InfoQ Homepage Windows Azure Content on InfoQ
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Windows Azure Gets Node.js, SQL Azure Federation, Increased DB Limits
Windows Azure team announced major updates including support for Node.js, better scalability for SQL Azure through Federation and higher individual DB Size limits (upto 150 GB), a limited preview for Hadoop and more.
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Windows Azure SDK 1.6 Streamlines Azure Development in Visual Studio
Publishing improvements, Team Build capability and streamlined service creation allow developers to centrally manage all aspects of application creation and deployment.
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Windows Azure News: Support for Windows 8, SDK 1.5, Storage Replication and Others
Microsoft has announced at the BUILD conference a number of new tools for developing applications that interact with the cloud: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8, Windows Azure SDK 1.5, Windows Azure Marketplace, Replication for Windows Azure Storage, Service Bus September Release, and Windows Azure Service Management API.
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Build Sessions to Watch For
With 274 sessions at the //Build/ conference it is hard to predict which are going to be important and which are just filler. Here is a rundown of the sessions we think are going to be important to enterprise developers.
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AppFabric Queues, Topics and Subscriptions Released
Windows Azure AppFabric Features, Queues, Topics and Subscriptions, which were in CTP for some time now have now been released. These enable new scenarios for Applications hosted on Windows Azure such as asynchronous Cloud Eventing, Event-Driven SOA, Load leveling/balancing and more.
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Second Level Caching with Entity Framework
Second Level Caching is one of the features that is not present out-of-the-box in Entity Framework. In an MSDN article “Second-Level Caching in the Entity Framework and AppFabric” Julie Lerman shows how to implement Second Level Caching with Entity Framework to take advantage of caching services like Microsoft AppFabric.
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Some Users Complain about Windows Azure
Appirio switched from using Windows Azure to Salesforce.com’s Database, mentioning difficulties with deployment, using Web Roles and DBA overhead, while Adron Hall, a developer, complained about the SDK, price, and administration issues.
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Enterprise Library To Get Auto-Scaling Of Windows Azure Applications
Windows Azure Integration Pack for Enterprise Library will bring support for a lot of Azure-only scenarios. One of these is auto-scaling of both web and worker roles, depending on various parameters such as CPU Utilization, message queue backlogs, specific date and time or even business metrics (such as # of unprocessed orders).
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A Wide Array of New Features in Windows Azure Tools 1.4
Microsoft has released Windows Azure Tools 1.4, an update to the Visual Studio extension that allows developers to create applications for Windows Azure. The new features include performance profiling, MVC 3 support, package validation, and support for multiple service configurations.
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Windows Server AppFabric adds Read-Through and Write-Behind Support
The new Read-Through and Write-Behind support in AppFabric 1.1 allow developers to improve performance while at the same time reduce the complexity of their applications. This is done by moving the logic for reading from and writing to the database into the caching server itself. Other improvements include lazy-loading of session state information and support for ASP.NET output caching.
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Accelerating Cloud Computing Standards with Use Cases
A set of key cloud computing use cases focused on cloud management, portability, interoperability and security has been developed by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) as an on-going contribution for the definition of open standards for cloud computing.
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Windows Azure Plugin for Eclipse with Java, June 2011 Community Technology Preview
Microsoft has recently released a new version of the Windows Azure Plugin for Eclipse with Java. The Eclipse plugin is an open source project, released under the Apache 2.0 license, which provides Java developers with an easy way to build and deploy web applications to Windows
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Adding Scale to ASP.NET Applications in the Cloud
Microsoft presented several options for scaling ASP.NET applications hosted on Windows Azure. There are a number of services for caching, traffic distribution, asynchronous work processing, and storage, and these options can be used in combination to scale applications up or down.
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Windows Azure AppFabric CTP - Queues and Topics
The Azure team recently shipped a Community Preview (CTP) for AppFabric, with Service Bus Queues and Service Bus Topics, which can be leveraged in a whole new set of scenarios to build Occasionally Connected or Distributed Systems.
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Microsoft releases Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS
Following on from the recent release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7, Microsoft announced on May 9, 2011 that they were making available a version for Apple’s iOS, and planning to release an Android version within the next month.