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Friday, July 02, 2010
The Azure ServiceBus Access Control Service was updated on July 1, 2010 with a very nice surprise: it has policy files in place for Silverlight and Flash! A week ago, I had written some code that redirected authentication requests and so on so that my Silverlight code could authenticate against the ACS. Today, I saw a post that the service had been updated. So, I went ahead and tried it out: Silverlight: https://[your service].accesscontrol.windows.net/crossdomain.xml Flash: https://[your service].accesscontrol.windows.net/clientaccesspolicy.xml Note that both of these are policies that allow ANYONE to send messages to the ACS. crossdomain.xml has this in the body: <cross-domain-policy> <allow-access-from domain="*" secure="true" /> <allow-access-from domain="*" secure="false" /> <allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="*" secure="true" /> <allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="*" secure="false" /> </cross-domain-policy> I’d like to see options via the SDK or the admin UI that allow me to turn on global access or per website access. This is something ...
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Azure
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Monday, April 27, 2009
This post is just a dump of a set of thoughts that have been running around in my brain. All three major cloud platforms, Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, offer a way to run worker tasks. Google recently introduced cron jobs. Amazon has Elastic Compute Cloud. Azure has the worker role. Each of these mechanisms works in a similar manner: a process looks somewhere for work to do (in the distributed data base, a work queue, or elsewhere) and then performs the task. I don’t have any issues here—this all makes sense. You need a headless process to take input and produce output. This is a staple of most systems I have worked on. I have another issue—how much is this going to cost me? While many people are busy climbing the Gartner hype cycle and are close to the “Peak ...
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Azure
Google App Engine
Cloud Computing
Amazon Web Services
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Wednesday, April 08, 2009
I received some great feedback on my survey of cloud computing platforms at the February Cloud Computing User Group in Downers Grove, so I’ve been asked to bring the show to the downtown Chicago meeting for the April meeting on Thursday, April 9 at 5:30 at Microsoft’s downtown location. If you saw the talk last month, I’ve been asked to beef it up with real world code running on all three major platforms: Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services, and Azure. It’s a simple photo sharing application based on the same code I showed in February for App Engine. Please sign up at https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=136727. The full meeting description: Join us for the fourth local meeting of the Cloud Computing User Group - this months being held at the Microsoft offices in Downtown Chicago. Note : this meeting will be a revisit and slight revamp of last month's content. As ...
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Azure
Google App Engine
Cloud Computing
Utility Computing
Amazon Web Services
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Monday, March 30, 2009
Here’s a small gotcha that I didn’t see covered via the normal Google coverage. So, I’m adding the information and the solution so that I can find the answer when I need it again. I’m sharing via my blog to help you out too. If this helps you, click on a link and send some change my way:) Symptom: You follow the rules and ran “Create Test Storage Tables” from Visual Studio on your dev box. All your testing locally seems to work. When you deploy, you see an error like this (leaving in lots of Google discovery goodness in here. If this saves your bacon, send me a thank you!): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?> <error xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata"> <code>TableNotFound</code> <message xml:lang="en-US">The table specified does not exist.</message> </error> Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error ...
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Azure
Utility Computing
.NET
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Wednesday, March 11, 2009
I originally presented this talk to the Azure Cloud Computing User Group on February 25, 2009. Thanks to Bryce Calhoun for inviting me to present! The original meeting announcement had this summary: Scott Seely, Architect at MySpace, will kick off the meeting with a 20-30 minute overview of the top three cloud computing offerings available today: Google App Engine, Amazon EC3 and Azure Services. His discussion will be primarily focused on a compare/contrast of the functionality and features inherent to each platform. Enjoy!
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CloudFront
Azure
Google App Engine
EC2
Simple Storage Service
Cloud Computing
Utility Computing
Elastic Compute Cloud
Cloud Storage
SQS
S3
Simple Queue Service
Amazon Web Services
SimpleDB
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Tuesday, February 24, 2009
I'll be speaking Wednesday night at the Cloud Computing User Group in Downers Grove, IL. I have a short presentation on the main computing platforms. If you are a regular reader, you know that I've been spending some time going beneath the surface on major platforms. If folks like the high level overview, I'll do some more in depth talks in the future. Here are the details and the announcement that Bryce Calhoun sent out: Join us for the third local meeting of the Cloud Computing User Group – this month in Downers Grove. At this meeting, we will be learning about how Live ID integration works in the Azure cloud computing platform. We’ll demo and dig into the code of an application built in the cloud that integrates directly with the Live ID service and stores information specific to the individual associated with that ID. Also, Scott Seely, Architect ...
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Azure
Google App Engine
EC2
Simple Storage Service
Cloud Computing
Utility Computing
SQS
S3
Simple Queue Service
Amazon Web Services
SimpleDB
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Friday, February 06, 2009
At this point, I think I have a good idea about what GAE, AWS, and Azure offer in terms of potential. To force myself to learn things faster, I think that it's time to go out and build an application. For the sake of making apples to apples comparisons, I need an application that is fairly simple and allows me to exercise cloud storage as well as application hosting. I also want something that is super simple and that involves something I have already built. For my book, Effective REST Services via .NET, I put together an application that allowed a user to create and manage a photo album. I think it's appropriate to reuse that concept. For one thing, I already have the application coded, so I will be able to reuse a lot of ideas and code. The other thing that I like about this idea is ...
