A Cloudy Place

Arg – it’s no longer SQL Azure, it’s now SQL Database! This article started out as a simple discussion of how to manipulate the SQL Database (was SQL Azure) firewall through REST calls, but on the way Microsoft threw me under the bus by completely changing branding names for what was Azure. Read more…

Many organizations accumulate massive quantities of valuable commercial data but don’t have technology in place to make it easily available to data analysts or actionable by business decision-makers. Microsoft’s Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket provides the infrastructure to syndicate more than 135 free and pay-per-use datasets to the public. Read more…

I have seen this question asked many times now: “How do I install third party software on Windows Azure?” This is a reasonably important question to address as Windows Azure applications often need to use third party software components. Read more…

This article is really a review of the alternative ways to get started with setting up a database-driven Azure site. I’ll start by using SQL Azure Management Portal and SQL Server Management Studio. Then, I’ll use Visual Studio to create a SQL Azure database (Web edition, 1 GB). Read more…

For the past several months I’ve been working on something new. This is a hosted service for maintaining cloud applications cunningly named Red Gate Cloud Services. It’s been live since the beginning of the year and it’s free to try out too. Read more…

We illustrated Idelma’s case study in the last article. This article continues from where we left off, looking at how a partner, Ovissia, would provide a recommended solution. Just as a reminder, Idelma had some specific requirements for migration including: cost-effectiveness, no functional changes for the user, and the proprietary CRM system stays on-premise. Read more…

Windows Azure is a very rich platform. Next to compute and storage, it offers a series of building blocks that simplify your life as a cloud developer. One of these building blocks is the content delivery network (CDN) Read more…

The Microsoft Codename “Cloud Numerics” Lab from SQL Azure Labs provides a Visual Studio template to enable configuring, deploying and running numeric computing SaaS applications on High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters in Microsoft data centers. Read more…

In my last post, I discussed some of the key considerations when moving an application to the cloud. To provide a better understanding, I’m using a simple scenario-based example to illustrate how an application could be moved to the cloud. Read more…

Well, the day has finally come; we’re at the end of this series of Azure training. In this final episode RMitch talks Topics, AppFabric Composition, Windows Azure Platform Appliance, and German data laws. Read more…