Jim introduced cloud and presented specifics on Blob and Table storage services and SQL Azure. I had the opportunity to present one of the sections – mine was a combination of Windows Azure Compute services + the Windows Azure Queue service with some basics around using these services to assemble “cloud native” applications. The official slides for the Windows Azure DevCamp series appear to be here, though my slides were a little different and are also available (WindowsAzureDeveloperCamp-FarmingtonCT-07Dec2011-BillWilder). At the end, Jim also ran through the creation of a RockPaperAzure “bot” and it was (literally!) game on as attendees raced to create competitive entries.

I took a few photos at the event – some of Jim presenting, some showing participants at the end coming to claim their prizes from the RockPaperAzure challenge – and none from the middle!

Since this summary page is – by necessity – a point-in-time SNAPSHOT of what I see is going on, it will not necessarily be updated when event details change. So please always double-check with official event information!

I’ve attempted to list events of interest to the local Azure community – not just topics specific to the Windows Azure Cloud Platform. Know of any more cloud events of interest? Have any more information or corrections on the events listed? Please let everyone know about them by adding a comment.

Events are listed in the order in which they will occur.

November 2011 Events

1. Cloudy Mondays

• when: Mon 14-Nov-2011, 5:00 – ?:?? PM
• where: Small Business Development Center (note: NOT Venture Development Center!), 100 Morrissey Boulevard, Boston, MA
  wifi: (not sure)
• food: (not sure, though food and spirits were provided last time)
• cost: FREE
• what: Discuss Amazon’s cloud: launching projects on AWS, comparing AWS to other public clouds, etc. One speaker is Jason Haruska, Chief Architect at Backupify. Vikram Kumar, CTO and Founder of OfficeDrop.com, will also be discussing how OfficeDrop.com launched using AWS.
• more info: http://www.meetup.com/Cloudy-Mondays/events/39091772/
• register: http://www.meetup.com/Cloudy-Mondays/events/39091772/
• twitter: (not sure)

2. Cloud Roundtable – Business in the Cloud -

• when: Tue 15-Nov-2011, 3:00 - 5:30 PM (updated: start time is officially 3:00 PM)
• where: Boston College Club, 100 Federal St., Boston, MA
• wifi: (not sure)
• food: (looks like cocktails and hors d’oeuvres towards the end)
• cost: FREE
• what: From the description on the web site: “The cloud is a fundamental paradigm shift from our current or past thinking about scalable architecture and there are security tradeoffs:  less control of data, new vulnerability classes, and compliance challenges.  However, if managed properly, these risks can be mitigated. This interactive seminar will discuss the challenges of cloud computing, demonstrate how to build a secure and redundant system, and touch upon real-world examples of cloud computing gone bad.”
• more info: http://web.securityinnovation.com/boston
• register: http://web.securityinnovation.com/boston
• twitter: (not sure)

3. Boston Azure User Group meeting: Introduction to Cloud, Windows Azure, Azure Dev Tools

• when: Thu 17-Nov-2011, 6:00 – 8:30 PM
• where: Hosted at NERD Center, 1 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA (directions)
• wifi: Wireless Internet access will be available
• food: Pizza and drinks will be provided
• cost: FREE
• what: Get ramped up on Cloud and Windows Azure – what is this cloud thing all about? How does the Windows Azure Cloud Platform fit in? And how can you get started using Visual Studio and the Windows Azure tools? Get all these questions answered in one night!
• more info: See the Boston Azure cloud user group site for more info
• register: http://www.meetup.com/bostonazure/events/38944852/
• twitter: #bostonazure

December – 2011 Events

4. Azure is on the Road! December Road Trip…

At a variety of locations (far from Boston, but at least regional):

• Check out Jim O’Neil’s blog post on the road show: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jimoneil/archive/2011/11/04/taking-the-cloud-on-the-road.aspx

5. Testing in the Cloud with Boston Web Performance Group

• when: Tue 06-Dec-2011: 6:30-7:15 Eat pizza and meet other members, 7:15-8:15 Presentation, 8:15-9:00 Q&A, general socializing and more pizza eating
• where: Wayfair Offices – 177 Huntington Ave, 177 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA (map) Come up to the 24th floor, call 802-522-6294 with issues
• wifi: Wireless Internet access will be available
• food: Pizza and drinks will be provided
• cost: FREE
• what: Speaker: Dan Bartow on Testing in the Cloud – description from event site: “Achieving real performance on the web begins with realistic testing and an understanding of the application and it’s infrastructure.  Testing realistically and for real results across web & mobile applications means leveraging the
  cloud.  Agile development processes, complex multi-tier architectures, and the potential for massive (and sudden) load all require a different approach than
  historical apps.  Come hear from Soasta, the makers of the CloudTest platform and CloudTest Lite, about their experiences and why companies need to change their expectations about what “testing” means. Dan Bartow is Vice President and CloudTest Evangelist at SOASTA, the leader
  in performance testing from the cloud. Prior to joining SOASTA he was Senior Manager of Engineering at Intuit, where his team was responsible for the speed and stability of TurboTax Online, the #1 rated, best-selling online tax software. Over the past decade he has been responsible for the speed and
  scalability of websites for such well-known brands as American Eagle Outfitters, AT&T, Best Buy, Finish Line, J.Crew, Neiman Marcus and Sony Online
  Entertainment, among others. Dan has set multiple industry precedents including launching the worlds largest stateful JBoss cluster and using over 2000 cloud computing cores to generate load against a live web site.  Dan is a frequent industry presenter and has spoken at leading testing and cloud computing
  conferences such as Software Test & Performance (STP), O’Reilly’s Web2.0 Expo, Amazon Web Services Road Show, and SYS-CON’s Cloud Computing Expo.” Visit the event web site to view the Cloud Testing Bill of Rights.
• more info: See http://www.meetup.com/Web-Performance-Boston/events/38442872/ for more info
• register: http://www.meetup.com/Web-Performance-Boston/events/38442872/
• twitter: @JonathanKlein

6. Boston Azure User Group December

• when: Tue 13-Dec-2011, 6:00 – 8:30 PM
• where: Hosted at NERD Center, 1 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA (directions)
• wifi: Yes
• food: Pizza and drinks will be provided
• cost: FREE
• what: Azure-related topic(s) to be announced.
• more info: See the Boston Azure cloud user group site for more info
• register: http://www.meetup.com/bostonazure/events/38945582/
• twitter: #bostonazure

7. Cloud Architecture Patterns at North Shore .NET User Group

• when: Wed 14-Dec-2011, 6:00 – 8:30 PM
• where: EBSCO Publishing, 10 Estes Street, Ipswich, MA (map)
• wifi: (not sure)
• food: (Food is either available … or provided .. not sure)
• cost: FREE
• what: Cloud Architecture Patterns (generally), then see how the Windows Azure Platform helps you realize these patterns. Speaker is Bill Wilder, Boston Azure user group leader, Windows Azure MVP, and an Independent Azure Consultant.
• more info: http://www.meetup.com/North-Shore-NET-User-Group/events/40679722/?a=ea1.2_lnm&rv=ea1.2
• register: http://www.meetup.com/North-Shore-NET-User-Group/events/40679722/?a=ea1.2_lnm&rv=ea1.2
• twitter:

8. Using Windows Azure to Build Cloud Enabled Windows Phone Apps at Microsoft DevBoston

• when: Wed 14-Dec-2011, 6:00 – 8:30 (?) PM
• where: Microsoft Corporation 201 Jones Road, Waltham, MA Hosted at NERD Center, 1 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA (directions)
• wifi: I don’t think so (given the location)
  food: (I am guessing there will be pizza, but not 100% sure, please check with the group organizers)
• cost: FREE
• what: “Speaker: John Garland This presentation will discuss how Windows Phone applications can be enriched by leveraging the power of the Cloud that is made available by Windows Azure. The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone will be explored to show how to quickly tap into resources in the cloud for computation, storage, identity, and communication from within a Windows Phone application.”
• more info: http://www.meetup.com/DevBoston/events/39064112/
• register: http://www.meetup.com/DevBoston/events/39064112/
• twitter: (not sure about the event, but John Garland can be found at https://twitter.com/#!/search/dotnetgator)

—–

Omissions? Corrections? Comments? Please leave a comment or reply on Twitter.
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Like last year, the class was engaged, asking tough and interesting questions… which is all the more impressive since this class meets on FRIDAY NIGHT. Must be a Harvard thing… Anyhow, we went from around 5:30 – 8:00… ON FRIDAY NIGHT.

