Developing in Windows Azure is at once not that much different from what you’re familiar with in on-premises systems, and different in significant ways. Because of these differences, developers often ask about the specific process to develop and deploy a Windows Azure application - more formally called an Application Lifecycle Management, or ALM. ...

I recently joined a software development project that involves not only myself and other internal Microsoft employees, but a partner and a customer as well. We are building a hybrid solution that uses assets on premises as well as Windows Azure for processing. When we put the team together we picked a methodology (Agile) for the project (we use ...

I served in the U.S. Military for a while, and as part of my training we had to maintain a “Bug-Out Bag”, which was a large duffle-bag full of certain items that we could live on/fight with in an emergency. I’ve carried the spirit of that idea forward with me into civilian life, in Florida and especially here in the Pacific Northwest. In Florida ...

Windows Azure Storage has three primary components - a Queue, a Binary Large Object (BLOB) store (two types of these), and Table Storage. Storage of data on-premises is fairly well understood - but there components of it that you may not consider. When you move to a distributed architecture, certain factors should be taken into account, such as ...

One of the advantages of using Windows Azure to run your code is that you don’t have to constantly manage upgrades on your platform. While that’s a big advantage indeed, it immediately brings up the question - how do the upgrades happen? Microsoft upgrades the Azure platform in periodic increments, and the components that are affected are ...

When you create a Windows Azure application, you’ll pick a subscription to put it under. This is a billing container - underneath that, you’ll deploy a Hosted Service. That holds the Web and Worker Roles that you’ll deploy for your applications. Along side that, you use the Storage Account to create storage for the application. ...

A new term - well, perhaps not that new - has come up and I’m actually very excited about it. The term is Data Scientist, and since it’s new, it’s fairly undefined. I’ll explain what I think it means, and why I’m excited about it. In general, I’ve found the term deals at its most basic with analyzing data. Of course, we all do that, and the term ...

Note - please pay attention to the date of this post. As much as I attempt to make the information below accurate, the nature of distributed computing means that components, units and pricing will change over time. The definitive costs for Microsoft Windows Azure and SQL Azure are located here, and are more accurate than anything you will see in ...

I’ve explained before that Windows Azure is a Platform as a Service - at its simplest, that means that you write software and Azure runs it for you. But what if you are a shop that normally buys “off the shelf” software, and the only software you write is an internal utility here and there - can you still use Windows Azure? Absolutely. Windows ...

Last week Microsoft announced several new offerings for “Big Data” - and since I’m a stickler for definitions, I wanted to make sure I understood what that really means. What is “Big Data”? What size hard drive is that? After all, my laptop has 1TB of storage - is my laptop “Big Data”? There are actually a few definitions for this term, most ...