Zane Adam's blog

Continuing Our Windows Azure Platform Innovation

Zane Adam — Mon, 16 May 2011 04:20:00 GMT

We are continuing our innovation in the Windows Azure Platform and releasing at a frequent cadence of high-value new features and enhancements to our public cloud services. Today at TechEd I’m excited to make a few new announcements:

For AppFabric, this past month we have just released the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service, and major enhancements to the Access Control service. At TechEd today we announced two new capabilities for both developers and IT Pros:

We released today new features and enhancements as part of the Windows Azure AppFabric May CTP which adds to the Service Bus more comprehensive pub/sub messaging and enables new scenarios on Windows Azure platform. These scenarios include:
- Async Cloud Eventing – Distribute event notifications to occasionally connected clients (e.g. phones, remote workers, kiosks, etc);
- Event-driven SOA – Loose coupling to enable easy evolution of messaging topology over time; and
- Intra-App Messaging – Load leveling and load balancing for building highly scalable, resilient applications.
We also announced capabilities coming in the Windows Azure AppFabric June CTP, which will provide the AppFabric Application Manager and Developer Tools that make it easy for developers to build, deploy, manage and monitor multi-tier (web, business logic, database) applications as a single logical entity. This CTP will also enable getting these benefits when running Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) services on AppFabric.

For SQL Azure we also recently released new Import/Export feature for SQL Azure as CTP. At TechEd today we announced a set of new developer and IT Pro enhancements:

A new capability (Codename “Austin”) which will make Microsoft StreamInsight’s complex event processing capabilities (available in SQL Server today) available as a service on the Windows Azure platform. This allows customers and partners to build event-driven applications where the analysis of the events is performed in the cloud. This is in private CTP for now, but will be opened up for public CTP later in H2 on the SQL Azure Labs site.
We are integrating the import/export features into the management portal. These features help simplify archiving SQL Azure databases and provide migration between SQL Server on-premises and SQL Azure. This makes it significantly easier to move databases back and forth between on-premises and cloud. Additionally, this enables new hybrid scenarios to extend on-premises data beyond the firewall to the cloud and reach both web and mobile users. By exporting an on-premises database to the cloud and utilizing SQL Azure Data Sync, data will be truly available and kept up to date anywhere – in any of Microsoft’s global datacenters, customer datacenters, and in branch offices for scenarios such as retail point of sale systems.
We will also provide an enhanced management experience through the portal, including enhancements to the web based database manager (formerly called “Project Houston”) for additional schema management, and a new service for managing SQL Azure databases via web services with an OData endpoint.

I’d also like to briefly talk a little more about Codename “Austin”. To learn more about StreamInsight, you can start here, and it adds another dimension to our growing portfolio of cloud data services. Codename “Austin” now offers the capability for creating event-driven systems in the cloud that have high data rates, continuous queries, and low-latency requirements. Industries such as manufacturing, utilities, and web analytics use StreamInsight to identify meaningful trends and patterns as they happen to trigger immediate response actions. Some example scenarios include:

Collecting data from manufacturing applications (e.g. real-time events from plant-floor devices and sensors);
Financial trading applications (e.g. monitoring and capitalizing on current market conditions with very short windows of opportunity);
Web analytics (e.g. immediate click-stream pattern detection and response with targeted advertising.); and
“Smart grid” management (e.g. infrastructure for managing electric grids and other utilities, such as immediate response to variations in energy to minimize or avoid outages or other disruptions of service).

Complementary to BI, complex event processing (CEP) enables real time insight into vast volumes of streaming data; while BI enables analytics and insight into a set of existing data to inform future decision making. Taking StreamInsight into the cloud with Codename “Austin” provides the opportunity to use this as a service instead of implementing this yourself, but more importantly, be able to collect and process events from anywhere on the planet and derive trends from a vastly increased series of events since that data is sent to the cloud.

To read more on the AppFabric announcements you can read the post on the AppFabric Team Blog and visit www.appfabric.net.

To read more on the latest about the SQL Azure announcements at TechEd, check out the SQL Azure team blog.

We continue to listen to your feedback and come out with new and exciting enhancements to our cloud services. So check out the new capabilities and let us know what you think!

DataMarket goes International with new publishers, free trials and new user experiences

Zane Adam — Thu, 12 May 2011 20:13:00 GMT

I am really excited to announce availability of Windows Azure Marketplace Service Update 2. This release include key enhancements to the marketplace based on our customer feedback.

Internationalization

With this release Windows Azure Marketplace is open for business in 8 new countries. DataMarket was made commercially available in Nov 2010 with ability to purchase datasets only in USA. Customers could use free datasets from across the globe. Customers worldwide have been requesting us to enable international purchases for few months. This release is our wave 1 for international roll out and we are enabling purchasing datasets from Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK in local currencies. We will continue to expand this list.

