PowerShell is an amazing technology which I’d love to learn to use properly some day. Unfortunately I’m still at the stage where I don’t really know much about it, but from time to time I need to use it to solve random problems. Luckily, trial and error...

I’ve just come back from Microsoft’s Tech.Ed conferences in Australia and New Zealand, where I presented a session called The role of an architect in an agile team . Thanks to everybody who attended the session, and for the great questions...

Hi again – yes I know it’s been a while. Recently I’ve started a new role in Microsoft which involves helping customers deploy applications on Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. I thought it may be fitting it...

Today’s post is a quick plug for a new tool developed by my friend Olaf Conijn, who (amongst other things) has been a developer on several versions of Enterprise Library. His new tool is called Suggested Resources for .NET Developers , and the current...

Hello again! It’s been a while, I know. I’ve been busy over the last few months with several projects, some of them software related, and one of them human – my son Jesse was born on 26 February 2010. Fun times! Meanwhile, back in Redmond, the p&p...

Just a quick post for anyone attending TechEd Australia and/or New Zealand, in the first couple of weeks of September 2009. I’ll be doing two presentations, so please stop by and say hello (and maybe even watch the sessions!). The sessions I’m presenting...

Where were you at 2:15am (Sydney time) on 5 April 2009? Other than the fact that your memory is pretty hazy now that a few weeks have passed, you’d expect there to be an unambiguous answer to that question. However it turns out you could well have been...

One of the critical responsibilities of every developer and architect is to understand, and know how to prevent, as many kinds of security attacks as possible. While there are many types of attacks and many weapons at our disposal to thwart them, the...