Hello Cloud – Getting The Environment Ready

First, you need to download the Windows Azure Tools For Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 1.1 (February 2010). This comes down as the aptly named VSCloudService.exe. You might encounter the following error:

There are a few pre-requisites to install first. Click here to view the detailed readme file. Once this is complete, the installation proceeds…

 

Launch Visual Studio 2010 RC1

File->New Project

Under Visual C#, go to Cloud. The option to create a Windows Azure Cloud Service is now enabled.

Playing with Windows Azure

I have been following SQL Azure pretty closely over the last few months. This week at Melbourne SQL Server Users Group, we had a presentation from David Lemphers from the Windows Azure team. To be honest I didn’t know a lot about Windows Azure prior to this session.

The architecture of Windows Azure is really neat – the ability to provision additional instances of your application, the separation of web and worker roles. The use of simple objects that we are all familiar with: blobs, queues and tables for storage. It all makes a lot of sense.

In my next few posts, I am going to document my experience as I attempt to write “Hello Cloud”. For this purpose I have downloaded Visual Studio 2010 RC1. My internet cap is really hurting right now.

Xobni – Neat add-in for Outlook 2007

At the moment I am testing out a little application called Xobni. It integrates with Outlook 2007 and does all sorts of useful things, like making it easy to find that attachment that some customer emailed you last week. Instead of trawling with the built in Outlook search, it presents a tidy context-sensitive list for you to click through. It also collects and displays interesting statistics on who emails you and when.

http://www.xobni.com/

A quiet day today…

Testing out Live Writer

Today I downloaded Windows Live Writer – the installation and integration with blogspot.com was pretty slick. Hopefully this will allow me to breathe some life back into my blog!