Rich Visualizations

Our customers have been asking us for rich data visualization tools on the marketplace. With this release we have enhanced our service explorer to not just display tabular data but create graphs like line, column, bar and pie. We also enable customers to export the data in various formats like CSV, XLS or XML. This is in addition to exporting data to PowerPivot and partners tools like Tableau.

Free Trials

Customers have also asked us over past few months to enhance our trial experience. There is lots of premium data with no trial data. We have added a new capability which allows customers to use selected offers for free for first 30 days on premium datasets. Content Publishers can still choose to opt-in. Our goal is to work with all our data publishers and have trial experience for most datasets. To begin with MetricMash, Dun & Bradstreet, Boundary Solutions, and StrikeIron all have free offerings to get started.

OAuth 2.0 Support

OAuth 2.0 support enables developers to provide embedded experience for dataset purchase. This is crucial in providing great experience for ISV applications. Great example of this is our Excel Add-in CTP2.

Excel Add-In consent flow reflects OAuth v2 integration

Facebook Integration

Customers can share their favorite datasets using Facebook like button on the marketplace.

For more information on this announcement check out the DataMarket team blog and datamarket.azure.com

Delivering on our roadmap: Announcing the production release of Windows Azure AppFabric Caching and Access Control services

Zane Adam — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 17:32:39 GMT

A few months ago, at the Professional Developer Conference (PDC), we released Community Technology Previews (CTPs) and made several announcements regarding new services and capabilities we are adding to the Windows Azure Platform. Ever since then we have been listening to customer feedback and working hard on delivering against our roadmap. You can find more details on these deliveries in my previous two blog posts on SQL Azure and Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket.

Today at the MIX conference we announced the production release of two of the services that CTPed at PDC: the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching and Access Control services. The updated Access Control is now live, and Caching will be released at the end of April.

These two services are particularly appealing to web developers. The Caching service seamlessly accelerates applications by storing data in memory, and the Access Control service enables the developer to provide users with a single-sign-on experience by providing out-of-the-box support for identities such as Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, as well as enterprise identities such as Active Directory.

Pixel Pandemic, a company developing a unique game engine technology for persistent browser based MMORPGs, is already using the Caching service as part of their solution. Here is a quote from Ebbe George Haabendal Brandstrup, CTO and co-founder, regarding their use of the Caching service:

“We're very happy with how Azure and the caching service is coming along.
Most often, people use a distributed cache to relieve DB load and they'll accept that data in the cache lags behind with a certain delay. In our case, we use the cache as the complete and current representation of all game and player state in our games. That puts a lot extra requirements on the reliability of the cache. Any failed communication when writing state changes must be detectable and gracefully handled in order to prevent data loss for players and with the Azure caching service we’ve been able to meet those requirements.”

Umbraco, one of the most deployed Web Content Management Systems on the Microsoft stack, can be easily integrated with the Access Control service through an extension. Here is a quote from Niels Hartvig, founder of the company, regarding the Access Control service:

“We're excited about the very diverse integration scenarios the ACS (Access Control service) extension for Umbraco allows. The ACS Extension for Umbraco is one great example of what is possible with Windows Azure and the Microsoft Web Platform.”

You can read more about these services and the release announcement on the Windows Azure AppFabric Team Blog.

We are continuing to innovate and move quickly in our cloud services and release new services as well as enhance our existing services every few months.

The releases of these two services are a great enhancement to our cloud services offering enabling developers to more easily build applications on top of the Windows Azure Platform.

Look forward to more CTPs and releases in the coming months!

New Import/Export Feature for SQL Azure Database

Zane Adam — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 14:50:00 GMT

Today we released some new CTP features to make importing and exporting data between SQL Azure and SQL Server databases much easier. Through updates to the DAC framework that will be shipping in the next version of SQL Server (code-named “Denali”), migrating and moving data back and forth between SQL Server and SQL Azure requires fewer steps and packages everything into a new export file.

Bundled inside the export file is not only database data, but also schema – such as logins, users, tables, columns, indexes, and stored procedures. Archiving and restoring all of these things now just requires two statements from a command prompt. We’ll be adding even more capabilities to this over the next few months, so stay tuned.

For more information on this announcement, check out the SQL Azure blog and SQL Azure Labs.

DataMarket Announces New Content and a Service Update!

Zane Adam — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 23:08:37 GMT

Today the Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket team announced the release of the first DataMarket Service Update and the February Content Update including a number of exciting new offerings.

The new offerings include both public and commercial data and come from a number of different organizations. The announcement introduces data offerings from Boundary Solutions, Inc. who offers an inventory of over 25 million parcels, Gregg London Consulting, who offers a comprehensive list of U.P.C.’s and related product information, StockViz, The Government of the United Kingdom, UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the United Nations, to DataMarket.

For more information on this announcement check out the DataMarket team blog and datamarket.azure.com

New Offerings on DataMarket!

