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Easy messages in Windows Azure

For a while now I have been using a class that wraps and adds extra functionality to the queue in the StorageLib sample in the Windows Azure SDK. There are a few benefits that this wrapper provides, so I thought it might be time to share: Strongly typed Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 14, 2009 1:09 PM by neilk | 1 Comments

UK Azure Technical Briefings

We are running a couple of briefings on the Microsoft cloud technology stack for ISVs in the next few weeks. I’ll be doing a bit on Windows Azure but the Live Platform and SQL Services will also be on the agenda. If you are interested in finding out about Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 06, 2009 1:00 PM by neilk | 2 Comments

Every cloud has a Silverlight lining

On a recent POC we found a bit of a problem with the time it was talking to deploy our application to Azure’s staging environment then deploy it into production. Now I must point out that we had a token that allowed us to have quite a lot of machine instances Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 18, 2008 2:44 PM by neilk | 0 Comments

Reliable Azure Processes - Part 4 - Scaling Down!

One thing that you need to consider when designing your Azure application is " what is the minimum deployment "? If your application has 5 different queues with a worker role to read each queue, we are going to want at least 2 instances per Read More...
Posted Monday, December 15, 2008 4:55 PM by neilk | 1 Comments

Reliable Azure Processes - Part 3 - Dealing with errors

After the last 2 blog entries, we have our worker process's main loop feed back into Azure's heath checking system. If we go unhealthy, Azure will notice and will eventually restart the worker role. However, this is a bit heavy handed; what if the failure Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 10, 2008 5:09 PM by neilk | 2 Comments

Reliable Azure Processes - Part 2 - was part 1 thread safe?

Last week, for a Azure POC, we implemented something similar to the pattern shown in Part 1 . One revision, that I asked to be made, was to surround the DateTime access code with a lock statement; I was worried that updating a DateTime struct would not Read More...
Posted Monday, December 08, 2008 10:06 PM by neilk | 1 Comments

Building a Reliable Windows Azure Process - Part 1

Building a decoupled, queue based system is will give you the ability to scale and the opportunity to create a highly available application. By dispatching work to multiple back end worker roles we are building a system that can survive unfortunate events Read More...
Posted Monday, December 08, 2008 3:59 PM by neilk | 3 Comments

Poison in Windows Azure

If you are developing a queue based system in Windows Azure - and lets face it, if you want a highly scalable and reliable application, you going to be using queue - you are going to have to deal with poison messages. A poison message is a message that Read More...
Posted Sunday, December 07, 2008 6:33 PM by neilk | 3 Comments

Debugging and Tracing REST calls to Azure Dev Storage

If you want to see the raw requests that the storage client is sending to your developer storage, the rather disturbingly named Fiddle Tool is what you are looking for. Normally network monitoring tools aren't going to see traffic to 127.0.0.1, but fiddler Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 13, 2008 3:59 PM by neilk | 0 Comments

Windows Azure Queues are quite particular

When you are using a Windows Azure queue, you have to be quite particular how you name it. The rules are: The queue name must be a valid Domain Name System (DNS) name, conforming to the following naming rules: A queue name must start with a letter or Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 11, 2008 10:09 AM by neilk | 0 Comments

Building blocks for an Azure application

Windows Azure provides two main things - a place to run your code and a place to store your data. When you are reading this keep in mind that Windows Azure is built for writing and hosting highly scalable and available applications - it is not about just Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 04, 2008 11:04 PM by neilk | 0 Comments

Why would you use Windows Azure

Ok, so the Channel 9 video we did is a too little long for an introduction to the MOB Guardian project . For a briefer overview and why AWS and the RNLI are looking to use Azure to help save lives at sea, have a look at: RNLI and AWS Mob Guardian Windows Read More...
Posted Friday, October 31, 2008 6:45 PM by neilk | 1 Comments

Working with Windows Azure

This week I have been fortunate to attend the Professional Developers Conference in LA. The PDC is the main occasion when Microsoft reveal some of what the product groups have been working on and indicate the direction that the MS platform and dev stack Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 29, 2008 6:04 PM by neilk | 1 Comments
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