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Windows Azure: Pending Success or Eventual Niche?
Microsoft has had its successes and failures over time, and it has managed to come first with some products even if it came later in the game. Is Microsoft going to be as successful with Windows Azure as it has been with the Windows operating system? Or will it remain a niche player like Windows Mobile?
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Windows Azure Now Generally Available, Moving From Free To Pay
As of February 1st, Microsoft's public cloud offering, Windows Azure, became part of the growing cloud market as it started charging for its services. Azure is one of the first Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings to move from free, "early-adopter" to a pay-as-you-go business model. InfoQ spoke with Matt Deacon of Microsoft UK to learn more about this change and what it means for Azure users.
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Azure Drive Eases the Migration to Microsoft’s Cloud
Initially announced as XDrive during PDC 2009, Microsoft has released the beta version of Windows Azure Drive, a storage access solution simplifying the migration of Windows applications to the cloud by creating an NTFS virtual drive on top of a storage blob.
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Information Can Be Sold and Bought in “Dallas”
Microsoft’s service codename “Dallas” is an information marketplace bringing together data, imagery and service providers and their consumers facilitating information exchange through a single point of access.
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Azure Storage Options
The Windows Azure Platform offers a wide range of storage options for unstructured, structured, and message style data. Deciding which option to use can be quite daunting, especially with the limitations of this new technology being so uncertain. This piece enumerates the storage options and discusses their basic capabilities and limitations relative to the other options available on the platform.
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Ruby on Rails Is Compatible with Microsoft Azure
Microsoft has opened Windows Azure to many other non-MS technologies in an attempt to lure companies and developers to deploy their applications on the Azure cloud rather than on their competition’s. One such technology is Ruby on Rails.
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Easily Accessing Azure Cloud Services with AppFabric
Microsoft Windows Azure Platform AppFabric is a set of technologies helpful to connect on-premises applications with Azure cloud services and resources and eases interoperability between users belonging to different domains. The main components are the Service Bus and the Access Control Service.
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Microsoft Builds Tools for Eclipse Developers
Microsoft has announced the release of a number of tools for Eclipse: Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse, Windows Azure SDK for Java, Eclipse Tools for Silverlight, plus a facelift for Eclipse to look-and-feel like Windows 7.
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Quickly Migrate from SQL Server to SQL Azure
In order to make migrating from SQL Server to SQL Azure easier, Microsoft is releasing a migration tool on CodePlex. The SQL Azure Migration Wizard will detect, and if possible, correct incompatibilities between SQL Server 2005/2008 and SQL Azure. In addition to generating scripts for deploying the migrated schema on SQL Azure, this tool will also allow you to migrate table data using BCP.
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SQL Azure is Feature Complete, but You Need to Move to the New CTP by December
Microsoft has released a feature-complete version of SQL Azure. CTP 2 includes everything that the final version is expected to have and is currently deployed on Microsoft’s production clusters. This gives CTP 2 an automatic upgrade path to the final release, but users of previous CTPs will need to migrate their data before the older servers are shutdown.
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Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 Prepares the Way for RTM, Scheduled for March 2010
Having a new logo, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 made it’s debut yesterday with performance improvements and better stability, setting the stage for the RTM release on March 22, 2010. F# is integrated with Rx, while Azure Tools are in the works.
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PHP API for Cloud Application Services
Zend Technologies, calling themselves The PHP Company, has launched the open source Simple API for Cloud Application Services project intended to help PHP developers creating applications consuming services from all major clouds. Microsoft has contributed with Windows Azure SDK for PHP Developers.
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GET Details On Upcoming .Net Access Control Service
The .net services team, released details on future plans for the .net services offering, that is part of the Azure services platform. .NET Services includes access control to help create secure connections between your applications and services, as well as a service bus for communicating across network and organizational boundaries.
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PHP and Microsoft's Cloud
Microsoft is continuing to court the PHP market with drivers. With the newest offerings, Microsoft is adding support for SQL Azure, their cloud-computing platform.
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Interview: Eric Nelson on VS 2010 and .NET 4.0
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.