Zane Adam — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 20:56:01 GMT

Today, the Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket team announced the release of a number of exciting new offerings on DataMarket. The new offerings include both public and commercial and come from a number of companies, some entirely new to DataMarket, and others who already have existing offers on the site. The announcement introduces D&B, one of the world’s leading sources for commercial information and insight on businesses, ESRI, a leader in geographic information systems (GIS) solutions, and StrikeIron, an innovator in the data-as-a-service (DaaS) space, to DataMarket.

For more information on this announcement check out the DataMarket team blog and datamarket.azure.com.

Industry Analysts Agree.....

Zane Adam — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 23:03:42 GMT

Over the past 2 months we have seen tremendous validation from leading industry analyst firms (Gartner and Forrester) that we are delivering great value for our customers and are headed in the right direction with our relational database, middleware services and data market in the cloud, as well as our traditional integration offerings.

Following are recent analyst reports on this topic:

SQL Azure Raises The Bar On Cloud Databases (Forrester Research, Inc., November 2, 2010, .pdf file, 187 kb) Over the past six months, Forrester interviewed 26 companies using Microsoft SQL Azure to find out about their implementations. Most customers stated that SQL Azure delivers a reliable cloud database platform to support various small to moderately sized applications as well as other data management requirements such as backup, disaster recovery, testing, and collaboration. In the report, analyst Noel Yuhanna states that key enhancements position SQL Azure as a leader in the emerging category of cloud databases and writes that it delivers the most innovative, integrated and flexible solution.

Windows Azure AppFabric: A Strategic Core of Microsoft's Cloud Platform (Gartner, November 15, 2010) Examines Microsoft’s strategy with Windows Azure AppFabric and the AppFabric services, concluding that “continuing strategic investment in Windows Azure is moving Microsoft toward a leadership position in the cloud platform market, but success is not assured until user adoption confirms the company's vision and its ability to execute in this new environment.”

Unlock the value of your data with Azure DataMarket (Blog post by James Staten, Forrester Research, October 29, 2010) In this article James Staten provides more commentary from the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, including a deeper look at Azure DataMarket.

Quotes from the article: “What eBay did for garage sales, DataMarket does for data… With Azure DataMarket now you can unlock the potential of your valuable data and get paid for it because it provides these mechanisms for assigning value to your data, licensing and selling it, and protecting it.”

Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic SOA-Style Application Projects (Gartner, Inc., October 21, 2010) Microsoft is positioned in the Leaders’ Quadrant of this report which examines vendors' application infrastructure worthiness for systematic service-oriented architecture (SOA)-style application projects. According to Gartner, “Systematic projects include long-term consideration and project planning in the process of design and technology selection for the application. They target applications that are intended for extended periods of use, carry advanced service-level requirements and typically have an impact on the overall information context of the business organization.”

Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic Application Integration Projects (Gartner, Inc., October 18, 2010) Microsoft is positioned in the Leaders’ Quadrant of this report that identifies which products contain the features required to address the needs of systematic application-to-application (A2A), B2B and cloud-based application and integration projects. According to Gartner, “[t]he part of the application infrastructure market focused on integration products for A2A, B2B and cloud-based application integration will undergo consolidation, because multiple product features are used across each of the project types. Many users are looking to support their integration projects with an integrated suite provided by one vendor, thus eliminating the burden to act as a system integrator for application infrastructure.”

The Forrester Wave™: Comprehensive Integration Solutions, Q4 2010 (Forrester Research, Inc., November 9, 2010, .pdf file, 825 kb) Forrester Research Inc., a leading independent research firm, recognized Microsoft as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Comprehensive Integration Solutions, Q4 2010 report. Microsoft’s BizTalk 2010 received some of the top-level scores in the areas of integration server and application development support.

Beyond the continued validation we have seen from industry analysts on our relational database and middleware services in the cloud, we have received similar validation from customers this fall at the many industry events we participated in. Your feedback is very important to us and we encourage you to take advantage of our free trial offers of SQL Azure and Windows Azure AppFabric. Click on the links below, give them a try and let us know what you think!

NEW! Windows Azure Platform Management Portal

Zane Adam — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 20:35:09 GMT

We have launched the new Windows Azure Platform Management Portal, and with it the database manager for SQL Azure (formerly known as Project Houston). Now, you can manage all your Windows Azure platform resources from a single location – including your SQL Azure database.

The management portal seamless allows for complete administration of all Windows Azure platform resources, streamlines administration of creating and managing SQL Azure databases, and allows for ultra-efficient administrator of SQL Azure.

The new management portal is 100% Silverlight and features getting started wizards to walk you through the process of creating subscriptions, servers, and databases along with integrated help, and a quick link ribbon bar.

