Microsoft Announce The Azure Services Platform

The Azure Services Platform is in CTP right now, here are some details about the Azure Services Platform:


What is the Azure Services Platform?
The Azure Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises.

Azure reduces the need for up-front technology purchases, and it enables developers to quickly and easily create applications running in the cloud by using their existing skills with the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment and the Microsoft .NET Framework. In addition to managed code languages supported by .NET, Azure will support more programming languages and development environments in the near future. Azure simplifies maintaining and operating applications by providing on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web and connected applications. Infrastructure management is automated with a platform that is designed for high availability and dynamic scaling to match usage needs with the option of a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Azure provides an open, standards-based and interoperable environment with support for multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and XML.

Microsoft also offers cloud applications ready for consumption by customers such as Windows Live™, Microsoft Dynamics™, and other Microsoft Online Services for business such as Microsoft Exchange Online and SharePoint® Online. The Azure Services Platform lets developers provide their own unique customer offerings by offering the foundational components of compute, storage, and building block services to author and compose applications in the cloud.

Windows Azure

Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage internet or cloud applications. Windows Azure supports a consistent development experience through its integration with Visual Studio. In the early stages of CTP, .NET managed applications built using Visual Studio will be supported. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. Windows Azure welcomes third party tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

Learn more about Windows Azure.


Live Services

Live Services is a set of building blocks within the Azure Services Platform for handling user data and application resources. Live Services provides developers with an easy on-ramp to build rich social applications and experiences, across a range of digital devices that can connect with one of the largest audiences on the Web.

Learn more about Live Services

Microsoft SQL Services

Microsoft SQL Services extends the capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server into the cloud as a Web-based, distributed relational database. It provides Web services that enable relational queries, search, and data synchronization with mobile users, remote offices and business partners. It can store and retrieve structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

Learn more about SQL Services

Microsoft .NET Services

Microsoft .NET Services make developing loosely coupled cloud-based applications easier. .NET Services includes access control to help secure your applications, a service bus for communicating across applications and services, and hosted workflow execution. These hosted services allow you to easily create federated applications that span from on-premises environments to the cloud.

Learn more about .NET Services

Microsoft® SharePoint® Services & Dynamics® CRM Services

In the future, developers will have access to SharePoint & CRM functionality for collaboration and building stronger customer relationships. With the flexibility to use familiar developer tools like Visual Studio, developers will be able to rapidly build applications that utilize SharePoint and CRM capabilities as developer services for their own applications. Developers can expect a breadth of SharePoint & CRM capabilities across the spectrum of on-premises, online & the Azure Services Platform.

Register for the Azure Services Platform here: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/register.mspx

New .NET Logo

New .NET Logo

New Transactional Memory Blog On MSDN

There is a Transactional Memory Blog On MSDN.

Here is an excerpt

If you have been using the Parallel Extension CTP or simply writing multi-threaded code yourself, you probably have run into situations where you needed to share data between multiple threads. So long as the data is read-only, this isn’t a problem, but what about mutating data?

The easy answer is to use a lock. There are a lot of blog entries and white papers talking about how to use locks correctly, how to avoid deadlocks, or what are the best locks for the particular scenario, or even how to correctly write lock-free code. You could read all of these and still run into trouble using locks. You see, the problem isn’t sharing one piece of data; it’s when you are sharing multiple pieces of data – for instance data that has a complex schema involving multiple complex objects such as trees or lists.

So, locks are a basic tool in your arsenal. From the simple lock, you can build synchronization mechanisms that hopefully protect your data, correctly, and don’t impact your scalability.

Ah, I hear you sigh. Yes, hope is eternal, software has bugs and multithreaded software has race conditions, deadlocks, and scalability problems. Why? Well, because many find it is hard and fraught with peril to correctly use anything more than a single lock or at most some really small set of course-grained locks. As code matures, locking hierarchies to provide fine-grained-locking often morph from elegant to clumsy. You may also find that as your project grows, lock depth blossoms, unnecessarily, or alternatively race conditions are introduced simply because programmers were unaware that it necessary to lock a specific resource. The end result is code that simply doesn’t scale or your application’s reliability plummets without some of your best and brightest spending time tuning, fixing, “right-sizing” and eliminating locks. Even after all that work, are you confident that your code is bug-free? Do race conditions exist in it?

Subscribe to this blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/stmteam/default.aspx

Microsoft Announces Conference Call With Scott Guthrie

Microsoft Corp. will hold a teleconference with Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft. Guthrie will make a significant announcement related to Microsoft Silverlight. A recording of the call and additional information will be available for 30 days on the Microsoft Silverlight PressPass Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/silverlight/default.mspx

When:
Monday, Oct. 13, 2008, at 9 a.m. PDT
Special Instructions:
Participants will need to speak the passcode “Silverlight” when prompted after dialing into the call.

