Most of the people who know me know I’ve invested a lot of my time in Windows Azure.  “I’m all in.”  :)   Last year, we began doing presentations on Azure after it was announced at PDC 2008.  Over the months, from SDS to SQL Azure, PDC 2008 to PDC 2009, the platform evolved and of course, is now under general availability.  I went through a lot of trials and tribulations as I migrated Worldmaps and the created @Home with Windows Azure applications. 

Learning any new platform takes a leap of faith.  It requires an investment of time,  and belief in the future of the technology.  Over the coming years, the cloud will become increasingly relevant for both companies and developers, and, in the case of Windows Azure, understanding how to get up to speed quickly and efficiently is critically important.

A few weeks ago, I found out that a colleague of mine, Brian Prince, has coauthored a book (with Chris Hay) entitled Azure In Action.  I was able to get an advanced copy, and spent some time over the past couple of weeks reading through the book.  I have to say, I am pretty impressed … I just wished I was able to read this before I touched the Azure platform.

The book includes a number of code samples, however will not teach you ASP.NET (as you might expect).  Rather, it details the platform, and how to take advantage of everything from diagnostics to remote management, and of course Azure storage options.   It’s really a great resource on getting up to speed on the cloud quickly and understanding the various offerings.  It also goes into the Windows Azure AppFabric with a few code samples as well, which is nice to see.   AppFabric (both Server and Azure versions) could take its own book, but it’s nice to get a taste of what’s available.

If you’re at the point where your considering Azure, would just like to learn the platform, or have an good reference for what features are in the platform, it’s definitely a good read. 

I’ve had a number of requests for slides and resources for the recent Azure roadshow in NC and FL – here are the slides and resources.  The slides are for sessions 2 and 3:

Worldmaps application:  http://www.myworldmaps.net

Stumbler application (shown during breaks): http://www.myworldmaps.net/stumbler

SETI @ Home: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

Folding @ Home: http://folding.stanford.edu/

In my first Azure Miniseries post, I showed setting up a new cloud service project and migrating an existing ASP.NET application into Azure.   Before I dive into other topics, I figured I’d jump to the end and discuss deployment – getting your Azure application into the cloud.  

Link to original post with download links.

I’m starting to put together some short form screencasts on Windows Azure related topics.  I’ll use my blog to dive into specifics or display code samples/downloads where appropriate – but first up is a quick look at getting a project setup and migrating existing applications into an Azure webrole.

The recent update to Windows Azure went quite well!  The site is now using a single Azure webrole, a single Azure worker role, Azure Queues for workload, and Azure Blobs for storage.  It’s also using SQL Azure as the database.   From a user’s point of view, not much has changed but the performance and scalability has been much improved.  On the stats page, I implemented a few new stats …

First up is the hourly breakdown of hits to a site.  Below is Channel 9’s current breakdown.   Neat way to tell when the traffic is heaviest to your site.  In this case, C9 is busiest at 3pm GMT, or about 9am-4pm EST. 

In addition, Worldmaps includes country breakdown information:

And, Stumbler has been updated a bit so be sure to check it out and watch traffic in real time!

Finally, there’s change to the registration process.  To add some scalability, Worldmaps now stores data in one of two schemes.  The older scheme has been migrated to what is called a “plus” or enhanced account.  The newer scheme is the default, and it stores data in a much more aggregated way.   What determines how information is stored?  This is based off of an invitation code on the Create Map form:

If no invitation code is provided, the newer scheme is used.  If a valid invite code is provided, the old, more detailed method is used.  If you’d like an invite code, drop me some feedback.What’s the difference?  Currently, the difference is pretty small.  On the stats page, current number of Unique IP's can not be calculated, so it looks like so:

Future report options are a bit limited as well, but otherwise, all data (and Stumbler) is still available.

The other day, I had the honor of sitting down and rambling endlessly with Michael Kimsal in this podcast.  It was a lot of fun, despite the overly loud announcement system in the background (“…table 3, your order is ready” type of thing).   Michael is one of those insanely smart kind of guys that has a really balanced view of technology and a lot of fun to talk to.   Michael publishes (among other things) jsmag, a must read for javascript developers.  Check it out!   Also, if you use coupon HITNEY on the site, you can get a free issue!  (Thanks Michael!)

Hi folks!  I wanted to take the opportunity and outline a few changes for Worldmaps – both changes in the service, the backend, and new features.

First up: Stumbler.  A link to Stumbler was added to the nav menu at the top of the page.  If you haven’t played around with Stumbler, check it out.  It maps users in near real time to websites.

One of the biggest changes is the update to the new Bing Maps Silverlight control.  This doesn’t change much from the end-user point of view, but a few new features have been added so the UI in Stumbler is a bit cleaner around pushpins and effects.  In addition, there’s a new setting in the settings dialog to choose whether or not to scroll the map automatically.  Normally you zoom around the map automatically, but now you can turn that off to stay focused on a certain area.