The database manager (formerly known as Project “Houston”) is a lightweight and easy to use database management tool for SQL Azure databases. It is designed specifically for web developers and other technology professionals seeking a straightforward solution to quickly develop, deploy, and manage their data-driven applications in the cloud. Project “Houston” provides a web-based database management tool for basic database management tasks like authoring and executing queries, designing and editing a database schema, and editing table data.

Major features in this release include:

Navigation pane with object search functionality
Information cube with basic database usage statistics and resource links
Table designer and table data editor
Aided view designer
Aided stored procedure designer
T-SQL editor

To reach the new management portal you need go to: http://windows.azure.com; and for the time being the old management portal can be reached at: http://sql.azure.com.

Along with the new Management Portal the Windows Azure team has shipped the Windows Azure SDK V1.3 (November 2010) , for more information see the announcement on the Windows Azure blog.

And yes, remember that you can get started with SQL Azure using the free trial offer.

DataMarket: New Content Available and Paid Transactions Enabled!

Zane Adam — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 11:38:00 GMT

With the PDC’10 launch of DataMarket as a part of the Windows Azure Marketplace, we introduced the premium online marketplace to find, share, advertise, buy and sell premium data sets to customers.

Today’s update to DataMarket enables paid transactions for all our US-based customers.

Moreover, there are some great new additions to our list of content providers, including:

You can get more details about this announcement on the DataMarket blog, and explore these datasets at https://datamarket.azure.com.

Windows Azure Marketplace: the DataMarket news at PDC’10

Zane Adam — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 11:30:00 GMT

As I mentioned in my previous post, today we announced the launch of the Windows Azure Marketplace. Windows Azure Marketplace is an online marketplace to find, share, advertise, buy and sell building block components, premium data sets and finished applications. The section of Windows Azure Marketplace focusing on ‘data’ related transactions has been named DataMarket (previously Microsoft Codename “Dallas”).

DataMarket will include data, imagery, and real-time web services from leading commercial data providers and authoritative public data sources. Customers will have access to datasets such as demographic, environmental, financial, retail, weather and sports.

DataMarket enables developers to access data as a service. DataMarket exposes OData API’s which can be leveraged by developers on any platform to build innovative applications. Developers can also use service references to these API’s in Visual studio, making it easy for developers to consume the datasets.

Information workers will now be able to make better data purchasing decisions using rich visualization on DataMarket. DataMarket connectivity from Excel and PowerPivot will enable information workers to perform better analytics by mashing up enterprise and industry data.

Today’s key announcements around DataMarket include:

Windows Azure Marketplace is the all-up marketplace brand for Microsoft’s cloud platform and “Dallas” is now the premium Data section of this marketplace.
DataMarket has been released to web with a brand new user experience and expanded datasets from leading content providers.
The ‘Excel Add-in for DataMarket’ is now available for download HERE.
An updated version of PowerPivot, with DataMarket connectivity is available HERE.
DataMarket has been launched with over 35 content provider partners with content ranging from demographic, geospatial, financial, retail, sports, weather, environmental and health care.

Today we also announced some of our early adopter ISV/SI partners on DataMarket which include Accenture, SAS, Tableau, Dundas, Jackbe, Enroute, Sitecore, Pervasive, among others.

Here is what some of our partners have to say about DataMarket.

Call to Action:

Explore available datasets at http://datamarket.azure.com
Download and use the Excel add-in for Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket - HERE

New Windows Azure Platform-as-a-Service capabilities unveiled at PDC

Zane Adam — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Today at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference we announced a wide range of new Platform-as-a-Service, or PaaS, capabilities for the Windows Azure Platform. The PDC is a fully virtualized event, so I invite you to visit the site and view the keynotes and sessions. But I wanted to also provide an overview of some of the news here on the blog, offer my perspective and direct you to additional information resources. (In particular, I recommend you read a short white paper we just published about Windows Azure AppFabric.)

I’m going to focus on the new services announced for SQL Azure and Windows Azure AppFabric middleware that enable developers to build powerful and unique business applications. Windows Azure also has some new announcements, to learn more you should check out their blog.

Certainly a top priority for us is to help developers improve productivity and take their applications to market faster. Developers often spend a majority of their time managing and enhancing their applications, so we are equally focused on providing developer solutions that span the entire lifecycle of an app. We think this focus and what we’re delivering against it really sets apart our approach and technology.

That said, it begins with solutions for rapid development through building-block services.

We continually roll out more PaaS services which abstract the Windows Azure Platform environment and minimize development complexity. These building block services are open and interoperable across languages (.NET, Java, Ruby, PHP and others), and provide a powerful, pre-built “class library” that you can just provision, configure and use. No installation or management of machines or instances required.

Today, we delivered community technology previews of new and enhanced services for Windows Azure AppFabric, our cloud middleware platform for developing, deploying and managing business applications.