Below are the resources I mentioned at the end of my talk, and the slide deck I used is here: Harvard-WhyAzureIsAwesome-Bill-Wilder-04-Nov-2011

Also, hope to see all of you at Boston Azure user group meetings! Feel free to contact me with any follow-up questions.

The slide deck Jim O’Neil used is here, plus here are a few action shots of Jim doing his thang:

Here are a few links that folks attending might have been told about, plus a couple of answers I offered to gather offline.

Where can I get the materials used in the Bootcamp?

• The materials live here: http://www.azurebootcamp.com/materials
• However, as I explained at the bootcamp, the actual materials used at our sessions were a mix of what is posted on the web and some slide decks that had been updated (mostly for the Azure SDK 1.5, but also other changes in some cases). So you can pull the materials as linked to above and you’ll be pretty close, but the updated ones are not yet publicly posted.

How can I see what’s in Windows Azure Storage?

• In addition to the tools we showed (such as Visual Studio and Cerebrata Cloud Storage Studio), there’s a useful, free storage browser on the web: https://www.myazurestorage.com/Containers, and an Explorer-like browser as Open Source on CodePlex here: http://azurestorageexplorer.codeplex.com/

How can I track changes/upgrades to Windows Azure Guest OS?

• (There might be an RSS feed, but I can’t find it if there is..) A lower-tech approach is to use a service like https://www.changedetection.com/ for monitoring the Windows Azure Guest OS page at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff729422.aspx

Does Azure use Hyper-threading?

• No

Where can I learn more about the Windows Azure Platform?

• Start coming to Boston Azure User Group meetings! Check out http://www.bostonazure.org - meetings are monthly at NERD – schedule now managed at http://www.meetup.com/bostonazure

Where can I read more?

• Insight from the big brains at Microsoft:
• http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/whitepapers/
• http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsazurestorage/

Who should I thank for this event?

• You can thank our TWO MAJOR SPONSORS: This event was provided free to you because our Gold Sponsor SNI TECHNOLOGY generously sponsored the food, and Microsoft NERD donated the space. Many thanks to these major sponsors!
• Without these sponsors this event would simply not have happened.
• You can thank our swag sponsors: O’Reilly (books), Pluralsight (training), Cerebrata (licenses), Packt Publishing (books), and Microsoft (books and licenses).
• And you can thank the Boston Azure Bootcamp team which included (in alphabetical order): Andy Novick (who led the SQL Azure segment), Arra Derderian (helped during labs), George Babey (“swag guy” – and helped during labs), Jim O’Neil (lab-time tech support, lecture-time answer-man), Joan Wortman (ran the registration), Maura Wilder (who led the Azure Table Storage segment – and helped during labs), Nazik Huq (“twitter guy” – plus made sure there was food – and helped during labs), and William Wilder (yes, that’s me; you can call me “Bill” but wanted to be listed last…). Also, many thanks to Martha O’Neil for baking us a cloudy cake.

We are planning another Boston Azure Bootcamp in 2012. Stay tuned!

Update 22-Oct-2011: Here is contact info for our Gold sponsors at SNI TECHNOLOGY:

I recently did some work with Windows Services, and since it had been rather a long while since I’d done so, I had to recall a couple of tips and tricks from the depths of my memory in order to get my “edit, run, test” cycle to be efficient. The singular challenge for me was quickly getting into a debuggable state with the service. How I did this is described below.

Does Windows Azure support Windows Services?

First, a trivia question…

Trivia Question: Does Windows Azure allow you to deploy your Windows Services as part of your application or cloud-hosted service?

Short Answer: Windows Azure is more than happy to run your Windows Services! While a more native approach is to use a Worker Role, a Windows Service can surely be deployed as well, and there are some very good use cases to recommend them.

More Detailed Answer: One good use case for deploying a Windows Service: you have legacy services and want to use the same binary on-prem and on-azure. Maybe you are doing something fancy with Azure VM Roles. These are valid examples. In general – for something only targetting Azure – a Worker Role will be easier to build and debug. If you are trying to share code across a legacy Windows Service and a shiny new Windows Azure Worker Role, consider following the following good software engineering practice (something you may want to do anyway): factor out the “business logic” into its own class(es) and invoke it with just a few lines of code from either host (or a console app, a Web Service, a unit test (ahem), etc.).

Windows Services != Web Services

Most readers will already understand and realize this, but just to be clear, a Windows Service is not the same as a Web Service. This post is not about Web Services. However, Windows Azure is a full-service platform, so of course has great support for not only Windows Services but also Web Services. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a popular choice for implementing Web Services on Windows Azure, though other libraries work fine too – including in non-.NET languages and platforms like Java.

Now, on to the main topic at hand…

Why is Developing with Windows Services Slower?

Developing with Windows Services is slower than some other types of applications for a couple of reasons:

• It is harder to stop in the Debugger from Visual Studio. This is because a Windows Service does not want to be started by Visual Studio, but rather by the Service Control Manager (the “scm” for short – pronounced “the scum”). This is an external program.
• Before being started, Windows Services need to be installed.
• Before being installed, Windows Services need to be uninstalled (if already installed).

Tip 1: Add Services applet as a shortcut

I find myself using the Services applet frequently to see which Windows Services are running, and to start/stop and other functions. So create a shortcut to it. The name of the Microsoft Management Console snapin is services.msc and you can expect to find it in Windows/System32, such as here: C:\Windows\System32\services.msc

A good use of the Services applet is to find out the Service name of a Windows Service. This is not the same as the Windows Services’s Display name you seen shown in the Name column. For example, see the Windows Time service properties – note that W32Time is the real name of the service:

Tip 2: Use Pre-Build Event in Visual Studio

Visual Studio projects have the ability to run commands for you before and after the regular compilation steps. These are known as Build Events and there are two types: Pre-build events and Post-build events. These Build Events can be accessed from your Project’s properties page, on the Build Events side-tab. Let’s start with the Pre-build event.

Use this event to make sure there are no traces of the Windows Service installed on your computer. Depending on where you install your services from (see Tip 3), you may find that you can’t even recompile your service until you’ve at least stopped it; this smooths out that situation, and goes beyond it to make the usual steps happen faster than you can type.

One way to do this is to write a command file –  undeploy-service.cmd – and invoke it as a Pre-build event as follows:

You will need to make sure undeploy-service.cmd is in your path, of course, or else you could invoke it with the path, as in c:\tools\undeploy-service.cmd.

The contents of undeploy-service.cmd can be hard-coded to undeploy the service(s) you are building every time, or you can pass parameters to modularize it. Here, I hard-code for simplicity (and since this is the more common case).

1. Set a reusable variable to the name of my service (set ServiceName=NameOfMyService)
2. Stop it, if it is running (net stop)
3. Uninstall it (installutil.exe /u)
4. If the service is still around at this point, ask the SCM to nuke it (sc delete)
5. Return from this .cmd file with a  success status so that Visual Studio won’t think the Pre-Build event ended with an error (exit /b 0 => that’s a zero on the end)

The S3 service runs “out there” (in the cloud) and provides a scalable repository for applications to store and manage data files. The service can support files of any size, as well as any quantity. So you can put as much stuff up there as you want – and since it is a pay-as-you-go service, you pay for what you use. The S3 service is very popular. An example of a well-known customer, according to Wikipedia, is SmugMug:

Photo hosting service SmugMug has used S3 since April 2006. They experienced a number of initial outages and slowdowns, but after one year they described it as being “considerably more reliable than our own internal storage” and claimed to have saved almost $1 million in storage costs.

Good stuff.

Of course, Amazon isn’t the only cloud vendor with such an offering. Google offers Google Storage, and Microsoft offers Windows Azure Blob Storage; both offer features and capabilities very similar to those of S3. While Amazon was the first to market, all three services are now mature, and all three companies are experts at building internet-scale systems and high-volume data storage platforms.

