By Alin Irimie Last March Microsoft released the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7, which provided a set of generic services for Windows Azure. This toolkit was the first step in enabling developers to build native experiences on multiple platforms using Windows Azure. As the next step in th... May. 10, 2011 09:26 PM EDT Reads: 546 |
By Alin Irimie OK, I admit it: I’m looking forward to VMworld like a kid looks forward to camp. But for exactly the opposite reason: VMworld marks the end of summer and the beginning of the fall tradeshow season. Summer, despite its all-American goodness, is an odd time for our industry—no less busy ... Aug. 20, 2010 11:58 AM EDT Reads: 701 |
By Alin Irimie  Microsoft announced the return of Age of Empires, one of the biggest PC franchises in the world, having sold more than 20 million copies worldwide and essentially defined real-time strategy (RTS) games for the PC, says Dave Luehmann, general manager of Microsoft Games Studios. “This ne... Aug. 19, 2010 12:30 PM EDT Reads: 4,076 |
By Alin Irimie RDS Reserved Instances are available now. You can get a lower price and know that an instance has been reserved for your use.
After you make a low, one-time payment, you can use a DB Instance at an hourly rate that is significantly lower than the On-Demand pricing for the same instance... Aug. 17, 2010 09:08 AM EDT Reads: 780 |
By Alin Irimie Microsoft just announced the release of the first version of SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) for MySQL.
Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) is a toolkit that dramatically cuts the effort, cost, and risk of migrating from MySQL to SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 and... Aug. 13, 2010 02:02 PM EDT Reads: 834 |
By Alin Irimie This SDK includes API libraries and samples for building connected applications with the .NET platform. It spans the entire spectrum of today’s Internet applications – from rich connected applications with advanced connectivity requirements to Web-style applications that use simple pro... Aug. 13, 2010 09:16 AM EDT Reads: 782 |
By Alin Irimie You can try Windows Azure and SQL Azure for a month for free, with the Windows Azure One Month Pass USA. Through this unique offer, US developers can get a one month pass to try out Windows Azure and SQL Azure - without having to submit a credit card.
Limited to US developers, the firs... Aug. 6, 2010 09:31 AM EDT Reads: 742 |
By Alin Irimie The Dow Chemical Co., Hyatt Hotels & Resorts, and the University of Georgia have each selected Microsoft cloud solutions, Microsoft announced today at the start of the company’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting.
With this announcement, Dow Chemical, Hyatt and the University of Geor... Jul. 29, 2010 12:47 PM EDT Reads: 783 |
By Alin Irimie  This guest post was written by James Mowery, a computer geek that writes about technology and related topics.
For the Ubuntu faithful, the recent announcement that Canonical could be expanding their business relationship with IBM in regards to the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud platform is ... Jul. 27, 2010 12:25 PM EDT Reads: 4,713 |
By Alin Irimie While all other blogs are reporting that apple store is down. I went to the iPhone application for Apple Store and this is what I got….If I select them, it goes into a empty page…
But the cat is out of the bag then.
Related posts:Embed iPhone and iPod Touch Applications ... Jul. 27, 2010 08:42 AM EDT Reads: 1,599 |
By Alin Irimie  With Cluster Compute Instances, you can now run many types of large-scale network-intensive jobs without losing the core advantages of EC2: a pay-as-you-go pricing model and the ability to scale up and down to meet your needs.
Each Cluster Compute Instance consists of a pair of quad-c... Jul. 13, 2010 09:03 AM EDT Reads: 3,631 |
By Alin Irimie  It took a little longer than I was expecting it, but here it is. During its annual Worldwide Partner Conference, Microsoft introduced the Windows Azure Platform Appliance,designed for service providers, large enterprises and governments and provides a proven cloud platform that deliver... Jul. 12, 2010 01:31 PM EDT Reads: 2,983 |
By Alin Irimie The Patterns & Practices team have just released the first part of the Windows Azure Architecture guide.
This book is the first volume in a planned series about the Windows® Azure™ platform and focuses on a migration scenario. It introduces a fictitious company named Adatum which s... Jul. 9, 2010 03:24 PM EDT Reads: 2,299 |
By Alin Irimie RDS now generates an SSL certificate for each DB Instance. If you need a certificate for an existing instance youll need to reboot it using the AWS Management Console, the RDS command-line tools, or the RDS APIs.