New Caching service will help you accelerate performance of Windows Azure and SQL Azure apps with distributed, in-memory application cache.
Enhanced Service Bus service will help ensure reliable, enterprise-quality delivery of messages to third-parties or mobile devices with durable messaging.
Enhanced Access Control service will allow you to federate identity from Active Directory, Windows Live ID, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. with new protocol support, including OAuth WRAP, WS-Trust, WS-Federation protocols; SAML 1.1, SAML 2.0, and Simple Web Token.

See the Windows Azure AppFabric blog for more information.

In addition to these building blocks, we announced new Windows Azure AppFabric capabilities providing an end-to-end composite application environment. Our goal here is to help developers streamline the process of assembling various home-grown and third party services and to provide more sophisticated deployment and management capabilities that span the web, middle tier and database in the cloud.

Coming in the first half of next year:

AppFabric Composition Model and Visual Tools will enable you to compose applications on the Windows Azure platform with extensions to the .NET Framework, building on the familiar Azure Service Model and adding new capabilities for describing all of an app’s components. You will be able to assemble code elements from your existing application with new cloud services and tie them all together through a new Visual Studio-based designer experience.
AppFabric Composite App service allows you to take the Composition Model and automate the deployment, configuration, control, monitoring, troubleshooting, reporting and optimization of an application without the usual manual steps with a multi-tenant, managed service.

Both of the AppFabric building block services and new composite app capabilities are built on a shared AppFabric Container application infrastructure which ensures scale out, availability, multi-tenancy and sandboxing of your application components with a high-performance runtime Container optimized for cloud-scale services and mid-tier components. It uses embedded caching for high-performance data and persistence management.

Today we also introduced several new SQL Azure capabilities:

SQL Azure Reporting CTP: SQL Azure Reporting enables developers to enhance their applications by embedding cloud based reports on information stored in a SQL Azure database, thereby allowing the users of these applications to gain greater insight on their line of business data without having to worry about setting up machines or instances. Developers can author reports using familiar SQL Server Reporting Services tools and then use these reports in their applications which may be on-premises or in the cloud.
SQL Azure Data Sync CTP 2: At PDC we are also announcing an update to SQL Azure Data Sync to enable synchronization of entire databases or specific tables between on-premises SQL Server and SQL Azure, giving customers greater flexibility in building solutions that span on-premises and the cloud. Customers can now synchronize SQL Azure databases across datacenters as well as with on-premises SQL Server.
Database manager for SQL Azure: As part of the Windows Azure platform developer portal refresh which will be available by the end of the year, we are announcing a new lightweight, web-based database management and querying capability for SQL Azure databases. This capability was formerly referred to as “Project Houston”, and allows customers to have a streamlined experience within the web browser without having to download any tools.

At PDC, customers can immediately register to get more information about the new capabilities. Limited CTP programs of the new SQL Azure Reporting and Data Sync services will be available by end of year 2010. Invitations to participate and try out the services will be sent as we continue to build out capacity.

To learn more, I encourage you to visit the SQL Azure blog for more details.

One of the most exciting new building block services is DataMarket (formerly Project “Dallas.”) Commercially available today, it is part of the new Windows Azure Marketplace and enables developers to easily discover, purchase, and manage data of all types – media, relational, real-time web services and more. DataMarket APIs enable developers to use “data-as-a-service” via Visual Studio, making it easy for them to utilize the datasets. SDKs are available for .NET, Silverlight, Ajax, iOS, Java, PHP, and Ruby. Already there are more than 35 data providers offering subscriptions on DataMarket. Visit the DataMarket blog for more information.

Wow – that was a lot…! When you look across all of the innovative new PaaS capabilities announced this week, across both the building block services as well as the new composite application innovation for rapidly developing, deploying and managing your application – there are a lot of exciting new benefits for both developers and IT Pros alike. Furthermore, it builds in the ongoing ability to more quickly and rapidly respond to customer feedback and competitive change – not just building the app, but also getting to a next version and continuing to innovate. This is true differentiation and sustainable advantage that sets you apart from the rest of the pack!

Announcing BizTalk Server 2010 RTM and General Availability date

Zane Adam — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 17:32:00 GMT

Today we are excited to announce that we have Released to Manufacturing (RTM) BizTalk Server 2010 and it will be available for purchase starting October 1^st, 2010.

BizTalk Server 2010 is the seventh major release of our flagship enterprise integration product, which includes new support for Windows Server AppFabric to provide pre-integrated support for developing new composite applications. This allows customers to maximize the value of existing Line of Business (LOB) systems by integrating and automating their business processes, and putting real-time, end-to-end enterprise integration within reach of every customer. All this coupled with the confidence of a proven mission-critical integration infrastructure that is available to companies of all sizes at a fraction of the cost of other competing products.

