Day: Thursday January 14 2010

Quick Tip for Detecting Azure Environment During Your Development Cycle

colinizer Azure, Microsoft, mix10, mix2010, Windows Azure, Windows Azure Storage

Given the Azure tools and portal for Visual Studio 2008, there are 4 likely modes of execution during your development cycle:

  1. Testing in Visual Studio (with no Azure environment)
  2. Testing in Visual Studio using the local Azure Development Fabric/Storage
  3. Staged on the Azure portal
  4. Deployed on the Azure portal

#1 mostly applies when you have an application that you are porting, or you are development components that may become part of the application.

At times you may find it useful to know if you are running inside or outside of the Azure environment (i.e. 1 vs. 2/3/4).

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Providing you have included the appropriate assembly reference, you can use this API to detect your environment and take appropriate action while developing and testing your components at the stages above.

Looking to learn more about the Windows Azure Platform, Silverlight, Windows Touch or Windows Identify Foundation?

If you’d like to see these sessions in person at Microsoft’s Mix 2010 conference or the recordings that will likely be made available for free later on, please vote for the sessions before January 15th 2010, by going to the site, adding the 3 sessions to you ballot and submitting it. 

Visual Studio 2010 to Release on April 12 2010

colinizer .NET 4.0, Microsoft, Visual Studio 2010

Microsoft previously announced a push-back before the US holiday season, and the addition of a Release Candidate in February 2010.

“In order to ensure that we are able to receive and react to this feedback, we will also be moving the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 back a few weeks.”

Since the RC hasn’t happened yet and the “receive and react to” window is a fixed length of time, it makes me believe that Microsoft is now confident enough about its solution to the performance issues that it can announce a final date with at least the perception of a reaction to the added RC.

Just 2 days Left to Vote for Mix 2010 sessions on Azure, Silverlight, Windows Touch and WIF

colinizer Azure, Microsoft, mix10, mix2010, Silverlight, Windows Azure, Windows Touch

Voting ends on Friday for sessions at Microsoft’s Mix 2010 conference.

I’ve submitted 3 session proposals – see the details – around Windows Touch, Azure & Silverlight which were all accepted into the voting list.  My session on Windows Identity Foundation has already been scheduled for the renowned high-level DevTeach 2010 conference at Microsoft’s Canadian HQ this March.

If you’d like to see my sessions in person at Mix or the recordings that will likely be made available for free then please vote for them.

You can find a list of all sessions available for voting  (a list that periodically shuffles its order), or go directly to my sessions here.  You can pick a total of 5 sessions to vote for.

Quick Tip for Hosting Services for Silverlight on Windows Azure

colinizer Azure, Microsoft, mix10, mix2010, Silverlight, WCF, Windows Azure

The Silverlight and Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 both provide convenient means to get going with these respective technologies.

Windows Azure is a good place to host services that your Silverlight application may call, as well as the web application that contains the Silverlight application itself.

However, if you’ve tried to get this to work, then you may have encountered as issue.

Let’s say you’ve added a Web Role to your Azure application to host the Silverlight application, and you want to add a Silverlight-enabled WCF Service to the website.  You may have tried using the Add New Item dialog to select the “Silverlight-enabled WCF Service” like this…

image

Unfortunately (for reasons I may go into in the future), the Azure platform isn’t going to correctly publish this WCF service in the web role, and your Silverlight app may be able to talk to the service just fine in your development environment, but not when you deploy to Azure proper.

The easiest workaround for this is to create a WCF Role, instead of a Web Role and then add your website files and Silverlight application to that.  The WCF Role exposes a service that is compatible with Silverlight on Azure.

If you check out my Guest Wall application (including source code), you’ll see this in action as well as the code :).

Looking to learn more about the Windows Azure Platform, Silverlight, Windows Touch or Windows Identify Foundation?

If you’d like to see these sessions in person at Microsoft’s Mix 2010 conference or the recordings that will likely be made available for free later on, please vote for the sessions before January 15th 2010, by going to the site, adding the 3 sessions to you ballot and submitting it.