Here’s a fun video made by Steve Marx explaining what Azure is.  What’s fun about it?  Steve drew the whole thing.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:feec9c5d-c6c9-451c-aa9a-b7f4524a6322&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="What is Windows Azure?">Video: What is Windows Azure?</a>

http://blog.smarx.com/posts/what-is-windows-azure-a-hand-drawn-video

VSHelper adds some usability enhancements to Visual Studio .NET

Common problems and solutions while consuming SSL enabled web services in MS.NET

A very common mistake taken by junior ASP.NET developers is forgetting that any web application running in a IIS instance will most likely run in a multithread environment.

They forgot that, unlike the dev environment which usually runs in a single thread pool, production environment usually have a working thread pool with several dozen threads.

Common mechanism like the ASP.NET Cache or the ASP.NET Session have points of concurrency.

It’s common to create singletons in web apps. The most common scenario are provider pattern implementations. Many times, apps also need to have it’s own Cache mechanism or even Session mechanism. All this scenarios may leads us to multi thread racing for some resources.

Testing those code pieces were almost impossible … and multithread bugs and deadlocks were detected late in the application developing cycle:

• when running load tests
• or, in the worst scenario, only in a production environment.

Those days are gone … last May Typemock added a new tool to its toolkit, the Typemock Racer.

This new tool is intended to help finding and fixing possible deadlocks by enabling us to write threaded tests.

And if you think that this is a complex task to do, you are wrong. Doing race tests is as simple as writing a unit test and then decorate it with an  attribute – [ParallelInspection].

That’s it .. you can then run the test and Racer will try to find and recreate deadlocks.

In future Racer will also check for race conditions.

Take a look at this Roy Osherove post for some snapshots and a little movie.

Large loops in Javascript tend to slow down browsers and cause the user experience to degrade. With the use of enclosures and setTimeout, we can simulate 'threading' and improve the performance of our page. This post explains how to create a simple class to handle 'threading'.

I decided to take a break yesterday from my efforts toward a new site to "enjoy" a little science project. The short description is that it's a little Silverlight app that I'd like to run out-of-browser, talking to the server via a WCF service. Before I knew it, I felt like there was XML configuration everywhere.

It could have been worse, because I figured I'd use the Entity Framework. I came to my senses realizing that was overkill, and used LINQ to SQL instead (which, by the way, has it's own config quirks when it comes to connection strings). I've been a big fan of what WCF can do, in particular the ability to create various endpoints in different formats, but my use of it has only been in the context of suggesting it to others who have already built stuff with it. Yeah, so I got to learn all about the vast configuration options there.

There are days like this where I feel that XML has been christened the great configurator, able to solve every problem. There are some risks that go along with this, I think, that include a certain brittleness to build processes and more difficult debugging. I mean, exceptions around these things rarely say, "Hey, your config is wrong, stupid!"

And even going beyond my science project, jump in with an IoC framework and find yourself in even more XML configuration hell. (Insert Ninject plug here... awesome stuff.) It gets to be a little out of control.

I wonder how we got to this point. I wonder if ultimate control via XML is actually more trouble than it's worth. My gut is that for 90% of development work done worldwide, it's totally not necessary. That makes me wonder why I'm chasing it around today.

A simple example of how to use the ASP.NET charting control with jQuery.

Combine a .NET math library and a .NET dynamic programming language to create a Matlab/Mathematica-like interactive environment for math and data analysis.

If we use Ajax or Ajax related controls then we'll find that a lot of script related requests are made to the server. Browser can request two concurrent requests to the server. For example browser may request for an image and while the image is loading the browser may request for an CSS file. But in

Microsoft has created an Azure resource portal for partners:

http://hub.digitalwpc.com/Azure

Bing fan boy here ;-) Check out this post by Ian: Pictures of Bing Stickers in Use I’ve started to receive some photos of how people are using the Bing stickers I sent out. I sent out about 30 to various people around the world and I still have some more pending requests – I’m running very low now despite getting a few more in. And of course I must actually get on and do some work sometime… :-) Here are the first two, starting with Ian Blackburn’s car: And Mark Wisecarver has kitted out his custom...(read more)

Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 provides a Web Part infrastructure that helps you build custom Web Parts and deploy them to Web sites built using Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This content is part 2 of the MOSS content from www.myrampup.com

This article presents the techniques and caveats of building a 3-tire Azure hosted application using Silverlight 3 (presentation tier), .NET RIA services (business logic and data access), and Windows Azure Table (data storage).

Get it from here.

Develop the Mastermind Game using .NET Compact Framework

In the last two years I have been busy in the Phoenix, AZ area trying to strengthen the technology community by putting together conferences like the The Best of PDC 08, AZGroups Scott Guthrie event and lunches like TechLunchSouth.  Every once in a while I sit back and wonder if it is all worth?  Am I making a difference? What impact am I making on the Phoenix technology area.

Well to my surprise when I got back from my short family vacation is received a Thank You note in the mail. Here are the contents of the note.

Joe,

I’d like to thank you or all your efforts that you put into developing the designer / .net / nerd community around here. Working at such a small shop, its a challenge for me to develop a network of peers & trusted resources. I’m not able to participate much, but the few events I’ve been able to attend are very beneficial.

With much appreciation for your time & effort,

J.A. (Name withheld)

So to J.A and the others that I have helped, you’re welcome! It’s nice to know that my work is helpful to some and being appreciated.

Silverlight 3 and associated developer tools have been released!  Visit the Silverlight Community site to download all you need to build great Web experiences with Silverlight 3. You can also learn more by watching the new videos, reviewing the Quickstarts or reading about some success stories and what is new in Silverlight 3.

https://www.code7contest.com

Tabarnouche!  We’re soooooooo evil here  ;-)

Microsoft announced part of the Azure pricing model in this blog post.  When they revealed Azure at PDC08, Microsoft said that the pricing model would be competitive (read: on par with Amazon Web Services).  A quick Azure/AWS comparison confirms that.

Here’s the pricing:

Azure
Compute @  $0.12 / hour
Storage @ $0.15 / GB stored
Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K

Azure .NET Services
Messages @ $0.15/100K message operations

SQL Azure
Web Edition – Up to 1 GB relational database @ $9.99
Business Edition – Up to 10 GB relational database @ $99.99 

Bandwidth @ $0.10 in / GB
Bandwidth @ $0.15 out / GB

So basically, a virtual instance (30 days * 24 hours * $0.12) costs $86.40.

Let’s say that I need 2 servers with 10GB of storage, 500GB out and 100GB in.  What’s hard to predict is the storage and messages transactions.  Let’s just use these numbers: one million transactions and messages.

Compute: $172.80
Storage: $1.50
Storage transactions: $1
Messages: $1.50
Bandwidth in: $10
Bandwidth out: $75

Total: $261.80

Not bad considering that you get load balancing, automatic failover, 99.5% availability.

At PDC09, Microsoft will announce a second set of pricing with more predictable costs (read: packages with X amount of bandwidth, transactions and messages for a fixed monthly price).

AWS pricing can be found here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing

A method for abstracting WCF service calls in Silverlight to facilitate reuse and easy re-targeting of services.