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12 May 2009

Are you confused about Windows Azure?

In my daily life here in the land of Microsoft Headquarters, I often interact with a whole variety of developers & designers from many places both local and far.

I was talking in the hallway the other day with one of the guys in the Windows Azure team around how folks are groking the Silverlight + Windowz Azure integration.

I was asked “How are you finding folks in your space approaching Windows Azure”.

For the first time in my career, I had no answer (which a smart ass like me is a rare thing heh).

my response:

“…ya know, I have absolutely no idea, I've not really paid too much attention to it all and just assumed someone else was on that case..”

It’s now Monday and the question bugs me as I rarely let questions like this go undiscovered.

So with that, I have but one question for you the reader:

What part of Windows Azure are you struggling with? do you want to know more about how it and Silverlight can work hand in hand or do you feel that’s covered well.

You tell me, and I’ll track down the answers from the actual Windows Azure guys as I’m surrounded by them on my floor. So use me!!!!

Ask away.

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# Steve said:

Until recently with all the new stuff out in the MS development world especially in the Silverlight space Azure is not something I had the luxury of looking at.  That being said I have already had a meeting with a client that I have been porting a winforms app to SL for and they are keen to have it fully hosted as an end to end solution in the cloud which is a drastic change to their usual corporate policy.  I therefore have watched a number of presentations on the mix site and ch9 and added a few azure blogs to my RSS feeds, to get up to speed.  Ultimately it looks like it can do what the app requires but so can Amazon so until Microsoft give some idea of pricing models I am not going to specifically target the Azure SDK and instead will just leave the app in a more generic, albeit Microsoft Stack.  When the numbers come in if they weigh up and the product is stable only then would I spend the time to load the SDK and move the app to it.

12 May 09 at 8:30 AM
# JC said:

My confusion about Azure reminds me a lot of my confusion about web services when I first heard about them.  

What makes a good Azure service?  When should I avoid it?

Where does Azure fit in a Silverlight 3 RIA Services app?  Do I host my database and services with Microsoft?

And, when I'm ready to get started prototyping something with Azure is it going to cost me - even better is it free for personal use?

12 May 09 at 10:47 AM
# skc said:

Well, we have no idea abotu pricing obviously...they could at least let us know whether or not they'll be competitive with AWS. The other thing is, at launch, will Azure be available only to developers in the US or not? Thats probably even more important because there are those of us that are actually writing code today on Azure and we have no idea whether or not we'll even be allowed to use it at go live. I suspect however that you won't be able to get these answers from the team. God knows I've tried.

12 May 09 at 11:03 AM
# Bryant Likes said:

I think it'd be great to see some more examples of SL2/SL3 running from Azure (or just integrating with it). I think the only real example I've seen was the one on Jonas blog.

12 May 09 at 11:11 AM
# Perry said:

I'm building a complete RIA that runs 100% on Azure. My SL app is being served by a WebRole which communicates to a WCF service in that same WebRole. I'm using Azure Tables for data persistence.

I've done several deployments and my biggest gripe by far, is the fact when you deploy to the Staging servers Azure will generate a URL for of the format GUID.cloudapp.net. Arrrgh!!!

It is impossible for me test, the SL app has in its client config the URLs that it needs to access, but I want to access the staging servers, which I only know after I deploy. It would be totally acceptable that a guid is generated per staging account, but it shouldn't change every time I deploy.

For those asking about pricing, I believe they announced that pricing and SLAs will be announced in the summer/July time frame.

12 May 09 at 6:56 PM
# skc said:

Perry, your app sounds alot like mine architecturally. I haven't yet tried to deploy the app though as I'm only a third of the way done with dev, but I hope such issues will be ironed out by then

14 May 09 at 2:41 AM
# robert little said:

Are you kidding me? I'm supposed to be able to read the license terms in this tiny textbox? Are you sure Microsoft is supposed to be making software?

http://i41.tinypic.com/30kfwhu.png

21 May 09 at 2:53 PM

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About scbarnes

Scott Barnes currently is a Rich Platform Product Manager (WPF & Silverlight). He has been working with Adobe/Macromedia technology for the past 10 years with a main focus specifically on Internet Applications (aka. RIA, Rich Client Technology etc).

Scott first started out as a graphic designer in the late 90’s and over the years developed a passion for programmatic art (Designer + Developer mind). He recently has branched out further into 3D modelling and animation making full use of both his designer + developer mindset.

"..The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man..." - George Bernard Shaw
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