According to Steven Smith, President and Chief Executive Officer at GCommerce, “GCommerce has bet our mission-critical value-chain functionality on BizTalk Sever 2010 which we use to automate the secure and reliable exchange of information with our trading partners. Additionally, the Windows Azure Platform allows us to extend our existing business-to-business process into new markets such as our cloud-based inventory solution called the Virtual Inventory Cloud (VIC), which is based upon Windows Azure and SQL Azure. This extension to our trading platform allows us to connect our buyers experience from the purchasing process within VIC all the way through to the on-premises business systems built around BizTalk. This new GCommerce capability drives both top-line revenue as well as reduces bottom line costs, by making special orders faster than before.” Details are available in the GCommerce case study.

The new BizTalk Server 2010 release enables businesses to:

Maximize existing investments by using pre-integrated BizTalk Server 2010 support with both Windows Server AppFabric and SharePoint Server 2010 to enable new composite application scenarios;
Further reduce total cost of ownership and enhance performance for large and mission-critical deployments through a new pre-defined dashboard that enables efficient performance tuning and streamlining deployments across environments, along with pre-integration with System Center;
Efficient B2B integration with highly-scalable Trading Partner Management and advanced capabilities for complex data mapping.

BizTalk Server 2010 also delivers updated platform support for Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010.

BizTalk Server is the most widely deployed product in the enterprise integration space with over 10,000 customers and 81% of the Global 100.

This release is another step in the on-going investments we have made in our application infrastructure technologies. Along with the releases earlier this calendar year of .NET Framework 4, Windows Server AppFabric and Windows Azure AppFabric, BizTalk Server 2010 makes it easier for customers to build composite applications that span both on-premises LOB systems and new applications deployed onto the public cloud.

To learn more regarding the BizTalk Server 2010 release and download our new free developer edition, please visit BizTalk Server website; more detailed product announcements about BizTalk Server 2010 are also contained on the BizTalk Server product team blog. You can learn more about Microsoft’s Application Infrastructure capabilities by exploring on-demand training at www.appinfrastructure.com.

New Features in SQL Azure - August Update

Zane Adam — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:28:00 GMT

As part of our continued commitment to provide regular and frequent updates to SQL Azure, I am pleased to announce Service Update 4 (SU4). SU4 is now live with three new updates - database copy, improved help system, and deployment of our web-based tool Code-Named "Houston" to multiple data centers. Here are the details:

Support for database copy: Database copy allows you to make a real-time complete snapshot of your database into a different server in the data center. This new copy feature is the first step in backup support for SQL Azure, allowing you to get a complete backup of any SQL Azure database before making schema or database changes to the source database. The ability to snapshot a database easily is our top requested feature for SQL Azure. Note that this feature is in addition to our automated database replication, which keeps your data always available. The relevant MSDN Documentation is available here, titled: Copying Databases in SQL Azure.

Additional MSDN Documentation: MSDN has created a new section called Development: How-to Topics (SQL Azure Database) which has links to information about how to perform common programming tasks with Microsoft SQL Azure Database.

Update on "Houston": Microsoft Project Code-Named "Houston" is a light weight web-based database management tool for SQL Azure. Houston, which runs on top of Windows Azure, is now available in multiple datacenters, reducing the latency between the application and your SQL Azure database.

Moving to the SQL Azure Cloud from Access or MySQL

Zane Adam — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:47:00 GMT

Today Microsoft is releasing to web an important update to the SSMA (SQL Server Migration Assistant) family of products which includes support for both Access and MySQL.

This release makes it possible to move data directly and easily from local Microsoft Access databases or MySQL databases into SQL Azure and realize the benefits of cloud computing. This enables two key new scenarios:

1) Microsoft Access provides a powerful rapid application development environment for information workers, teams and departments to quickly develop solutions that track, manage, prioritize, and act upon business information. When scenarios require increased scalability in a managed IT environment, you can “upsize” your data from the Access Jet engine to the full relational database of SQL Azure. By transitioning from the Access database to SQL Azure (using the migration assistant), you get a self-managing, highly available and scalable cloud relational database back-end built on proven and familiar SQL Server technologies. Best of all, your existing Access application front ends can continue to be used with the data now residing in SQL Azure – often with very little modification needed! Access 2010 can connect transparently to SQL Azure data, opening up opportunities for Access users and technology providers to create rich experiences (using the familiar Access application environment they already use) while leveraging the benefits of the cloud on a “pay as you grow” elastic basis.

2) MySQL databases can also be easily moved to the cloud, to help you better consolidate your disparate departmental or ad-hoc data into a centrally managed and highly scalable environment on SQL Azure. As part of this release, Microsoft is also releasing the SSMA for MySQL v1 which allows migration from MySQL databases (v4.1 and above) to SQL Azure.

For more information on how to use Access 2010 with SQL Azure, please also see the detailed blog that was posted at TechEd which walks through how to get started. Please note that at the time of the TechEd it was not possible to move data directly to SQL Azure – now it is possible using this new update.

