Trent Swanson

material formal efficient final

Patterns & Practices Symposium 2013

Did you miss the Patterns & Practices Symposium 2013?  Sorry to hear that, it was a great conference, and I would highly recommend making it to the next one.  Fortunately you can catch some of the sessions from the conference over on channel 9.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Patterns-Practices-Symposium-Online/pattern-practices-symposium-2013

I really enjoyed the Introduction of Git version control to the team session.  You have to check out the Autoscaling in Windows Azure.  Great session on automated scaling of Windows Azure instances.  I still can’t believe the feature is not part of the platform.

 March 5, 2013 Windows Azure

Windows Azure Web Role RoleEntry Configuration. WaIISHost.exe.config no longer works.

A BLOG post on Full Scale 180 site shows how to provide application configuration with Windows Azure Web Role RoleEntry Events (OnStart, Run, Onstop).  Prior to Windows Azure SDK 1.8 a lot of people had used WaIISHost.exe.config to work around a limitation in the SDK.  As of Windows Azure SDK 1.8 this no longer works.  You can find a solution with the current version of the Azure SDK here.

http://www.fullscale180.com/Blog/post/2012/11/08/WaIISHostexeconfig-in-Web-Roles-does-not-work-in-Windows-Azure-SDK-18.aspx

Including WaIISHost.exe.config in a web role project came about with SDK 1.3 and introduction of Full IIS.  Additional background as to why this is used to provide application configurations for RoleEntry  can be found here.

 November 9, 2012 Cloud, Windows Azure

Windows Azure Shared Caching Extensions for ADO.NET

At Full Scale 180 we get to work on some interesting Windows Azure projects with our customers every day, and every now and then we find some time to work with friends from Microsoft to put together some useful samples.  This sample demonstrates how to use Extension Methods to extend common ADO.NET classes, and how to use these extension methods to easily add Windows Azure Caching support to any Windows Azure application that uses ADO.NET.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Shared-Caching-Extensions-e0fb8204

 

 October 24, 2012 Cloud, Windows Azure

Optimize Windows Azure for Performance and Scalability Job Processing

This paper presents recent findings of the Microsoft Customer Advisory Team (CAT) to optimize a large-scale PaaS application built on Windows Azure. The application was originally developed as an on-premises solution, then migrated to Windows Azure. An important point is that the application had a wide range of job sizes. Depending on the job, the time could vary greatly. The application also used a database intensively, both reading and writing. If you are migrating an application that has those same characteristics (wide range of job sizes and intensive use of a database), then the lessons learned here are applicable.

Optimization Techniques for Windows Azure Role Sizes and Databases

 October 11, 2012 Windows Azure

Remote Debugging Windows Azure Cloud Services with Visual Studio 2012

Most of your Windows Azure development and debugging work can and will be done in the local emulator. Even though the emulator is close to the cloud environment, there are differences, and there are some situations that occasionally come up when remotely debugging your solution which is deployed and running in the cloud would be useful.  Fortunately there is a sample available which demonstrates how to make this possible.  The sample does have some limitations, but does work quite well.

You can find sample code for an approach to enabling Remote Debugging of Windows Azure Cloud Services on MSDN Code Gallery

Additional details on the sample code can be found on the Full Scale 18o BLOG – Using Visual Studio Remote Debugger with Windows Azure Cloud Services.

 

 October 9, 2012 Cloud, Windows Azure

Hello World! From Windows Azure Web Sites

Welcome to the personal BLOG for Trent Swanson.  This BLOG is currently a WordPress BLOG hosted on Windows Azure Web Sites.  By utilizing Windows Azure Web Sites with my BLOG I am able to quickly and easily deploy sites to a highly scalable cloud environment that allows you to start small and scale as traffic grows.

With Windows Azure Web Sites, use the languages and open source apps of your choice then deploy with FTP, Git and TFS. Easily integrate Windows Azure services like SQL Database, Caching, CDN and Storage.

 September 29, 2012 Cloud, Windows Azure