As I mentioned above, S3 came up during a talk I attended. The speaker – CTO of a company built entirely on Amazon services – twice touted S3’s incredibly strong Service Level Agreement (SLA). He said this was both a competitive differentiator for his company, and also a competitive differentiator for Amazon versus other cloud vendors.

Pause and think for a moment – any idea? – What is the SLA for S3? How about Google Storage? How about Windows Azure Blob Storage?

Before I give away the answer, let me remind you that a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a written policy offered by the service provider (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in this case) that describes the level of service being offered, how it is measured, and consequences if it is not met. Usually, the “level of service” part relates to uptime and is measured in “nines” as in 99.9% (“three nines”) and so forth. More nines is better, in general – and wikipedia offers a handy chart translating the number of nines into aggregate downtime/unavailability. (More generally, an SLA also deals with other factors – like refunds to customers if expectations are not met, what speed to expect, limitations, and more. I will focus only on the “nines” here.)

So… back to the question… For S3 and equivalent services from other vendors, how many nines are in the Amazon, Google, and Microsoft SLAs? The speaker at the talk said that S3 had an uptime SLA with 11 9s. Let me say that again – eleven nines – or 99.999999999% uptime. If you attempt to look this up in the chart mentioned above, you will find this number is literally “off the chart” – the chart doesn’t go past six nines! But my back-of-the-envelope calculation says it amounts to – on average – less than 32 milliseconds of downtime per year. This is about half what “a blink of your eye” would take – yes, a mere half of an eye-blink. (Which ends with your eyes closed. )

This is an impressive number! If only it was true. It turns out the real SLA for Amazon S3 has exactly as many nines as the SLA for Windows Azure Blob Storage and the SLA for Google Storage: they are all 99.9%.

Storage SLAs for Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all have exactly the same number of nines: they are all 99.9%. That’s three nines.

I am not picking on the CTO I heard gushing about the (non-existant) eleven-nines SLA. (In fact, his or her identity is irrelevent to the overall discussion here.) The more interesting part to me is the impressive reality distortion field around Amazon and its platform’s capabilities. The CTO I heard speak got it wrong, but this is not the first time it was misinterpreted as an SLA, and it won’t be the last.

I tracked down the origin of the eleven nines. Amazon CTO Werners Vogels mentions in a blog post that the S3 service is “design[ed]” for “99.999999999% durability” – choosing his words carefully. Consistent with Vogels’ language is the following Amazon FAQ on the same topic:

Q: How durable is Amazon S3? Amazon S3 is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year. This durability level corresponds to an average annual expected loss of 0.000000001% of objects. For example, if you store 10,000 objects with Amazon S3, you can on average expect to incur a loss of a single object once every 10,000,000 years. In addition, Amazon S3 is designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities.

First of all, these mentions are a comment on a blog and an item in an FAQ page; neither is from a company SLA. And second, they both speak to durability of objects – not uptime or availability. And third, also critically, they say “designed” for all those nines – but guarantee nothing of the sort. Even still, it is a bold statement. And good marketing.

It is nice that Amazon can have so much confidence in their S3 design. I did not find a comparable statement about confidence in the design of their compute infrastructure… Reality is that [cloud] services are about more than design and architecture – also about implementation, operations, management, and more. To have any hope, architecture and design need to be solid, of course, but alone they cannot prevent a general service outage which could take your site down with it (and maybe even still lose data). Some others on the interwebs are skeptical as I am, not just of Amazon, but anyone claiming too many nines.

How about the actual 99.9% “three-nines” SLA? Be careful in your expectations. As a wise man once told me, there’s a reason they are called Service Level Agreements, rather than Service Level Guarantees. There are no guarantees here.

This isn’t to pick on Amazon – other vendors have had – and will have – interruptions in service. For most companies, the cloud will still be the most cost-effective and reliable way to host your applications; few companies can compete with the big platform cloud vendors for expertise, focus, reliability, security, economies-of-scale, and efficiency. It is only a matter of time before you are there. Today, your competitors (known and unknown) are moving there already. As a wise man once told me (citing Crossing the Chasm), the innovators and early adoptors are those companies willing to trade off risk for competitive advantage. You saw it here first: this Internet thing is going to stick around for a while. Yes, and cloud services will just make too much sense to ignore. You will be on the cloud; it is only a matter of where you’ll be on the curve.

Back to all those nines… Of course, Amazon has done nothing wrong here. I see nothing inaccurate or deceptive in their documentation. But those of us in the community need to pay closer attention to what is really being described.  So here’s a small favor I ask of this technology community I am part of: Let’s please do our homework so that when we discuss and compare the cloud platforms – on blogs, when giving talks, or chatting 1:1 - we can at least keep the discussions based on facts.

This month’s July Boston Azure User Group meeting was up for the challenge.

• In the opening act, Bill Wilder (that’s me) introduced the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games (see also the Cloud Cover episode 52 which also talks about the toolkit). You can find Bill on Twitter @codingoutloud.
• Mark Eisenberg of Microsoft then shared some great insights about the cloud and the Windows Azure Platform – what they really are, why they matter, and how they fit into the real world. You can find Mark on Twitter @azurebizandtech.
• Marshall Rosenstein then talked about building social games for Facebook with an Azure back-end. Marshall’s slides are on his skydrive here (the slides are here, the code download is here). You can find Marshall on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/marshall.rosensteina) and on Twitter @mrosenstein.
• We wrapped up the meeting with a short live demonstration of the Windows Azure Portal doing its thing. Then a few of us retired to the Muddy.

Hope to see you at the Boston Azure meeting in August (Windows Phone 7 + Azure), two meetings in September (one in Waltham (first time EVER), and the “usual” one at NERD), and then kicking off a two-day Boston Azure Bootcamp!

Details on ALL upcoming Boston-area events of interest to Azure folks (that I know about) can be found in this blog post about Boston-events in August and September. Those hosted by Boston Azure are also at www.bostonazure.org and the upcoming events page.

The deck is attached at the bottom, after a few links of interest for folks who want to dig deeper.

Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS):

• I’m a big fan of Bertrand Meyer‘s work, and I just learned that CQRS is based on his earlier CQR pattern
• Martin Fowler has a entry on CQRS (recently added, I will now read this)
• CQRS on Windows Azure  (MSDN Magazine article)
• .NET Rocks podcast: Episode 639 Udi Dahan Clarifies CQRS (That same podcast episode is also included in the Azure Top 40 feed that I curate: Azure Top 40 http://bit.ly/azuretop40)
• http://abdullin.com/cqrs/

Sharding is hard:

• Foursquare down for 11 hours from imbalanced shards: http://blog.foursquare.com/2010/10/05/so-that-was-a-bummer/ (though the High Scalability blog says it was longer)

NoSQL:

• NoSQL and the Windows Azure Platform whitepaper from Microsoft (which I found to be a very good read)

CAP Theorem:

• Wikipedia
• HA MySQL (interesting links)

PowerPoint slide deck used during my talk:

• DotNetArchStudyGroup_ArchitecturePatternsForScalabilityAndReliability_BillWilder_20July2011.pptx

As I was working through the Interesting Finds: June 23, 2011 posts on Cloud Computing I drilled into one from the Official Google Enterprise Blog titled Businesses innovate and scale faster on Google App Engine. It is a very well crafted post which includes some great customer quotes and a couple of videos. I must say, it does a great job of promoting the value in the Google App Engine (GAE) platform, essentially as mini-case studies. Well done!

