Alin Irimie

Microsoft announced at TechEd India — a show running simultaneously with TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles, a new software development kit for people interested in building apps in PHP for Windows Azure cloud. The PHP SDK for Windows Azure, a.k.a. PHPAzure, is an open source project, available for download from Microsoft CodePlex. The SDK provides consistent programming model for Windows Azure Storage (Blobs, Tables, Queues). Program Manager, Peter Galli, said Microsoft also is announcing “the launch of a series of projects that offer samples and a toolkit that enable PHP developers to include Silverlight controls, Microsoft Virtual Earth maps and IE Webslices and Accelerators in PHP web applications; as well as automatically generated a simple Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) PHP application from a table in SQL Server.” A Technology Preview of the PHP SDK for Windows Az... (more)

SQL Azure Migration Wizard

SQL Azure Migration Wizard helps you migrate your local SQL Server 2005 / 2008 databases into SQL Azure. The wizard walks you through the selection of your SQL objects, creates SQL scripts suitable for SQL Azure, and allows you to edit / deploy to SQL Azure. The SQL Azure Migration Wizard (SQLAzureMW) will let you identify a SQL Server 2005 / 2008 database that you want to migrate to SQL Azure or select an existing SQL file that has the commands you want to execute against SQL Azure. If your source is a SQL Server database, SQLAzureMW will walk you through the different object ... (more)

When Are We Going To Have an SLA for Microsoft Azure?

Alin Irimie's Azure Blog After more than two “azure” months, with lots of new stuff to learn, a whole new alphabet soup to digest and a dozen or so Microsoft evangelists trying to navigate us through the plethora of “cloud services” that seem to pop up every day from Microsoft’s software-making machine, I believe something is not right with with the way the information is presented to the public or with the overall Microsoft strategy. Let me explain. First of all, everybody is using nowadays “cloud” to describe anything that runs on the web. Cloud is the new buzzword, and Microsoft... (more)

Microsoft Should Release Windows Azure This Year

Some time ago I wrote an article about Windows Azure. The reaction to the article was mixed - some agree with the “cloud” confusion and the lack of release dates, others (mostly Microsoft guys) asking for more time so the technologies will evolve; and last but not least people trying to explain how I don’t really understand Windows Azure and related technologies (to those, actually that was one of the points of the article - too much confusion). So I find myself after six months since the release of Windows Azure looking at the same things as before. First, the “cloud” confusion. ... (more)

SQL Data Services: Your Database in the Cloud

One thing in the Microsoft cloud I find really interesting is SQL Data Services and Huron/Data Hub - SQL cloud sync service, one of the “cloud” offerings I believe has lots of potential and will really make sharing of data in the cloud so much easier. I had the pleasure to sit down and talk about this subject with Liam Cavanagh, Sr. Program Manager at Microsoft, with the SDS/Huron team, and get some insights about the current state and the future of this remarkable new technology. In this article I’ll talk about SQL Data Services, and I’ll follow up with one about Data Hub/Huron... (more)