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PhillyNJ.NET – What is Azure?Yesterday

I am going to be giving a talk at the PhillyNJ.NET user group on Thursday January 15th on the topic of “What is Azure”.

As I have been writing about recently, Azure is a massive undertaking by Microsoft. What I am hoping to do in this talk is paint a clear picture of:

What is available
Why you should care
What you can do to start leveraging this platform.

You can find driving direction here.

Posted to Code and tagged as user-group , community , speaking , cloud-computing , azure

Core Options

Data storage is provided by two distinct services, SQL Data Services and Azure Storage.

SQL Data Services (SDS)

SDS provides a cloud scalable set of web-based services enabling you to store store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. With each passing release of SDS you can expect more (where applicable) feature parity with SQL Server proper. Today it provides basic query and crud functions and will hopefully add query aggregates (count, sum, etc) in a release soon.

Azure Storage

Azure storage comes in three flavors; Tables, Blobs, and Queues.

Tables is designed to support a near infinite number of rows. However, unlike SDS they will only provide a very limited API for querying. All records in a table must use a 2 “column” composite key consisting of a partition key and a row key. Choosing the proper key extremely important with tables. Azure will store items with the same partition key (close) together. In addition, it will seek to optimize access to hot data by the partition key. Anytime you execute a query without a partition key, a full table scan will

Multiple Work Roles on AzureDecember 11 2008

One of the early Windows Azure features that really excited my was the worker role functionality.

If you are not familiar with work roles they are basically a very simple way to do back ground processing when hosting an application on Azure.

Here is a worker role skeleton:

public class WorkerRole : RoleEntryPoint{ public override void Start() { while(true) { //Do work here } } public override RoleStatus GetHealthStatus() { return RoleStatus.Healthy; }}

In most case, your work role is going to simply process messages added to a queue. This has a couple great benefits:

It is drop dead simple.
Provides a structured path to move heavy processing out of your web application and does not require managing your own back ground threads.
Since queues (and all of Azure storage as well SDS) are REST enabled, you can easily push tasks to a worker role from just about anywhere (Azure web application and existing applications)

However, as of today, you can only have a single worker role (although you can ha

BalsamiqDecember 9 2008

Ayende's post today (or yesterday) about Balsamiq reminded me that I needed to write up a quick review.

Disclaimer: As you see this is a great tool. However, in the current economic climate I could not pass up a free post/review for a tool that I already like. So yes, I did receive a free license in exchange for writing about this tool. And yes, that will make some people a little creepy and I am usually one of those people. However, I liked the tool so this post is technically saving me $79 for the 10 minutes it took to write, which is way more than I will make in advertising.[1]

I have been using the demo version of a couple of weeks and I have to say that while it is relatively simple it is a very handy tool.

Since I do not have anything interesting to share, I grabbed a nice example off of the Basamiq site.

mytube

Here are the basics:

Everything is drag/drop and resizable.
Most items allow you to edit the text by clicking on them.
Complex items such as tables, tabs, and breadcrumbs use a comma delimited format.
It is built with Adobe AIR and does not post to Twitter. Seriously, an AIR app