Here are a few interesting things things to keep in mind:
SSL encrypts t... Jun. 29, 2010 08:47 AM EDT Reads: 817 |
By Alin Irimie  As businesses seek to cost-effectively consume IT services, interest is growing in moving computation and storage from on-premise equipment to Internet-based systems, often referred to as "the cloud." This new document from Microsoft focuses on the security challenges and recommended a... Jun. 15, 2010 09:11 AM EDT Reads: 1,999 |
By Alin Irimie  The Windows Azure CDN enhances end user performance and reliability by placing copies of data, at various points in a network, so that they are distributed closer to the user. The Windows Azure CDN today delivers many Microsoft products – such as Windows Update, Zune videos, and Bing M... Jun. 1, 2010 09:35 AM EDT Reads: 2,343 |
By Alin Irimie  Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient, resizable capacity for an industry-standard relational database and manages common database administration... May. 25, 2010 08:49 AM EDT Reads: 2,568 |
By Alin Irimie CloudFront delivers your static and streaming content using a global network of edge locations. Amazon CloudFront delivers your static and streaming content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your objects are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so con... May. 18, 2010 08:18 AM EDT Reads: 733 |
By Alin Irimie In case you missed it, Microsoft released SQL Azure FAQ, providing an architectural overview of SQL Azure Database, and describing how you can use SQL Azure to augment your existing on-premises data infrastructure or as your complete database solution. Some of the questions answered in... May. 10, 2010 08:59 AM EDT Reads: 670 |
By Alin Irimie Microsoft Learning has a training clinic for Microsoft SQL Azure with lots of useful information. If you’re a newbie or even an experimented Windows Azure developer this is a required reading. This two-hour clinic explores the capabilities of Introduction to Microsoft SQL Azure a... May. 7, 2010 05:08 PM EDT Reads: 593 |
By Alin Irimie Do you want to learn more about Windows Azure Blob API?:
* Using the StorageClient library, take a lap around the Blob API and discover the common operations
* Hear the latest news and announcements for the platform
* Discover a quick tip/gotcha for running the AppFabric Service Bus in... May. 5, 2010 10:19 AM EDT Reads: 823 |
By Alin Irimie Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is now available in our EU (Ireland) region.
Customers with existing IT infrastructure in the EU can now deploy Amazon VPC in the same region in order to provide the best possible experience for their users. They can also deploy an Amazon VPC in the E... May. 4, 2010 03:43 PM EDT Reads: 503 |
By Alin Irimie  Awesome post on how to troubleshoot SQL Azure connectivity by SQL Services Team, helping you to understand some of the common connectivity error messages that you would see while connecting to SQL Azure as listed: A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the ser... Mar. 23, 2010 10:07 AM EDT Reads: 3,676 |
By Alin Irimie I just stumbled upon the SQL Azure Labs website, a place where you can access incubations and early preview bits for products and enhancements to SQL Azure. The goal is to gather feedback from users. All technologies on this site are for testing and are not ready for production use. So... Mar. 19, 2010 01:56 PM EDT Reads: 1,486 |
By Alin Irimie The final release of ASP.NET MVC 2 is now available for VS 2008/Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with ASP.NET 3.5. You can download and install it from the following locations:
Download ASP.NET MVC 2 using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer
Download ASP.NET MVC 2 from the Download ... Mar. 12, 2010 06:05 PM EST Reads: 6,454 |
By Alin Irimie Ryan Dunn, the Technical Evangelist for Windows Azure, posted a neat trick on how to measure your database size in SQL Azure. Here is the exact queries you can run to do it:
select
sum(reserved_page_count) * 8.0 / 1024
from
sys.dm_db_partition_stats
GO
select
sys.objects.name, sum(res... Mar. 9, 2010 10:01 PM EST Reads: 2,357 |
By Alin Irimie  Microsoft Corp. and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have announced an agreement that will offer individual researchers and research groups selected through NSF’s merit review process free access to advanced cloud computing resources. By extending the capabilities of powerful, eas... Feb. 10, 2010 11:15 AM EST Reads: 3,696 |
By Alin Irimie C – Connection
T – Time is seconds during 5 min interval for which connection is active. Value cannot exceed 300 ( 5*60=300seconds)
C1*T1+…+Cn*Tn
TWC = ———————
T1+…+Tn
Cost = max (TWC1,…, TWCn)/no.of days in month * 3.99
Related p... Feb. 9, 2010 02:25 PM EST Reads: 1,946 |
By Alin Irimie This release supports VS 2008 and the upcoming VS 2010 RC. For VS 2010 Beta 2 you can use the November 2009 release.
