Windows Azure is a platform that has you covered, whether you need to write software, run software that is already written, or Install and use “canned” software whether you or someone else wrote it. Like any platform, it’s a set of tools you can use where it makes sense to solve a problem. You can click on the graphic below for ...

I’m fascinated by the way people learn. I’m told there are several methods people use to understand new information, from reading to watching, from experiencing to exploring. Personally, I use multiple methods of learning when I encounter a new topic, usually starting with reading a bit about the concepts. I quickly want to put those into ...

Two weeks ago I made available a copy of [AdventureWorks2012] on SQL Azure and published credentials so that anyone from the SQL community could connect up and experience SQL Azure, probably for the first time. One of the (somewhat) popular requests thereafter was to make the venerable Northwind database available too so I am pleased to say that ...

Distributed Computing - and more importantly “-as-a-Service” models of computing have a different cost model. This is something that sounds obvious on the surface but it’s often forgotten during the design and coding phase of a project. In on-premises computing, we’re used to purchasing a server and all of the hardware infrastructure and ...

Windows Azure allows you to write code in languages within the .NET stack, you can use Java, C++, PHP, NodeJS and others. Code is code - other than keeping things stateless, using a Web or Worker Role in Azure is not all that different from working with an on-premises system. However…. Working in a scalable, component-based stateless ...

Microsoft is working on a new Windows Azure service called “Trust Services”. Trust Services takes a certificate you upload and uses it to encrypt and decrypt sensitive data in the cloud. Of course, like any security service, there’s a bit more to it than that. I’ll give you a quick overview of how you can use this product ...

In September 2011 I published a blog post SSIS Reporting Pack v0.2 now available in which I made available the credentials of a sample database that one could use to test SSIS Reporting Pack. That database was sitting on a paid-for Azure subscription and hence was costing me about £5 a month - not a huge amount but when I later got a free Azure ...

Windows Azure is a Platform as a Service – a PaaS – that runs code you write. That code doesn’t just mean the languages on the .NET platform – you can run code from multiple languages, including Java. In fact, you can develop for Windows and SQL Azure using not only Visual Studio but the Eclipse Integrated Development ...

(Many thanks to Peter Gvozdjak and Dan Benediktson here at Microsoft who worked with me on this issue and provided the bulk of information for this post) Recently I had a customer inquire about some performance tuning he wanted to do for SQL Azure, and as part of that he found that it was possible to remove the “Encrypt=True” setting on the ...

(As with all of these types of posts, check the date of the latest update I’ve made here. Anything older than 6 months is probably out of date, given the speed with which we release new features into Windows and SQL Azure) I don’t normally like to discuss things in terms of tools. I find that whenever you start with a given tool (or ...