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Azure
Google App Engine
Cloud Computing
Utility Computing
Amazon Web Services
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Wednesday, February 04, 2009
I have found a need to do some research across the various cloud offerings so that I get good feel for what each has to offer. At this point in my investigations, I am focusing on only three platforms: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google App Engine. The three have common sets of features: storage through an API, compute resources, and ability to respond to demand by scaling application instances. The storage APIs encourage scalable patterns over patterns that could cause data contention. Amazon requires that the application handle scale up and down on its own. Azure and App Engine scale for the user through a combination of configuration and observed demand. These services also offer authentication services as well as the ability to create your own authentication. App Engine integrates with Google logins, Azure works with Windows Live, and Amazon through security mechanisms in the Amazon Machine Instances. ...
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CloudFront
Azure
Google App Engine
EC2
Simple Storage Service
Cloud Computing
Utility Computing
Elastic Compute Cloud
Cloud Storage
SQS
S3
Simple Queue Service
Amazon Web Services
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Monday, February 02, 2009
I prefer the term utility computing to cloud computing. People outside of software development understand that electricity, water, and phone service are all utilities. Cloud computing is an attempt to deliver compute resources at utility prices. Before I define what utility computing is, I want to define what utility computing isn't. Some companies, such as IBM, are trying to do a "me too" with cloud computing. They use the term cloud computing because that amorphous word, cloud, does not have a clear meaning. They are also confusing the computing public. Why? They are conflating their virtualization products with utility computing in order to confuse the market and continue making sales (note: most big iron and *nix vendors have EXCELLENT virtualization technology). Virtualization of resources and compute resources is an ol+++++++++d story that mainframe vendors have had working well since the 1960s. More recently, companies like VMWare, Citrix,and ...
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Azure
Microsoft
Cloud Computing
Utility Computing
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Friday, January 30, 2009
Around the beginning of January, 2009, I began my experimentation with Azure. This meant installing the October 2008 SDK. Being a WCF geek, I tried writing a service a few minutes after I got Hello World working. Complete FAIL. No matter what binding I tried, I would get a message about having issues with config not allowing partially trusted assemblies. I tried all sorts of things to get the service working, and I eventually got something going by writing custom ServiceHostFactory (no config) that also stripped out the multiple HTTP endpoints appearing when the web site tried to create the service. Not exactly a happy experience. On January 14, a new version dropped. Now, I am reduced to using the basicHttpBinding, but I don't need to use the custom ServiceHostFactory to diagnose things.
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Azure
WCF
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Friday, January 16, 2009
To allow a few of you out there to avoid the same time waster I experienced, let me state this one quickly: if you want to develop applications for Azure, you cannot run the DevFabric on Windows 7 Beta. The bug has been confirmed by Microsoft and has no known workarounds. I hit the issue exactly 5 minutes after I had finished a system rebuild to get Win 7 + VS 2008 up and running. Thankfully, I also run Windows Home Server elsewhere in the house and was able to get back to a happy place within an hour. I know a few of you may have seen Microsoft folks running this scenario; Ron Jacobs did it at the MSDN DevCon in Chicago on Tuesday, Jan 13. Guess what: FOLKS LIKE RON AREN'T RUNNING THE BETA. They have access to internal builds that, apparently, allow one to debug Azure locally. ...
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Azure
Windows
.NET
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Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Kenn Scribner and I are busy getting our book, Effective REST Services via .NET, ready for publication. We've already written all the content and received the technical reviews. This past weekend, Kenn spent some serious time making sure that the voice in the book was consistent. Today, the editors get there hands on the manuscript in order to fix punctuation and English. That's right, the folks with degrees in English will fix our prose. It's exciting to know that this book is getting closer to being on bookshelves and available for ordering from Amazon. Unlike the other .NET REST titles out there, we don't spend 300+ pages talking about WCF and how cool it is. Instead, this book walks through all the different ways that a .NET developer has created to expose and consume REST services. IHttpModule, MVC, Azure, ADO.NET Data Services, JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest...
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Miscellaneous
Azure
Microsoft
JavaScript
WCF
.NET
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Friday, January 09, 2009
I'm still waiting on a Storage and Hosting account with Azure. This kind of bites since I am a member of the Cloud Services Advisory Group-- I'd have thought I'd get some preferential treatment, but no. Still, I am using the Windows Azure SDK to build stuff. This means that I can still experiment locally. A little while ago, while checking to see if my F# code would run OK with a cloud service, I ran into a deployment issue. I had the SQL Server Express database installed and had the Development Fabric and Development Storage up and running via VS2008. I pressed F5, Internet Explorer eventually popped up, and I saw Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage I then clicked on the Development Fabric, selected the Web Role, and saw this reported in the Web Role window: Role state Suspended
Role state Started
Role state Stopping
Role state Stopped ...
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Azure
Microsoft
F#
.NET
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Sunday, January 04, 2009
A long while back, I mentioned that my wife, Jean, and I were looking at starting up a company. Well, we've done a lot of thinking about what the product should do and how this should be done. Because of other recent activities, I haven't had a lot of time to execute on the idea. The fact of the matter is that we still like the underlying concept, but the implementation concept has morphed several times since we had the idea. The biggest changes are these: F#: A VS2010 language (currently in Beta) Azure: A Cloud platform F# is a functional .NET language. I've always been a fan of functional programming as it typically allows me to write my applications using fewer lines than what I would do in pure imperative mode. For better or worse, imperative languages are still center stage (and have been for ...
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Azure
F#