Now here are the list of updates from PDC10:

• WA VM Role
• WA Virtual Network
• Extra Small Instances (half the hardware, half the cost)
• New Portal
• Multiple users/roles for management
• Rolling out WS2008R2/IIS7.5
• Admin Mode
• Full IIS
• Remote Desktop
• WS AppFabric Caching as a service
• SSRS as a service
• Dallas
• New Composition Model and designer
• Microsoft will be hosting TFS in Azure

What is more impressive and you will be interested as a developer will be that that Windows Azure now has additional role called WA VM ROLE or ELEVATED PRIVILIGES ,earlier we had a Web Role which used to work as front end to interact with clients and Worker Role which was a background processing application. The VM role and elevated privileges functionality removes roadblocks that today prevent developers from having full control over their application environment.some of its features are:

• Full control of OS image (WS08R2)
• Full operations: reboot, reimage, remote desktop
• Customer must configure and maintain the OS
• SLA still requires 2 instances
• Fabric controller will not understand the health of the running applications, but does automate management
• No durability of instance state on failure/restart
• Still sit behind load balancer (one public IP)
• Priced by the hour
• The Windows license of the instance is included in pricing

Another interesting fact for developers is that we have now an additional compute instance called as EXTRA SMALL . New compute instance chart is as follows:

Another interesting fact is that now web role uses FULL IIS, its key features are :

• Web Role now uses full IIS by default
• Supports
• Multiple sites
• Multiple applications
• Virtual directories
• Everything else in IIS can be scripted with admin mode
• Can push iterative changes to running instances in minutes

PDC10 brings lot of cool stuff for the developers and Microsoft will also be launching new web portal of it.Microsoft is eyeing potential market share of SOA and will be directly competing with Google, Amazon, IBM, VMWare and SalesForce.

Sources: Brian Price’s Presentation @ Windows Azure Blog

                          

An industry shift towards cloud computing discuss basics of cloud computing, importance of it from business point of view, technology related & Much more. This half a MB ebook can be downloaded from here : Ebook Cloud-Computing

                          

Windows Azure supports both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments -developers can use Ruby, PHP, and Python to develop Azure Services. Azure supports a seamless development experience and is well integrated with Visual Studio.

Setting up development environment in Visual Studio
You can download the Azure SDK and Azure tools and use them in Visual Studio. In order to create an Azure application, the pre-requisite operating systems areWindows Vista with SP1, Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7. You would also need . NET framework 3.5 with SP1 installed. Additionally, the development machine should be configured with IIS 7 (with ASP.NET and WCF HTTP Activation). Also it requiresMicrosoft SQL Server (or express) 2005 or 2008.

To develop Windows Azure application you would need either of the following: MS Visual Studio 2008 SP1, MS Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 or MS Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition with SP1.

Once you have the required IDE, you will need Azure SDK and Azure tools for Visual Studio to start developing your first Azure application.

Continue Reading : PCQuest.Ciol

                          

DUG is now having an event for Students only. This time sepcially for student we are presenting 3 sessions which are will be delivering by 3 MSPs (Rishu Mehra, Amit Khilnaney & Rahat Khanna). Sessions will be on Windows 7, IE8 Customization with IEAK & Windows Azure.

For registration: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=142720

Venue:
5th Floor, Microsoft’s Office,
Eros Croporate Tower,
Nehru Place, New Delhi,
Pin – 110019
Date: 31st October (Saturday), 2009
Timings: 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM

For any assistance or queries you can contact Rishu Mehra @: +91- 9818562858, rishumehra@merawindows.com

                          

Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Windows Azure Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.
Azure Services Platform is an application platform in the cloud that allows applications to be hosted and run at Microsoft datacenters. It provides a cloud operating system called Windows Azure that serves as a runtime for the applications and provides a set of services that allows development, management and hosting of managed applications off-premises.All Azure Services and applications built using them run on top of Windows Azure.
Windows Azure can rather be said a version of Windows that runs over the Internet from inside Microsoft’s own data centers.

                          

Cloud Development has become easy with this new version of Visual Studio.With Windows Azure™ Tools for Visual Studio, it’s easy for developers to build, debug and deploy services and applications for Microsoft’s new cloud platform.

• C# and VB Project Templates for building Cloud Services
• Tools to change the Service Role configuration
• Integrated local development via Development Fabric and Development Storage services
• Debugging Cloud Service Roles running in the Development Fabric
• Building and packaging of Cloud Service Packages
• Browsing to the Azure Services Developer Portal

Although some compatibility issues have been reported with Office 2010 CTP, (which is one of the major software Microsoft is looking for Cloud computing) and Visual studio 2010.But since both these products are in their Beta there might some conflicts Occur .