I’ve seen a few customers use Medium sized roles in production and ExtraSmall sized roles in their test environment to reduce the cost of compute hours. They typically use multiple ServiceDefinition.csdef files (one for each environment) which also means they need to make changes to all of these fil...

In the last few months the tooling for Windows Azure greatly improved: a new portal, official PowerShell cmdlets, azure-cli, … In this article I would like to focus on the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio which is one of the components included in the Windows Azure SDK for .NET installation

If you worked with the Windows Azure SQL Database in the past you’ll know that there is no support for SQL Server Agent jobs. According to the official guidelines you should use a SQL Server Agent which runs on-premises and connect it to your Windows Azure SQL Database. But this only works if you ha...

It has been less than four months since we introduced the first public preview for Windows Azure Mobile Services and in this short time we have seen continual improvements to the service. We are continuing this great momentum and I’m happy to announce another round of exciting updates to Windows Az...

What is IaaS? Infrastructure as a service. How it is different from existing services in Windows Azure like Software as Service and Platform as Service? Saas and PaaS are service models where you can use the capabilities of Cloud computing to deliver services. Many customers adapting IaaS model beca...

As you can see the staging URL is obfuscated and is (almost) impossible to guess. But what happens if someone gains access to this staging URL? That person might gain access to a version of the application containing critical bugs / security breaches or even information that shouldn’t be available j...

A few days ago Scott Guthrie announced yet another update to Windows Azure. The great thing about this update is that it adds job scheduler support to Mobile Services. This means you can now create scripts that run every X minutes/days/hours/months. The Windows Azure website explains in detail how y...

Last month Glenn Block announced the new release of azure-cli (version 0.6.9). This release adds lots of new features to the CLI like managing Mobile Services, custom Web Site deployments … In order to use the azure-cli you’ll need Node.js on your machine. And I guess this is the reason why peopl...

Demonstrate how to build a web app with Node.js and MongoDB, and how to deploy it on Windows Azure as a Windows Azure Web Site. Firstly, The web site is built with Node.js, Express.js, Mongoose and MongoDB and MongoLab.

Windows Azure Table Storage is a great way to store your data: partitions make it easy to scale and it’s very cheap (as opposed to Windows Azure SQL Database). But there are some downsides of choosing Table Storage: no indexes (except for the partition and row key), no full text search and no sortin...

I’m excited to announce that we have re-launched the Rock, Paper, Azure challenge! For the next 6 weeks Developers will compete in an online game based on rock, paper, scissors, with the opportunity to win prizes and some serious bragging rights.

You are now allowed to run 10 free web sites per sub region. Since Windows Azure Web Sites (Preview) is available in 5 regions this means you can create up to 50 free Web Sites. The only thing you’ll need to look after is that you choose a different region when you hit the 10 sites limit.

A few days ago Alan Smith (Windows Azure MVP) started a discussion about the “Virtual Machine hacking” thread on the MSDN forum and how we could protect our Virtual Machines. Let’s take a look at our options for reducing the attack surface of a Windows VM (some options can also be applied to Linux V...

In order to manage endpoints of a Virtual Machine you have 2 options: use the portal or use Powershell. If you use the portal it’s not so easy to add a list or a range or ports, you would need to add these ports one by one. The other way you can manage these endpoints is by writing Powershell script...