What struck me as particulary interesting about this post, however, is the types of benefits the GAE customers say they value:

• The first embedded video features Dan Murray, founder and managing director of a cloud-based SEC-filings company called WebFilings. Mr. Murray mentions they needed a platform that would be secure and would support rapid growth. He goes on (at 1:50 into the video): “Google App Engine provides a platform that takes the infrastructure management off of our hands, we don’t have to worry about it, so it’s easy for us to build and deploy apps. For us right now it’s about execution and making sure that we’re scaling our business, while App Engine provides the ability to scale the technology and platform.”
• The second embedded video features Jessica Stanton from the famous Evite event invitation site. Ms. Stanton mentions (at 0:52 into the video) “the things that App Engine especially desirable for us are the autoscaling and … monitoring systems” that Google provides. Near the end (at 1:12 into the video) she emphasises: “the opportunity that App Engine has afforded to us is more time to do what we need to do. To just get things done and to get new features out and not have to worry so much about load and things going down because we take on 16-18 million unique users a month.  It’s really nice to see instances spin up and come down and we never had to touch anything.”
• Quote from Gary Koelling of Best Buy: “… we don’t have to spend any time doing system administration or setting up servers, which allows us to focus on the development and testing new ideas.”

The funny thing is, the benefits touted are really the benefits of Platform as a Service (PaaS). These services could just as easily have been built on the Windows Azure Platform!

• Mr. Murray from WebFilings mentioned the need for a a platform based on a great security infrastructure. Both Microsoft and Google have some of the industry’s best and brightest working for them in their state-of-the art, world-class data centers. Here are some good resources relating to security in the Windows Azure data centers. If you want a secure data center and secure platform, I don’t think you can go wrong with either Microsoft or Google. (Frankly, I expect you are more likely to have problems – including with cost and security – if you roll your own data center. Your company will not have the top experts in the world on your payroll.)
• Both Ms. Stanton from Evite and Mr. Koelling of Best Buy emphasize that they benefit from being able to focus on building software – and not being distracted by needing to worry about infrastructure. This is what Platform as a Service (PaaS) is all about. Both Microsoft and Google offer PaaS. GAE supports apps which run on the JVM (e.g., Java) and apps written in Python. Windows Azure supports programming in any .NET language (e.g., C#), plus a plethora of other platforms that run on Windows – PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, C++, and so many more. GAE has database support with a query language they call GQL, and Azure has SQL Azure which supports the regular SQL you know and love. Each platform has other features as well, making it a place where you can focus on your app – not your infrastructure.
• Ms. Stanton mentions that they have a team of 5 developers. I wonder how large the Evite team would need to be if they were not running on PaaS?

Mr. Murray from WebFilings mentions that they began using GAE back 2008 – and the Windows Azure Platform was not announced until late in 2008 (at Microsoft PDC in November 2008), so that was not an option yet for them. It is not mentioned when the other companies began to use GAE. If they were starting today, I wonder how many would choose Azure?

[Update 23-June-2011: Joel Bennett posted his slide deck from the talk.] 
[Update 05-July-2011: Added another handy link to post from Patrick Butler called Developing and Debugging Azure Management API CmdLets.]

Some of the pointers:

• Go get the PowerShell Community Extensions (from codeplex)
• You can use the PS command line to CD into folders/directories, look at files, etc. — but you can also look at the Registry or your Certificate Store as if they were directories!
• There are no plural nouns in PS (e.g., get-provider, not get-providers)
• Learn these commands first: Get-Command, Get-Help, Get-Member, Select-Object, Where-Object, Format-Table, … others you can learn later
• Somebody needs to write a PowerShell Provider for Azure Storage
• Joel created an open-shell WPF-ish PowerShell shell called POSH

Try some commands:

• dir | get-objec
• dir | fl *  –formats as lis
• get-verb | fw -col
• get-verb | fw -col 6 -groupby Group
• Get-ExecutionPolicy
• dir | where { $_.PSIsContainer } – where $_ is “the thing over there (directory)”
• dir | select CreationTime, Name | gm
• dir | select * –will look different than command above
• $global:foo = “some value”
• cd c:\windows\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0… see Help.format.ps1xml controls the default output formatting properties for object types not already known by PowerShell – can have property names, even script blocks in it – very powerful
• # is single-line comment char; <# … #> for multi-line comments
• You can create aliases for scripts
• Powershell is an interpreted scripting language
• Can access WinForms, WPF, lots of stuff.. though not Threading

Three ways to manage Azure from PowerShell

1. Remoting
2. WASM (Windows Azure Services Management commandlets) – superceded by http://wappowershell.codeplex.com/ – developed by Development Evangelist group (e.g., Vittorio)
3. Cerebrata (3rd party, commercial)

Remoting:

• Need to get some goodness in a Startup Script, along with crecentials
• Set OS Family = 2 (so you get Windows Server 2008 R2)
• Need a certificate – can be self-signed

WAP PowerShell:

• 36 Cmdlets
• “the 80% library”
• very good example

Cerebrata Cmdlets

• Requires .NET 4.0 (which is different than baseline support for PS, which is .NET CLR 2.0
• $70
• 114 Cmdlets
• Cerebrata
• gcm –mo cerebrata | gr0up Noun | sort

Snap-ins need to be in the GAC – so put WAP PowerShell stuff where you want to keep them, since that’s where they’ll be built — or build the file in Visual Studio

• Add-Module is for SNAPINS
• IPMO is for ImportModule for Modules
• ipmo AzurePlatform
• gcm –mo AzurePlatform

PowerShell has something called “splatting”

• Starting with a hashtable… put in the parms you’ll need
• variables start with $
• retrieving (splatting) starts with @

Both cerebrata and WAP are snap-ins

WHAT FOLLOWS… are somewhat random notes I captured…

Get-Certificate $azure | Get-HostedCertificateStore

Your personal profile for PowerShell lives in c:\Users\YOURNAME\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\AzurePlatform as Startup.ps1 (?)

Two kinds of errors in PowerShell: 1. Terminating Errors (exceptions, can be “trapped” or use try/catch as of PS2) and 2. Non-Terminating Errors which are harder to deal with

$? ==> did the last command succeed

dir doesnotexist –ev er –ea “”

$er[0].categoryinfo

“Don’t Produce Snap-ins!” Here’s why: to figure out what is in there (get-command –Module

Get-Module –ListAvailable

- run the above on AZure and see “NetworkLoadBalancingCl…” – is this Azure relate

OTHER INTERESTING POWERSHELL/AZURE LINKS

• http://poshcode.org/
• http://pscx.codeplex.com
• http://wappowershell.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic
• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/patrick_butler_monterde/archive/2011/06/30/developing-and-debugging-azure-management-api-cmdlets.aspx

To specificy your intent to use a Local Storage location, you add an entry to ServiceDefinition.csdef under the specific role from which you plan to access it. For example:

<LocalStorage name="LocalTempFolder" sizeInMB="11"
      cleanOnRoleRecycle="true" />

You can read more about the details over in Neil Mackenzie’s post, but the main thing you need to do is call a method to access the full path to the read/write folder associated with the name you provided (e.g., “LocalTempFolder” in the config snippet above). The method call looks like this:

LocalResource localResource =
      RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("LocalTempFolder");
var pathToReadWriteFolder = localResource.RootPath;
var pathToFileName = pathToReadWriteFolder + "foo.txt";

Now you can use ”the usual” classes to write and read these files. But calling RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource only works from within the safe confines of a your Role code – as in a Worker Role or Web Role – you know, the process that inherits from (and completes) the RoleEntryPoint abstract class. What happens if I am inside of a Windows Service?

Your Windows Service Has Super Powers

Well… your Windows Service does not exactly have Super Powers, but it does have powers and abilities far above those of ordinary Roles. This is due to the differences in their security contexts. Your Windows Service runs as the very powerful LocalSystem account, while your Roles run as a lower priviledge user. Due to this, your Windows Service can do things your Role can’t, such as write to the file system generally, access Active Directory commands, and more.

[Your Startup Tasks might also have more powers than your Roles, if you configure them to run with elevated privileges using executionContext="elevated" as in:
<Task commandLine="startuptask.cmd" executionContext="elevated" />
See also David Aiken's post on running a startup task as a specific user.]

However, there are some things your Windows Service can’t do, but that your Role can: access RoleEnvironment!

Problem Querying Local Storage from a Windows Service

Inside of a Windows Service (which is outside of the Role environment), the RoleEnvironment object is not populated. So, for example, you cannot call

RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("LocalTempFolder")

and expect to get a useful result back. Rather, an exception will be raised.

