Make your startup task a Windows Azure startup plugin and easily re-use it 31 August 2011 Peter-Himschoot In a previous blog I showed you how to create a startup task to install certain requirements in Azure Compute. In this blog post I will show you how you can easily turn this startup task into a re-usable plugin. This post continues with the startup post. Open the UsingStartupTasks lab solution. Rig... [More]
Excellent intro to Windows Azure 23 July 2011 Peter-Himschoot Azure, .NET Development If you want an excellent introduction into Windows Azure I can recommend “Windows Azure: Step by Step” from Roberto Brunetti. This book will teach you the basic components of Windows Azure and how to build an application with them. It will introduce you to Azure Compute, Azure Storage and Azure AppF... [More]
Windows Azure Toolkit for social games 20 July 2011 Peter-Himschoot Azure, VS2010, .NET Development Marrying Azure and HTML5: Microsoft released today the Windows Azure Toolkit for social games: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/07/20/build-your-next-game-with-the-windows-azure-toolkit-for-social-games.aspx
Installing requirements using Azure startup tasks 12 July 2011 Peter-Himschoot .NET Development, Azure, VS2010 Windows Azure deploys your azure web or worker role in the cloud, on a machine with Windows Server 2008 and .NET 4 pre-installed. But what if you need an additional requirement? What if you need to install some performance counter, or if you need some other piece of software like the media encoder? ... [More]
Storing message in table storage 10 July 2011 Peter-Himschoot .NET Development, Entity Framework, Azure, VS2010 In my previous post I looked at getting started with table storage, in this one we will create a table for our entities and store them. As you’ll see, quite easy! So, to store an entity in table storage you start by creating a TableServiceEntity derived class (recap from previous post): public cla... [More]
Introducing Windows Azure Table Storage 06 July 2011 Peter-Himschoot .NET Development, VS2010, Azure Windows Azure storage gives you several persistent and durables storage options. In this blog post I want to look at Table storage (which I prefer to call Entity storage because you can store any mix of entities in these tables; so you can store products AND customers in the same table). For t... [More]
Debugging those nasty Windows Azure startup-code problems with IntelliTrace 03 July 2011 Peter-Himschoot .NET Development, Azure, VS2010 1. Introducing Intelli-Trace How do engineers figure out what caused a plane crash? One of the things they use is the black-box recording, which recorded all mayor data from the plane prior to the crash. This recording allows them to step back in time and analyze step-by-step what happened. Microso... [More]
Building a Storage Account helper class (and forget about it) 02 July 2011 Peter-Himschoot .NET Development, VS2010, Azure When you use storage with the managed API’s, you always need to use a storage account, and make sure you setup the whole thing correctly. The way to do this is slightly different when building a web role versus a worker role, so I decided to tackle this problem by building a simple class that takes ... [More]
Running multiple sites in one Windows Azure Web Role 28 June 2011 Peter-Himschoot Azure, VS2010, .NET Development Since the release of the Windows Azure SDK 1.3 it is possible to host multiple sites in one web role. In this blog post I will show you how to do this. 1. Creating the Azure project Start by creating a new Azure Cloud project. Add a single WebRole project (call it MultiSitesWebRole) to it: Hit ... [More]
Remote debugging a Windows Azure Worker Role using Azure Connect, Remote desktop and the remote debugger, part 3 27 June 2011 Peter-Himschoot .NET Development, Azure, VS2010 This is the third part of the “Remote debugging a Windows Azure Worker Role using Azure Connect, Remote desktop and the remote debugger”. In this part I will show you how to attach the remote debugger on your worker role and start debugging… Step 3: Connect to the remove debugger In the previous b... [More]