AMQP and Windows Azure Service Bus
David Ingham previews the support provided by Windows Azure Service Bus for AMQP.
David Ingham previews the support provided by Windows Azure Service Bus for AMQP.
This week, Microsoft notified its customers that it was re-naming all of the services that comprise the Windows Azure cloud offering. Confusion ensued as some wondered if Microsoft was abandoning the Azure branding, but subsequent information revealed that this change was solely related to customer billing and that the Windows Azure name was staying put.
Cloud being inherently different from traditional website hosting , making best use of a cloud platform generally requires some architectural changes to an existing application. In his article “Top 7 Concerns of Migrating an ASP.NET Application to Windows Azure”, Peter Laudati explores some of these concerns in detail, in the context of ASP.NET and Windows Azure.
At this week's VS Live conference, Microsoft announced a new Build Service for Team Foundation Service, the Azure-based version of Team Foundation Server. The build service will automatically compile and run unit tests every time files are checked in.

Imagine if architects had to be the janitor for every building they designed. With an understaffed Channel 9 development team handling production support on a web farm built from mismatched servers, something had to be done. When Windows Azure was launched in the summer of 2010 the development team saw it as a way to hand off support and return to building features.

IronRuby is Microsoft's implementation of the Ruby language we all know and love with the added bonus of interoperability with the .NET framework. It's supported by the .NET Common Language Runtime as well as, albeit unofficially, the Mono project. This article gives an introduction to IronRuby, and discusses how to run Rails applications in IronRuby as well as potential issues to look out for.

William El Kaim describes an Open Cloud Model based on agile principles and driven by an independent user community to define it further. He provides a sketch of a potential Cloud Operating System. He also defines the SHINE principles for transforming IT into BT (Business Technology).

Amanda Laucher and Josh Graham present at an introductory level some of the most important elements of the .NET ecosystem: F#, M, Boo, NUnit, RhinoMocks, Moq, NHibernate, Castle, Windsor, NVelocity, Guerilla WCF, Azure, MEF.

Simon Guest presents 5 cloud computing patterns along with examples and Azure solutions for scaling, multi-tenancy, computing, storage and communication.
Adrian Cole discusses his jclouds project, which is an open source library that helps Java developers get started in the cloud and reuse their Java development skills. Cole also talks about some of the challenges of creating a cloud agnostic library, such as the use of different hypervisors and that various cloud implementations are written in different languages, such as VB, Python, Ruby, etc.

In this interview Eric Nelson talks about what’s coming in VS 2010, the C# – VB.NET convergence, the introduction of Parallel as a library, and Azure cloud computing.