The SSMA toolkits were designed to tackle the complex manual process that customers deal with when migrating databases. By using the SQL Server Migration Assistants, customers and partners reduce the manual effort; as a result the time, cost and risks associated with migrating are significantly reduced.

The latest SQL Server Migration Assistant is available for free download and preview at:

1. SSMA for Access v4.2 out of the two downloads, ‘SSMA 2008 for Access’ enables migration to SQL Azure

2. SSMA for MySQL v1.0, out of the two downloads, ‘SSMA 2008 for MySQL’ enables migration to SQL Azure

Announcing the Third Community Technology Preview of Codename “Dallas”

Zane Adam — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 03:08:00 GMT

During his keynote speech at the Worldwide Partner Conference in July, Microsoft President Bob Muglia announced that the third Community Technology Preview of “Dallas” would be available within 30 days. Today, we are thrilled to announce the release of “Dallas” CTP3 at www.sqlazureservices.com.

This new community technology preview brings with it a number of exciting improvements, rounding out the “Dallas” experience and making it easier to develop applications using data from “Dallas” subscriptions. CTP3 brings with it a number of small incremental changes as well as larger, highly-requested new features such as:

Basic Authentication to authenticate users of Dallas data offerings
Flexible querying of OData content, as announced earlier this year at MIX, beyond simple web services
Support for Add Service Reference in Visual Studio
New content providers and data

For more information and to experience “Dallas” CTP3 for yourself, visit www.sqlazureservices.com.

New Windows Server AppFabric benchmarks vs. IBM WebSphere 7 and IBM eXtreme Scale 7.1

Zane Adam — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:58:00 GMT

Microsoft just released two new benchmark reports for Windows Server AppFabric and Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0. These reports can be downloaded from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/stocktrader-benchmarks.aspx.

The first looks at the use of Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric Caching Services, comparing the performance of Microsoft Windows Server AppFabric to IBM eXtreme Scale 7.1 as a middle-tier distributed caching solution.

The second report looks at the performance of .NET Framework 4.0 in a variety of scenarios as compared to IBM WebSphere 7.0. Both reports include pricing information and comparisons, as well as full tuning details and source code.

The results show a very large price-performance advantage with Windows Server AppFabric and Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 vs. IBM WebSphere 7 and IBM eXtreme Scale 7.1.

I encourage customers to visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/stocktrader-benchmarks.aspx and download the two benchmark reports.

New AppFabric Access Control service in LABS delivers greatly expanded capabilities

Zane Adam — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:26:00 GMT

Today we are excited to announce the Windows Azure AppFabric LABS August 2010 Release. This release represents a significant expansion of the capabilities of AppFabric Access Control. As you know, we released the Access Control service back in April to full general availability, as a production, SLA-backed service. Based upon the great feedback we’ve been getting from our customers using the service we prioritized delivering a quick update to address top customer requests.

Highlights of this release:

Expanded Identity provider support - allowing developers to build applications and services that accept both enterprise identities (through integration with Active Directory Federation Services 2.0), and a broad range of web identities (through support of Windows Live ID, Open ID, Google, Yahoo, Facebook identities) using a single code base.
WS-Trust and WS-Federation protocol support – Interoperable WS-* support is important to many of our enterprise customers.
Full integration with Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) - developers can apply the familiar WIF identity programming model and tooling for cloud applications and services.
A new management web portal - gives simple, complete control over all Access Control settings.

This release makes it easier for developers to support a broad range of security and access scenarios, and we believe it is a major step forward towards our goal of supporting “any identity, any application”. This also extends the value that our customers get when they use cloud applications together with our full on-premises identity technology stack, including ADFS 2.0 and WIF.

Access to our LABS environment is free, and we encourage your feedback as we move this version of the service towards production. To create an account, please visit http://portal.appfabriclabs.com.

For more information on this release, please see this post on the Windows Azure AppFabric Team Blog.

Announcing CTP1 of Project “Houston”

Zane Adam — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 23:24:00 GMT

We are pleased to announce the CTP 1 of Project “Houston”. Originally announced at TechEd as “SQL Server Web Manager”, Project “Houston” is a lightweight and easy to use database management tool for SQL Azure databases. It is designed specifically for Web developers and other technology professionals seeking a straightforward solution to quickly develop, deploy, and manage their data-driven applications in the cloud.

Project “Houston” provides a web-based database management tool for basic database management tasks like authoring and executing queries, designing and editing a database schema, and editing table data. It is now available on SQL Azure Labs.

Partners at WPC discuss benefits of SQL Azure and AppFabric

Zane Adam — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:17:00 GMT

The Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) is a great chance for us to sit down with industry partners and understand their latest plans for adopting cloud technologies and the opportunities they see with SQL Azure, Windows Azure AppFabric, and “Dallas” –as they adopt the Windows Azure Platform and deliver value to customers in new ways. I’ll be sharing some of these stories and usage scenarios with you by linking to some very short partner interviews, presentations, and demos captured onsite here at the conference.