Domestic participants: 888-617-1526

International participants:
Argentina: 0800-777-0466
Australia: 1-800-098-380
Austria: 0800-677-286
Belgium: 0800-4-9718
Brazil: 0800-8911991
Chile: 1230-020-0323
China: 10800-712-1296 or 10800-120-1296
Colombia: 01800-9-156436
Czech Republic: 800-700-224
Denmark: 8088-5430
Finland: 0-800-1-12828
France: 080-510-0983
Germany: 0800-12-6809
Greece: 00800-12-6809
Hong Kong: 800-908-208
Hungary: 06-800-17568
India: 000-800-852-1228
Indonesia: 001-803-011-3651
Ireland: 1800-932-053
Israel: 1-80-9214710
Italy: 800-906-460
Japan: 0034-800-400651
Malaysia: 1-800-81-2060
Mexico: 001-866-839-3438
Netherlands: 0800-343-4364
New Zealand: 0800-441-333
Norway: 800-11118
Panama: 011-001-800-5072132
Poland: 00-800-1211774
Portugal: 8008-60134
Russia: 8-10-8002-0074011
Singapore: 800-120-4247
South Africa: 080-09-92283
South Korea: 00798-14800-6607
Spain: 800-099-387
Sweden: 0200-893-409
Switzerland: 0800-001-214
Taiwan: 00801-137-661
Thailand: 001-800-1206-65426
United Kingdom: 0800-279-9630
Uruguay: 000-413-598-3416
Venezuela: 0800-1-00-3211

Nice collection of VB.NET Programming Hacks

A nice collection of VB.NET Programming Hacks

Here is what is available

General
* Aliassing a namespace
* Memory usage for all processes
* Get the commandline parameters
* Get the computername
* Getting text from the clipboard
* Saving text on the clipboard
* Getting the freespace on a drive
* Getting memoryusage of one process
* Get the total space used by a drive
* Path to UNC
* Impersonating an administrator
* Programaticaly changing the Ignore addresses in the proxy settings


Strings
* Use StringBuilder to concatenate strings


Dates
* Add day, month, year to date
* Add time to a date (hours, minutes, seconds)
* Substract Time from a date (hours, minutes, seconds)
* Substract from a date (days, months, years)
* What day of the week is a certain date
* Is this year a leapyear?
* Difference in days between 2 dates


ADO.NET
* Use commandparameters instead of string concatenation


Forms
* Opening a form on a specified monitor
* Show a form in a form
* Open a form as modal
* Open a form
* MDI
* Hide a form on closing

Controls
* Use TextBox.AppendText instead of concatenating strings


LINQ
* Using Linq to Order directories by creation datetime

XLINQ
* Xlinq : get an elements value with VB.Net
* Xlinq: write to an element using VB.Net

Reflection
* Getting a property using reflection part 1
* Getting a property using reflection part 2
* Getting a property using reflection part 3
* Getting a property using reflection part 4
* Create an instance of class from a string using reflection
* Set a readonly property via reflection
* Setting a private field using reflection
* Getting a private field using reflection


Patterns
* Use Singletonprovider instead of the Singleton pattern
* Invoke Singletonprovider giving a string as classname


Network
* See if the network is available
* Pinging another computer
* Getting the current computer's IP-Address
* Determining if an IPAddress is IPv4 or IPv6
* Creating an IPv6 address the correct way
* How to create an IPv4 address the correct way

Printing
* Selecting a printer


Numbers to Words
* Numbers to French words
* Numbers to Dutch words

Mail
* Sending a mail with attachements


File handling
* Checking if a file exists
* Deleting a file
* Checking if a directory exists
* Deleting a directory
* Get all the files from a certain directory
* Get all the files with a certain extension from a directory
* Getting a file's extension from a string
* Getting a file's filename from a string
* Getting a file's filename from a string without the extension
* Combining two strings to make a path

Or visit this link VB.NET Programming Hacks since it might get updated

Help me win this bet

You might know that some friends and myself have launched a site named LessThanDot, this is a site where users can collaborate via the wiki, ask questions in the fora and can read out blogs. It is a technical site but we do have a forum where you can post pretty much anything you want(not vulgar or offensive). Here are some examples
The Rage of the Previously Rich
We're In Ur Bank, Bailing It Out
Girls Habanero Eating Contest

Of course we do have our technical forums, some examples
Microsoft SQL Server
ASP.NET
Tech Rants

So I made a bet with the other owners of this site that I will have the most people sign up until November 1st. So please sign up and let your coworkers/friends know and let them sign up too, after all you don't want me to lose or do you?


Don't be scared to participate in the forums :-)

My username is SQLDenis