But here’s a trick: it turns out that calling RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource returns the location of the folder, but it is just the location of a folder on disk at this point – this folder can be accessed by any process that knows about it. So how about if your Web  or Worker Role could let the Windows Service know where its storage location happens to be? (As an aside, we have a good idea where they might ultimately end up on disk in practice (see last section of this post) – but of course subject to variability and change – but it is useful if you want to poke around on your local machine or through Remote Desktop to an instance in the cloud.)

The Trick: Pass the Local Storage location into your Windows Service

If you are deploying a Windows Service along with your Role, you will need to install the Windows Service and you will need to start the Windows Service. A reasonable way to install your Windows Service is to use the handy InstallUtil.exe program that is included with .NET. Here is how you might invoke it:

%windir%\microsoft.net\framework\v4.0.30319\installutil.exe
      MyWindowsService.exe

Now the Windows Service is installed, but not running; you still need to start it. Here is a reasonable way to start it:

net start MyWindowsServiceName

Typically, both the InstallUtil and net start commands would be issued (probably in a .bat or .cmd file) from a Startup Task. But there is another way to start an installed Windows Service which allows some additional control over it, such as the ability to pass it arguments. This is done with a few lines of code from within the OnStart method of your Role, such as in the following code snippet which uses the .NET ServiceController class to get the job done:

var windowsServiceController =
      new System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController
            ("MyWindowsServiceName");
System.Diagnostics.Debug.Assert(
      windowsServiceController.Status ==  
      windowsServiceControllerStatus.Stopped);
windowsServiceController.Start();

Putting together both acquiring the Local Storage location and starting the Windows Service, your code might look like the following:

string[] args = { 
      RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource
            ("LocalTempFolder").RootPath
      }
var windowsServiceController =
      new System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController  
            ("MyWindowsServiceName");
System.Diagnostics.Debug.Assert(
      windowsServiceController.Status == 
      windowsServiceControllerStatus.Stopped);
// pass in Local Storage location
windowsServiceController.Start(args);

Within your Windows Service’s OnStart method you will need to pick up the arguments passed in, which at that point has nothing specific to Azure. Your code might look like the following:

protected override void OnStart(string[] args)
{
   var myTempFolderPath = args[0];
   // ...
}

That oughta do it! Please let me know in the comments if you find this useful.

Since this summary page is – by necessity - a point-in-time SNAPSHOT of what I see is going on, it will not necessarily be updated when event details change. So please always double-check with official event information!

Know of any more cloud events of interest to the Windows Azure community? Have any more information or corrections on the events listed? Please let us know in the comments.

They are listed in the order in which they will occur.

[10-June-2011 - added the New England ASP.NET Professionals User Group talk on June 15; I am the featured speaker. Moved Kyle Quest's cloud hackathon to new date: June 16.]

1. 24 Hours in the Cloud – Cloud Scalability Patterns for the Windows Azure Platform

Note: GITCA’s 24 Hours in the Cloud event begins on Wed June 1 and ends on Thu June 2. This post just highlights the talk I am giving. There are MANY OTHER talks you may wish to check out. Many of the talks are IT Pro-oriented.

• when: Thurs June 2, 5:00 – 6:00 AM (yes, in the MORNING, Boston time) [changed to earlier still! I was rescheduled to begin at 5:00 AM!]
• where: Online – see below for registration
• cost: Free
• what: Talk on scalability patterns that are important for cloud applications; my session consists of a 40 minute (pre-recorded) talk, followed by 20 minutes of live Q&A. Since the talks are pre-recorded, speakers will be able to respond to questions from Twitter during the talk (then again in the live Q&A at the end) via the #24HitC hashtag. My twitter handle is @codingoutloud.
• more info & Register: http://sp.gitca.org/sites/24hours
• twitter: #24HitC

2. CloudCamp Boston

• when: Thu 02-June-2011, 5:30 - ??? PM
• where: NERD Center in Cambridge
• wifi: yes
• food: (unknown)
• cost: FREE
• what: Vendor-independent bar camp-style conference on whatever in the cloud is interesting to the audience
• more info: http://www.cloudcamp.org/boston
• register: http://cloudcamp-boston-2011.eventbrite.com/
• twitter: (not sure)

3. Beantown .NET Meeting – Architecture Patterns for Scalability and Reliability

• when: Thu 02-June-2011, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
• where: NERD Center in Cambridge
• wifi: yes
• food: (I think there will be pizza)
• cost: FREE
• what: Talk by Bill Wilder (me) on architecture patterns that will help your applications scale and be more reliable.
• more info: http://blog.benday.com/archive/2011/05/27/Beantown-NET-Meeting-on-622011-Bill-Wilder-quotArchitecture-Patterns-for.aspx
• register: See instructions to send an email here
• twitter: (not sure)

4. Hack the Cloud – Cloud Platform Bake-Off

Moved to June 16th – see below

• when: Thu 02-June-2011, 6:00 PM – ???
• where: Nokia – 5 Wayside Road Burlington, MA
• wifi: (unknown)
• food: (unknown)
• cost: FREE
• what: Hacking event on multiple cloud stacks in order that they can be compared
• more info: http://www.meetup.com/Hack-The-Cloud/
• register: http://www.meetup.com/Hack-The-Cloud/
• twitter: (not sure)

5. New Hampshire Code Camp – Concord, NH

• when: Sat 04-June-2011, 8:00 – 4:00 PM
• where: New Hampshire Technical Institute 31 College Drive Concord, NH 03301
• wifi: not sure
• food: I think they do dinner afterwards
• cost: FREE
• what: In the Code Camp spirit, come learn many things from many people!
• more info: here or at www.nhdn.com
• register: here
• twitter: (not sure)

6. The Architect Factory

• when: Thu 09-June-2011, 1:00 – 8:00 PM
• where: Hosted at NERD Center
• wifi: Wireless Internet access will be available
• food: (not sure of details yet)
• cost: FREE
• what: Real, Practical Guidance on becoming and Architect, or becoming a Better Architect
• more info: http://architectfactory.com/
• register: http://architectfactory-eorg.eventbrite.com/
• twitter: #architectfactory or #af3 (not sure which is “official”)

7. New England ASP.NET Professionals Group

• when: Wed 25-June-2011, 6:15 – 8:30 PM
• where: Microsoft Office on Jones Road, Waltham
• wifi: no
• food: group does to dinner afterwards
• cost: FREE
• what: A talk that introduces Cloud Computing and the Windows Azure Platform and shows how it relates to the ASP.NET developer – tools, libraries, and how to build and deploy.
• more info: http://neasp.net/
• register: see http://neasp.net/
• twitter: (not sure)

8. Hack the Cloud – Cloud Platform Bake-Off

• when: Thu 16-June-2011, 6:00 PM – ???
• where: Nokia – 5 Wayside Road Burlington, MA
• wifi: (unknown)
• food: (unknown)
• cost: FREE
• what: Hacking event on multiple cloud stacks in order that they can be compared
• more info: http://www.meetup.com/Hack-The-Cloud/
• register: http://www.meetup.com/Hack-The-Cloud/
• twitter: (not sure)

9. 4th Annual Hartford Code Camp

• when: Sat 18-June-2011, 8:00 – 5:30 PM
• where: Hosted at New Horizons Learning Center (Bloomfield CT)
• wifi: Wireless Internet access will be available
• food: Pizza and drinks will be provided
• cost: FREE
• what: In the Code Camp spirit, come learn many things from many people!
• more info: http://ctdotnet.org/
• register: see http://ctdotnet.org/ until a direct link is published
• twitter: (not sure)

10. Boston Azure User Group meeting: Rock, Paper, Azure Event!

• when: Thu 23-June-2011, 6:00 – 8:30 PM (come at 5:30 if you need help getting set up)
• where: Hosted at NERD Center
• wifi: Wireless Internet access will be available
• food: Pizza and drinks will be provided
• cost: FREE
• what: Bring your Windows Azure-ready laptop (or get a loaner, or pair up with someone) as we go head-to-head in an Azure programming contest (it is a simple game, but you will compete with others in the room). Also, there will be prizes – like an Xbox 360, Kinect, and other goodies.
• more info: See Boston Azure cloud user group site for details or see Jim O’Neil’s blog post on the event. Of special note is to request your free account (no credit card, etc. – easy), following details on Jim’s post - takes only a minute of YOUR time, but will help make sure you don’t need to wait for it on Thurs night – do it NOW!
• register: here
• twitter: #bostonazure

11. Maine Bytes: Azure State of the Union

• when: Thu 30-June-2011, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
• where: Unum’s Home Office 3 building at 2211 Congress Street in Maine
• wifi:
• food:
• cost: FREE
• what: Ben Day will give a talk: “Microsoft’s Azure platform moves fast and new features get added all the time. It can definitely be tough to keep up. In this session, Ben will give you a tour around the current features and offerings in Azure with some tips on how to use them in your applications and how to integrate Azure into your software development process.”
• more info: See http://www.mainebytes.org/ for details
• register:
• twitter:

Coming in July:

• Boston Azure User Group meeting on July 28
• And more? Please let me know in the comments if you know about an event relevant to those who care about the Windows Azure Platform

Omissions? Corrections? Comments? Please leave a comment or reply on the Twitters!