First up, here is a link to Brian Rose at Infor, discussing the benefits they see with SQL Azure and Windows Azure AppFabric. Infor is a 2 Billion dollar per year company with more than 70,000 customers worldwide. We are pleased to see Infor adopt the Windows Azure Platform!

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Here's Al Perez from Total Computer, sharing his thoughts.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

This is Darren Guarnaccia from Sitecor, talking about Azure.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

And here is Jason Popillion from GCommerce.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Rainer Stropek from Software Architects, shares his thoughts.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

And finally, its Rob McGreevy from Invensys.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

News on Microsoft codename “Dallas” at WWPC 2010

Zane Adam — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Today at the Worldwide Partner Conference, we announced some continued momentum around Microsoft codename “Dallas”.

Businesses can use “Dallas” to discover, manage, and purchase premium data subscriptions that can be integrated into applications. For ISVs, this eliminates the need to sign contracts with individual content providers and instead use “Dallas” for one stop data shopping that is easy to manage. For content providers, “Dallas” provides a simplified way to distribute data to a broad audience.

The current list of content providers for “Dallas” include NASA, National Geographic, Associated Press, Zillow.com, and Weather Central—just to name a few. And the list continues to grow with some impressive new content providers being announced today.

During his keynote speech at WWPC, Microsoft President Bob Muglia made the following announcements on Microsoft Codename “Dallas”:

“Dallas” will reach commercial availability in the fourth quarter of 2010.
Demonstrated an on-stage preview of the updated and impressive “Dallas” user experience.
The third Community Technology Preview (CTP) will be available in the next 30 days.
An impressive list of new content providers will offer public and premium content on “Dallas”. See below.

Watch the keynote at www.digitalwpc.com. For additional information on “Dallas” please visit www.microsoft.com/dallas.

Announcing availability of the Windows Azure AppFabric July Release

Zane Adam — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 14:58:00 GMT

The Windows Azure AppFabric July Release is live as of July 1^st, 2010. This is our second update since commercial availability for the Windows Azure platform began earlier this year, and we are pleased to deliver on our commitment to provide you with updates and service improvements on a regular basis.

With this release, we are expanding the benefits of Windows Azure AppFabric in two key areas:

1. Extending AppFabric to web browsers and mobile devices.

2. Providing an SDK to support .NET 4.

Support for Rich Internet Applications Just Got Better With Commercial Support for Silverlight and Flash clients:

We have added support for cross-domain policy files, allowing Silverlight and Flash clients to make cross-domain calls to the Service Bus and Access Control Service. This is our first step in addressing the needs we have heard from you around providing first-class support for Rich Internet Applications.

New Azure AppFabric SDK Now Offers Support for .NET 4:

We are also delivering a new version of the Windows Azure AppFabric SDK that supports .NET 4. This allows clients and services written in .NET 4, whether on-premises or hosted in Windows Azure, to connect to the Service Bus and Access Control service. To obtain the latest copy of the AppFabric SDK, visit the AppFabric portal or the Download Center. For a complete list of known issues and changes in this release, please refer to the release notes. More details about AppFabric are available in our FAQ.

All of these features are available today. Thank you for your business and your continued interest in Windows Azure AppFabric.

Delivering new features for SQL Azure today

Zane Adam — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:51:00 GMT

My name is Zane Adam and I am the GM for the Microsoft Azure business driving SQL Azure, Windows Azure AppFabric, Microsoft codename “Dallas” and middleware.

Today I wanted to share some updates with you on some new features for SQL Azure which we announced earlier in the month at TechEd North America.

Today, the following updates are broadly available:

1. SQL Azure Database size - We are expanding SQL Azure to support up to 50GB per database. With this update, SQL Azure now supports up to 5GB in the Web Edition, and up to 50GB in the Business Edition. SQL Azure can scale to multi-terabytes (across db instances) and is built from the ground up for scaling-out, high performance and high availability.

2. Spatial data support—Geography and Geometry types and query support in T-SQL are now supported in SQL Azure. Customers wanting to run location aware applications can now do so on the Windows Azure Platform.

3. Public preview of SQL Azure Data Sync Service (released at TechEd)— Expanding on the current ability to sync between SQL Server and SQL Azure, now you can also distribute and sync data across multiple datacenters and multiple SQL Azure instances around the globe. Click here to give it a try.

4. Office 2010 Support for SQL Azure (released at TechEd) – This new feature offers native data connectivity support from Microsoft Office (e.g. Access, Excel and PowerPivot) to SQL Azure databases, providing more choices to connect rich Office Business Applications with databases, running either on-premises or in the cloud.

Your feedback has been instrumental in all of the above announcements on SQL Azure and the future will continue to be bright as we set our sights on the next set of priorities for helping you more efficiently meet your IT needs.