The other big new feature is multiple/extensible leaderboards.  The way it worked until now was there a single leaderboard for all users.  This “master leaderboard” is still there, but having sub leaderboards is a lot more interesting.  I defined a few leaderboards like “Tech Blogs” and “Personal Sites,” but will add more over time (leave feedback on new leaderboards!).  On the leaderboard page, the default view is the all-up leaderboard, while each leaderboard is displayed on the left nav. 

To pick a leaderboard, log in to your account and edit your maps.  In the detail section, you’ll see a drop down that allows you to select a leaderboard (see image to the right).  I should also point out that the sub-boards are sorted based on hits per day, not total hits. 

The other big change to outline is the end-of-year change.  At the end of the year, the individual hit data is reset.  This means all the red dots on the map will be wiped clean and start over again.  Data will be archived and available in some fashion, but this hasn’t been implemented yet.  Additionally, next year (2010) the main leaderboard will be sorted based on average hits per day. 

Now to address the biggest architectural change:  if you’ve created an account on Worldmaps but haven’t gotten an email yet with the approval, fear not.  Unfortunately the volume is such that with limited infrastructure, there’s not much more that can be done.  This will soon change.  Worldmaps has been moved to Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform.  This should give Worldmaps a nice bump in scalability (limited really only by funds).  So stay tuned in early 2010 for more info.

We’re back!  Starting early November, we’ll start our fall MSDN Southern Fried Roadshow series.  Right now, we’re scheduled here:

Check out our sessions below!

Introduction to ADO.NET Data Services

The new wave of Web applications are built on technologies such as AJAX and Microsoft Silverlight, which enable developers to build better, richer user experiences. These technologies bring a shift in how applications are organized, including a stronger separation of presentation from data. In this session, you’ll learn how ADO.NET Data Services enables applications to expose data as a REST-based data service that can be consumed by Web clients within a corporate network and across the Internet. We’ll look at how the data service is reachable over HTTP, and how URIs are used to identify the various pieces of information available through the service. You’ll get a solid understanding of data service concepts like HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE) and data formats (ATOM/APP and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)).

Parallel Programming in .NET 4.0 - Much more than Threading!

Come learn how the next version of Visual Studio and the Microsoft .NET Framework can help you write better performing and more scalable applications. We take a tour of new .NET APIs, including the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and Parallel LINQ (PLINQ). We also introduce new features in the debugger that help you quickly identify concurrency issues and visualize the internal state of your application. You don’t need any experience with writing multi-threaded code to benefit from this session

Windows 7 and Windows Server – Exciting New OS Developer Features

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 come packed with loads of new developer goodies.  Computers are starting to come with more and more hardware built-in – from Ambient Light Sensors to Accelerometers and GPS.  Come learn about how the Windows 7 Sensor API can integrate with your applications, and help them rock with these new hardware capabilities.  Not to be outdone, Windows Server R2 has seen some really incredible boosts to IIS with version 7.5 and the extensibility models.  Now you can manage your databases, delegate control to multiple IIS servers, and configure package deployment from all within one location!

Thanks for those who came out to the roadshow over the past few weeks!   In this post, I’ll include the sample files and slides used in my ASP.NET 4.0 overview talk.  A couple of notes:  each presentation on the show was a bit different.  In some cases, some slides were not used.  Also, the VS2010 demo solutions here are “approximate” as they were done a bit differently at each venue.

The webforms solution demos routing in web form as well as using the QueryExtender control.  This requires an AdventureWorks database, or replace with one of your own.  The AJAX sample demos client-side templates and data binding, the latter of which also requires the adventure database exposed by ADO.NET Data Services.  You can easily change this to your own datasource by creating a new Entity Data Model, changing the ADO.NET Data Service to this new type, and modifying the AJAX (in Demo3) to point to the correct resource.

The Worldmaps users queue is getting big!  Just wanted to thank everyone for their interest, but in response to so many emails, I thought I should explain how to get signed up on Worldmaps. 

After creating an account, it must be approved before the account can be used.  The main reason for this is to slowly ramp up on bandwidth to make sure the service (both website and database) are providing a good experience.  During high volume, the service is processing many requests per second – obviously, not a ridiculous load in the scheme of things, but for a small service with no budget, it’s certainly something to keep an eye on.  Currently, however, the service is getting more user requests than are approved daily, so there’s a backlog forming.  We’ll get through it in time, but it does require culling the sites that don’t fall into the acceptable use parameters.

Technical blogs and personal sites will generally get approved first.  At this time, commercial sites cannot be approved.  Over the coming months, I’ll be looking more at a Windows Azure implementation that will allow more growth and hopefully, allow just about all sites to “play.”  One new feature hopefully to be released with this implementation will also be website categories – instead of just a single leader board, there will be multiple leader boards and users can select the one most appropriate to their domain.  Stay tuned!