Here is the slide deck I used for the talk: Demystifying Cloud Computing and the Windows Azure Platform.

Find out why on Monday May 16 @ TechEd in Atlanta – at the FREE After-Hours Dinner-Included Hackathon!

Windows Phone 7 Unleashed Hackathon
Monday, May 16, 2011
6:00 PM to 11:00 PM
Register: http://bit.ly/RegWP7Hackathon

Don’t miss this opportunity to get hands-on help with your Windows Phone 7 app, from the experts!

This is a “hands on” hackathon where you will learn from Windows Phone 7, XNA and Azure experts how to build, scale and publish your Windows Phone 7 app or game. If you are just a beginner, or already have apps in the Marketplace this event should not be missed.

Come hear about new developments that will help you combine the power of the Windows Phone with the Windows Azure cloud platform.

BYO Laptop! And prepare yourself for an energetic evening of fun, learning, and accomplishment!

RSVP early, as space is limited to 300 attendees: http://bit.ly/RegWP7Hackathon

Food, beverages and refreshments will be provided.

 I recently reinstalled Windows 7 on one of my computers and in rebuilding my development tool set, including for Windows Phone, and found I could not run a Windows Phone 7 project locally: Visual Studio complained I did not have the Zune software installed. Okay, not a problem; I will install Zune. But not so fast…

I encountered the following mysterious error while trying to install the Zune software to my Windows 7 desktop.

What does this Zune error message mean?

NO INSTALLATION MEDIA

Can’t find the media for installation package ‘Windows Media Format SDK’. It might be incomplete or corrupt.

Error code: 0×80070002

Searching around the internets did not help, though I saw a reference to do a few things, one of which was to install the latest Windows Media Player. Well… it turns out, I had NO version of the Windows Media Player installed, so I simply installed the latest, and the Zune installer was happy…

One more step

But Visual Studio 2010 was NOT yet willing to allow me to run the Windows Phone 7 emulator to test and debug my Windows Phone applications. I saw the following additional (but improved!) errors from Visual Studio.

First, could not deploy. Nothing new here:

But the reason provided looked more promising:

This is a better known error, easily rectified. Simply switch to the emulator if your project is referencing an attached device, done at the top of Visual Studio as shown here:

Okay… now back to Windows Phone 7 development – of course, with a Windows Azure back-end using the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7.

They are listed in the order in which they will occur.

Know of any more cloud events of interest to the Windows Azure community? Have any more information or corrections on the events listed? Please let us know in the comments.

1. New England Code Camp

• when: Sat 07-May-2011, 8:30 AM – 6:00 PM
• where: Microsoft Waltham (Jones Road)
• wifi: (unknown, but probably just for speakers)
• food: Provided (usually pizza & salad)
• cost: Free
• what: Developer-focused mini-conference on a wide range of topics
• More info & Register: http://thedevcommunity.org

2. Jeffrey Richter from Wintellect will be presenting a free, in-person Windows Azure Deep Dive

• when: Mon 16-May-2011, all day
• where: Waltham
• wifi: (unknown)
• food: (unknown)
• cost: FREE (registration required)
• what: Deep Dive on Windows Azure
• More info: See Jim O’Neil’s blog post for details
• Register: Note there are two ways to register from this page – in person, or webinar – the webinar is a link, but the in person event form is on this page directly: https://www.wintellect.com/Training/Webinar/Registration

3. NHDN – New Hampshire .NET – Concord

• when: Wed 25-May-2011, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
• where: New Hampshire Technical Institute 31 College Drive Concord, NH 03301, Grappone Hall, Room 106
• wifi: not sure
• food: I think they do dinner afterwards
• cost: FREE
• what: Demystifying the Cloud and an overview of Microsoft’s public cloud platform, Windows Azure
• More info: here
• Register: here

4. Boston Azure User Group meeting on PowerShell and how to use it with Windows Azure

• when: Thu 26-May-2011, 6:00 – 8:30 PM
• where: Hosted at NERD Center
• wifi: Wireless Internet access will be available
• food: Pizza and drinks will be provided
• cost: FREE (registration appreciated)
• what: What is PowerShell, why do you care, and how can you use its awesome power to help with Windows Azure. PowerShell MVP Joel Bennett is the featured speaker.
• More info: See Boston Azure cloud user group site for details
• Register: here

Coming in June:

• 24 Hours in the Cloud
• Cloud Camp Boston
• The Architect Factory
• Boston Azure
• Beantown .NET (Architecture Patterns in the cloud)
• Hartford Code Camp
• New Hampshire Code Camp
• And more? Please let me know in the comments if you know about an event relevant to those who care about the Windows Azure Platform

• What is the Cloud
• How does SQL Azure compare with SQL Server
• What are the other storage options available on the Windows Azure Platform

There were many interesting questions from the audience of 20 or so people – One asked (paraphrasing here..) “Are the Microsoft Data Centers resilient to the radiation expected from a nuke” to which I did not have a good answer. To another question, Jeff Mlakar (@JeffMlakar) offered helpfully that the SQL Azure Data Sync service is an option for SQL Azure backups to on-prem and with geo-replicating SQL Azure across data centers.

We didn’t get to the end of the material due to lots of discussion… but we did get through the most critical concepts.

They are listed in the order in which they will occur.

Know of any more cloud events of interest to the Windows Azure community? Have any more information or corrections on the events listed? Please let us know in the comments.

1. SQL Saturday #71

• when: Sat 02-Apr-2011, 8:30 AM – 6:00 PM
• where: Babson College
• wifi: (unknown)
• food: Provided
• cost: Cheap (registration required)
• what: All about SQL and related topics
• More info & Register: http://www.sqlsaturday.com/71/eventhome.aspx

2. Cloud Platform Bake-Off led by Kyle C. Quest

• when: Fri 15-Apr-2011, 10:00 AM – ??? PM
• where: Hosted at Cafe On the Common, 677 Main Street Waltham, MA (but please DOUBLE CHECK the location at Meetup.com listing)
• wifi: (unknown)
• food: (unknown)
• cost: FREE, but pre-registration appears to be required
• what: “Putting different cloud platforms head to head is one of the original ideas for Cloud Hackathon. I’m sure lots of people are curious how each platform can measure up to its competition.” This is a coding/hacking event on Windows Azure plus Amazon EC3, Google App Engine, and maybe others.
• More info: See Meetup.com for details
• Register: See Meetup.com

3. Boston Azure User Group meeting with David Makogon as featured speaker

• when: Thu 28-Apr-2011, 6:00 – 8:30 PM
• where: Hosted at NERD Center
• wifi: Wireless Internet access will be available
• food: Pizza and drinks will be provided
• cost: FREE
• what: Exact topics to-be-announced, but they will be awesome David Makogon from Microsoft will be featured speaker
• More info: See Boston Azure cloud user group site for details (soon)
• Register: (soon)

Today at the Virtualization Boston Deep Dive Day 2011 event (put on by the Virtualization Group-Boston), I joined forces with the ITProGuru (aka Mr. Dan Stolts) to share some thoughts in a presentation on this megatrend – what’s going on, what it means for data centers, and what today’s IT Pro might expect from a Cloud-dominated future.