New for version 1.1:
Windows Azure Drive: Enable a Windows Azure application to use existing NTFS APIs to access a durable drive. This allows the Windows Azure applicat... Feb. 9, 2010 01:48 PM EST Reads: 1,898 |
By Alin Irimie  An interoperable cloud could help companies cut costs and governments connect constituents, say Microsoft executives.
Governments and businesses alike are looking at cloud services as a way to consolidate IT infrastructure, scale their IT systems for the future, and enable innovativ... Feb. 7, 2010 09:45 AM EST Reads: 6,337 |
By Alin Irimie  Data Services Update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (aka ADO Data Services v1.5) has been re-released and is available for download. If your target is Windows7 or Windows 2008 R2 you can pick it up here. For all other OS versions you can get the release from here. This release targets the... Jan. 29, 2010 01:24 PM EST Reads: 2,684 |
By Alin Irimie  If you are a software developer and didn’t read this paper you should. This paper is targeted towards cloud architects who are gearing up to move an enterprise-class application from a fixed physical environment to a virtualized cloud environment. The focus of this paper is to hi... Jan. 27, 2010 08:36 AM EST Reads: 2,812 |
By Alin Irimie  Current status on the health of the Windows Azure Platform is shown here. If you wish to receive notifications for interruptions to any of the services, you can subscribe to the respective RSS feeds. They also maintain the history of the health status for each service for the past five... Jan. 25, 2010 08:43 AM EST Reads: 4,293 |
By Alin Irimie  Today, at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) here Los Angeles, Microsoft announced not only the release of version 4.0 of the.NET Micro Framework, but also that they are open sourcing the product and making it available under the Apache 2.0 license, which is already ... Nov. 18, 2009 12:45 PM EST Reads: 3,717 |
By Alin Irimie  OK, OK … maybe not (just) for Windows Azure, but Microsoft just released a Facebook client library to help make it easier for everyone to create some interesting applications.
Clarity Consulting Inc. developed the original Facebook Developer Toolkit for the Microsoft Visual Stud... Nov. 18, 2009 01:30 AM EST Reads: 5,020 |
By Alin Irimie  Microsoft just released several new features for Windows Azure through the Windows Azure Tools and SDK. This release adds support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and VWD Express 2010 Beta 2.
What’s New?
Service Model UI: A redesigned and significantly more complete interface for mani... Nov. 17, 2009 11:15 PM EST Reads: 2,391 |
By Alin Irimie Microsoft released today at PDC Pinpoint - the fast, easy way for business customers to find experts, applications, and professional services to meet their specific business needs—and build on the software they already have.
At the same time, Pinpoint helps developers and technology se... Nov. 17, 2009 12:14 PM EST Reads: 2,051 |
By Alin Irimie  Microsoft just released a tool to help you figure out how much money you can save by switching to Windows Azure from your on-premises solution.
The tool will provide you with a customized estimate of potential cost savings you (or your company or organization) may achieve by building ... Nov. 13, 2009 10:15 AM EST Reads: 3,725 |
By Alin Irimie  Under the pressure from Windows Azure release in a week, Amazon unveiled today a new AWS SDK for .NET Developers providing .NET developers the libraries, code samples, and documentation needed to build an AWS-powered application using any programming language capable of making .NET cal... Nov. 12, 2009 09:22 AM EST Reads: 5,941 |
By Alin Irimie  The long awaited build of SQL Server Management Studio with support for SQL Azure is available today for MSDN and TechNet subscribers and will be generally available for the rest of the world as of tomorrow.
The download page can be found here. This support is included as part of th... Nov. 11, 2009 05:00 AM EST Reads: 3,552 |
Alin Irimie is a software engineer - architect, designer, and developer with over 10 years experience in various languages and technologies. Currently he is Messaging Security Manager at 
