In Windows Azure, it pays to keep an eye on the amount of storage used by your Azure services. Windows Azure Storage Analytics is a useful means of checking that your data storage is within limits and and to troubleshoot issues with Storage services… Read more
SQL Azure can come up with intermittent connection problems in production. To avoid these, make sure you use the correct connection string and use ReliableSqlConnection rather than SqlConnection … Read more
Windows Azure Access Control Service can be used to integrate your application's authentication and authorization logic with whatever Identity providers you wish, as long as they support one of the security protocols that the service understands… Read more
How can you getting through the Azure firewall to allow remote access to SQL Azure, er Windows Azure SQL Database (formerly SQL Server Data Services, then SQL Services and SQL Azure)? The easy way is to use the Windows Azure Portal but you can also script the process to access the RESTful servic… Read more
Sometimes it is the simple questions about Azure that are hard to answer. A typical one is how to install third party software on Windows Azure. Altrhough it is possible, it isn't quite as intuitive as one might expect.… Read more
There are some essential tasks to be done in move existing applications to the cloud, because of the differences between the on-premise and cloud architecture, though the move from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Azure is generally straightforward. … Read more
By caching static content on the Content Delivery Network CDN, the web server can offload the serving of content that doesn't change, and so will have more resources for processing requests for active content. Browser-based users of your application will get static content delivered with less latency from a server that is closer to them.… Read more
Imagine that you are running a website that is subject to wide fluctuations in demand, such as a ticket-selling system for events. How would you plan for migrating a seemingly-ideal candidate for a cloud platform to Windows Azure? … Read more
There are four major changes that are required when moving applications to the cloud: Architectural, Application-level security, overcoming shortcomings, and diagnostic logging and monitoring. It is likely that the changes to the architecture of applications will take the most effort if you are to get the most advantages from the cloud.… Read more
Because you can't maintain session state for ASP.NET applications in Azure using the default in-process method, you will need to opt for one of the other available methods, of which the most popular are Table storage, SQL Azure, or Windows Azure Caching.… Read more
This is the second article of a two-part introduction to Windows Azure. The first part discussed the Windows Azure data centers and examined the core services that Windows Azure offers. This article explore additional services available as part of Windows Azure which enable customers to build richer, more powerful applications.… Read more
Binary Large OBject (BLOB) storage is the usual way of storing file-based information in Azure. Blobs are charged according to outbound traffic, storage space and the operations performed on storage contents. This means that the ways that you manage Blob Storage will affect both cost and availability. … Read more
Windows Azure is the Microsoft cloud computing platform which enables developers to quickly develop, deploy, and manage their applications hosted in a Microsoft data center. As a PAAS provider, Windows Azure not only takes care of the infrastructure, but will also help to manage higher level components including operating systems, runtimes, and middleware.… Read more
As long as you use TSQL DDL to do it, creating a federated SQL Azure database is simple. What, then, of populating it with data? It is surprisingly straightforward to upload data from a BCP file via secure TDS in parallel multiple connections, even when things go slightly wrong… Read more
When providing cloud solution to connected mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets in particular, there are several practices that make a great difference to the quality of the service that you provide.… Read more
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