The slides are available here:

Cloud Computing Essentials for the IT Pro – Bill Wilder and Dan Stolts – 11-Mar-2011

The following was not a slide all by itself, but could have been – and I think I’ll use it next time for the simplest definition I can think of for understanding SaaS, PaaS, IaaS:

I also posted a twitter-sized definition of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

A Hackathon You Say?

Yes, a Hackathon. This is in-person event where folks show up and hack (write code). In our case, we will meet at Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, MA, and our hacking will be on Windows Azure-related code.

1. Rule #1: A Hackathon is fun! (Coding is fun when there is a lot of energy in the room… Plus, we’ll have give-aways – which always makes it even more fun, right?)
2. Rule #2: We learn something! (We all learn better by doing. Plus, we’ll have many book give-aways – another great way to learn!)
3. Rule #3: Aim to ship! (So don’t be overly ambitious with your idea – try to choose something that you can complete in the allotted time – then enhance it if you have extra time.)
4. Rule #4: Goto Rule #1! (Yes, recursion abuse. Extra credit at the Hackathon if you employ recursion appropriately.)

(Did you say Windows Azure? Yes, Windows Azure is Microsoft’s platform for writing applications that will run in the cloud.)

A code base that we expect will get a lot of attention is www.bostonazure.org, which is the community’s web site, but is also a real honest-to-goodness-in-production Azure application using features like Web Role, Blob Storage, Table Storage, SQL Azure (with OData), and Azure Diagnostics. (And also an open source project on CodePlex.)

We will break up into small teams based on which subprojects people want to work on and… get coding.

Here’s the approx schedule:

• 4:00-4:30 PM – Gather, get organized into teams, begin hacking! (We want this to be as efficient as possible so we maximize our time hacking. So please read the rest of this post to see how you can be prepared, such as by joining in the conversation on CodePlex in advance.)
• 4:30-8:15 PM – Hack! We will break for pizza, but otherwise will crank away.
• 8:15-9:00 PM – Show and Tell. What did you do? We will have fun seeing what everyone did, and some cool PRIZES and GIVEAWAYS. + +

Where and when?

Location: Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, MA. Parking available in the building (costs money), or take the T, or find on-street parking.

When: Wednesday February 16, 2011 from 4:00-9:00 PM. If you are late, that’s life, but something we can live with.

Food: Pizza will be provided.

What happens if I come late? Join a team when you get here. You will be “just in time” for something.

What do I need to do?

A few things:

1. Sign up so we know you are coming
2. Prepare your development laptop (www.bostonazure.org is running SDK 1.3)
3. Join the conversation in this thread on the CodePlex space for the Boston Azure Project (where we can discuss ideas in advance of the event so we can “hit the ground running”)
4. If you want to have access to a live, honest-to-goodness Azure-in-the-cloud instance of your own, please be sure to sign up A FEW DAYS IN ADVANCE for a Windows Azure Pass (use code: DPEA01). For very clear instructions, please check out Jim O’Neil’s screencast on signing up for Windows Azure Pass. Jim will be at the Hackathon helping out, and in case you don’t know him, Jim is definitely a friend of ours. [Note that an Azure development environment should be fine as well for most of us.]

IF YOU DO NOT HAVE YOUR OWN AZURE-CAPABLE DEV LAPTOP, then plan to pair up with someone who does…

What will we work on?

Here’s the rule: You can hack on anything you want that is either related to Windows Azure or related to the Boston Azure Community. The discussion thread mentioned above has some ideas. Add your ideas too.

This will break into three broad areas:

1. Ehancing or adding Azure capabilities to www.bostonazure.org (generally speaking, this is what the group calls the Boston Azure Project). This does not need to be limited to .NET or ASP.NET MVC. Post your ideas to CodePlex.
2. Writing Azure code unrelated to www.bostonazure.org (maybe a file upload utility, for example)
3. Enhancing the Boston Azure community in ways unrelated to using Azure itself. For example, if you want to build a WP7 app for the Boston Azure community, go for it (though that could have an Azure-enabled back end). If you want to add features to www.bostonazure.org in jQuery or make it HTML5-capable, go for it. If you want to create a favicon or a privacy policy for the site, go for it.

Use your imagination.

Wait – I am not an Azure expert – is that okay?

Yes, that’s okay. We will have some folks in the room who do understand Azure, so we will help you. However, of course, it is better if you get warmed up in advance. Install the Azure dev environment. Learn a bit about Azure in advance. Download the code from bostonazure.codeplex.com to see the code for the site.

Do you have a hashtag for Twitter?

Yes: #bostonazurehack.

The Boston Azure User Group has a twitter handle: @bostonazure. My personal twitter handle is @codingoutloud.

Who do we have to thank for all this awesomeness?

Microsoft NERD Center provides the space and the food (thanks Leah!).

Microsoft people help make it happen (thanks Jim O’Neil and Mark Eisenberg – each is a friend of ours!).

And the following sponsors are providing software and books for prizes:

+ +

The event is organized by folks from the Boston Azure User Group.

Thanks Microsoft!

1. The featured talk led by Chander Khanna and Nazik Huq asked the provocative question Why choose the Azure cloud?  and (not surprisingly!) spirited discussion ensued. The slides are available (see link at the bottom of the page), and there is a blog post titled “Microsoft in the Clouds with Windows Azure Platform?” from Chander which considers some of the same material.

2. An Azure 101 talk was led by Mark Eisenberg. This is a challenging topic to cover, since the cloud has so many interesting concepts, and the audience at any given Boston Azure meeting always includes new faces. More Azure 101 to come at next meeting, Dec 13, 2010.

3. Several members discussed the Boston Azure Project. The most recent build includes some instrumentation changes made by Arra Derderian (part of which reused some code from Jason Haley).

4. After the meeting around 10 of us went down to the Muddy Charles Pub for a beer!

Follow me on twitter (@codingoutloud), follow the Boston Azure User Group on twitter (@bostonazure), join the low volume Boston Azure User Group email list, and come join us at an upcoming Boston Azure meeting such as our SPECIAL NIGHT FOR DECEMBER as we meet on Monday December 13, 2010 for a night of Azure-packed goodness!

As always, to see what’s COMING UP in Boston Azure meetings, check out our Azure-hosted web site at www.bostonazure.org - meetings beyond what is on the home page (if known) are listed on the Upcoming Events page.

The story of ”an HTTP header that’s mandatory for this request is not specified”

First of all, my call to get a queue reference had completed without incident:

queue = queueStorage.GetQueueReference(“myqueue”);

Next I executed this line of seemingly innocuous code:

queue.CreateIfNotExist();

An Exception was raised – a “Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient.StorageClientException” to be exact – with the following message:

Exception Message: “An HTTP header that’s mandatory for this request is not specified” 

“An HTTP header that’s mandatory for this request is not specified.”

That didn’t help, so I then checked the Inner Exception:

Inner Exception Message: “The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request.”

That didn’t help either. So I fired up Fiddler and looked at the http Request and Response (Raw views shown here):

If you look carefully in the Response, you will see there are two references to Blobs:

Blobs? Yes, blobs.

Blobs… That was my problem. This was supposed to be code to create a queue. A quick check back to my code immediately revealed a cut and paste error on my part. Two actually, as I tried this both against Development Storage and against live Cloud Storage with the same error.

This was the problem – the culpret – the issue – the bug:

    var clientStorageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.DevelopmentStorageAccount;
    CloudQueueClient queueStorage = new CloudQueueClient(clientStorageAccount.BlobEndpoint.AbsoluteUri,clientStorageAccount.Credentials);

As was this:

    CloudQueueClient queueStorage = new CloudQueueClient(String.Format(“http://{0}.blob.core.windows.net”, accountName), creds);

Replacing “Blob” with “Queue” did the trick for both snippets.

Pay the Fiddler

The error message was tricky, requiring that I fire up Fiddler to see the error of my ways. So..  Be careful out there when you Cut & Paste. Or don’t hack at 9:30 in the night. Or check out a Fiddler http trace, which may have additional information. Or all three..

