Pablo Castro's blog

The announcement of Windows Azure is a big milestone for us in the Astoria team. We got a chance to add our little contribution to the platform by providing data service interfaces for a couple of the Azure services. Currently there are two services that Read More...

I've been sort of under a rock for a while, but I thought I'd come out for a minute to celebrate. Today we made available .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1. There are two components in the release I spent a bunch of time on, which interestingly Read More...

As part of the Astoria design process we scanned through many topics, some of them are straightforward, some are hard but mostly mechanical, but there are some that become interesting, fundamental aspects to address. I found the problem of concurrency Read More...

Jon Udell wrote a brief piece on how data is locked on servers behind UIs that were not designed for data sharing. He views this as "data friction"...it's just the perfect way to describe the problem. I couldn't agree more with Jon's take. I would even Read More...

Since we put out the new version of the experimental Astoria online service there has been a broad set of questions coming, which is great because it was the goal of the thing...we're learning a bunch from it. A class of questions that we are getting Read More...

When we announced Project Astoria at Mix 2007 last May we made the toolkit available along with a few samples as an online service. The missing piece there was the ability to create your own service online in the experimental setting we had setup. Now Read More...