Checking the Fiddler trace is really the interesting lesson from this post. If you are perplexed over some error condition, look at the raw http traffic for additional details – there may be a new clue in there.

Did This Post Help You?

Please leave me a comment if this blog post helped you or if you encountered the same exact error.

But it isn’t there!

You already know you can’t use the .NET Managed Libraries for Windows Azure in a Silverlight app, but you just know it is okay in a desktop application.

You double-check that you have installed Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.2 (June 2010) (or at least Windows Azure SDK 1.2 (last refreshed from June in Sept 2010 with a couple of bug-fixes)).

You sort the list by Component Name, then leveraging your absolute mastery of the alphabet, you find the spot in the list where the assemblies ought to be, but they are not there. You see the one before in the alphabet, the one after it in the alphabet, but no Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient assembly in sight. What gives?

Look familiar? Where is the Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient assembly?

Azure Managed Libraries Not Included in .NET Framework 4 Client Profile

If your eyes move a little higher in the Add Reference dialog box, you will see the problem. You are using the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile. Nothing wrong with the Client Profile – it can be a friend if you want a lighter-weight version of the .NET framework for deployment to desktops where you can’t be sure your .NET platform bits are already there – but Windows Azure Managed Libraries are not included with the Client Profile.

Bottom line: Windows Azure Managed Libraries are simply not support in the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile

How Did This Happen?

It turns out that in Visual Studio 2010, the default behavior for many common project types is to use the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile. There are some good reasons behind this, but it is something you need to know about. It is very easy to create a project that uses the Client Profile because it is neither visible – and with not apparent option for adjustment – on the Add Project dialog box – all you see is .NET Framework 4.0:

The “Work-around” is Simple: Do Not Use .NET Framework 4 Client Profile

While you are not completely out of luck, you just can’t use the Client Profile in this case. And, as the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile documentation states:

If you are targeting the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile, you cannot reference an assembly that is not in the .NET Framework 4 Client Profile. Instead you must target the .NET Framework 4.

So let’s use the (full) .NET Framework 4.

Changing from .NET Client Profile to Full .NET Framework

To move your project from Client Profile to Full Framework, right-click on your project in Solution Explorer (my project here is called “SnippetUploader”):

From the bottom of the pop-up list, choose Properties.

This will bring up the Properties window for your application. It will look something like this:

Of course, by now you probably see the culprit in the screen shot: change the “Target framework:” from “.NET Framework 4 Client Profile” to “.NET Framework 4” (or an earlier version) and you have one final step:

Now you should be good to go, provided you have Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.2 (June 2010) installed. Note, incidentally, that the Windows Azure tools for VS mention support for

…targeting either the .NET 3.5 or .NET 4 framework.

with no mention of support the .NET Client Profile. So stop expecting it to be there!

As you may know, Silverlight assembly format is a bit different than straight-up .NET, and attempting to use Add Reference from a Silverlight project to a plain-old-.NET assembly just won’t work. Instead, you’ll see something like this:

If you pick a class from the StorageClient assembly – let’s say, CloudBlobClient – and check the documentation, it will tell you where this class is supported:

Okay – so maybe it doesn’t exactly – the Target Platforms list is empty – presumably an error of omission. But going by the Development Platforms list, you wouldn’t expect it to work in Silverlight.

There’s Always REST

As mentioned, you are always free to directly do battle with the Azure REST APIs for Storage or Management. This is a workable approach. Or, even better, expose the operations of interest as Azure services – abstracting them as higher level activities. You have heard of SOA, haven’t you?

1. Maura Wilder on JavaScript Debugging (@squdgy)
2. Jason Haley on Comparing the Azure and Amazon Cloud Platforms (@haleyjason)
3. Jim O’Neil on Dissecting the Azure @Home Application (@jimoneil)
4. Abby Fichtner on Lean Startups (@hackerchick)
5. MC’d by Abby, various folks talking about their experiences at startups — 4 talks jam-packed into a fast-paced one-hour session:
   1. Vishal Kumar of savinz.com (“mint.com for shopping”)
   2. Allison Friedman (@rateitgreen) of Rate It Green (“yelp for the green building industry”)
   3. Sean Creely (@screeley) of Embedly (“make friendly embedded links”) – a Y Combinator company providing a service for turning tweets containing media links into something more user friendly (e.g., embed inline YouTube video rather than a link taking you to YouTube)
   4. Marc Held (@getzazu) of getzazu.com (“alarm clock 2.0″)

At Uno’s afterwards, I enjoyed chatting with many folks, including Veronica and Shawn Robichaud (all the way from Maine!), John from BUGC and Blue Fin, Slava Kokaev, entrepreneurs Marc, Billy, Brian, Vishal, and Dan Colon, dev evangelists Jim O’Neil and Chris Bowen, Yilmaz Rona from Trilogy, and of course Maura.

At the Code Camp, I presented twice on Azure-focused topics:

1. Cloud Computing 101: Azure Style! – an introduction to cloud computing, and an overview of the services that Microsoft’s cloud stack offers
2. Building Cloud-Native Applications with Azure – a mind-blowing tour of some of the changes that await the technology community as we move our world into the cloud

The Boston Azure User Group is one year old! You can follow the group on twitter @bostonazure. You can also follow me on twitter @codingoutloud. And I hope to see you at the next Boston Azure meeting on Thurs October 21 from 6:00-8:30 PM at NERD (registration and more info).

Do I Need .NET?

No, .NET is not needed to program against Blob storage. Any programming language or platform can be used, provided it can support calling out via http. Programs speak to the Blob storage service in Azure via a RESTful interface – yes, good old-fashioned http goodness.

Isn’t REST Awkward to Program Against?

Well, there are a few details to making these REST requests: construct a well-formed request body, set up the http headers, add your hash (in most cases Azure requires this step as proof you have the right key), create a web connection, send your request, handle the response, and repeat. But in .NET it is even easier due to the Azure SDK where you will find some helper classes, such as CloudBlobContainer, CloudBlobClient, and CloudBlob. These helpful helpers help you help yourself to Blob storage services without having to worry about most of the details – you just deal with some objects.

How Do I Access the Azure SDK, and How Many Thousands of Dollars Does it Cost?

For .NET / Visual Studio developers, download the SDK as part of the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio. Or, better still, follow these instructions from David Aiken for getting started with Windows Azure.

For non-.NET, non-Visual Studio developers, download the Windows Azure SDK separately.

And even though the Azure SDK makes Azure development super über ultra convenient on .NET, it does not cost any money. A freebie. If you are developing on a non-.NET platform, there is very likely an open source client library for you. Microsoft provides a library now for PHP, too.

Can You Give Me a Short Example?

Sure, here is a code snippet showing the two primary classes in action (and bold blue). Under the hood, there are REST calls being made out to the Blob storage services, but you don’t need to deal with this plumbing in your code.

FileInfo = new FileInfo(“c:/temp/foo.png”);
string blobUriPath = fileInfo.Name;

CloudBlobContainer blobContainer = // getting blob container not shown here

CloudBlob blob = blobContainer.GetBlobReference(blobUriPath);
blob.UploadFile(fileInfo.FullName);

blob.Metadata["SomeArbitraryPropertyName"] = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); // arbitrary value
blob.SetMetadata();

blob.Properties.ContentType = “image/png”;
blob.SetProperties();

Are these Calls Really REST Under the Hood!!??

They sure are. You can prove this by firing up an http sniffer like Fiddler. You will see http traffic whiz back and forth.

What if Something Goes Wrong?

Here are a couple of errors I’ve run into:

• One Cause of Azure Error – One of the request inputs is out of range
• What causes “specified container does not exist” error message in Windows Azure Storage?

For other errors or issues, try the Azure Support Forum.

Is it Production Quality Code?

Hmmm… We have a continuous stream of code on a single (long) page, in a single source file… Is it “Production Quality Code” you might wonder? I’m going to go with “no” – this code is not production ready. It is for getting up to speed quickly and learning about Azure Blob Storage.

Can I Tell if My Blobs Get to the Cloud?

You sure can. One way is to use the nifty myAzureStorage.com tool:

Go to http://myAzureStorage.com in your browser:

Now you need to know something about how your Azure Storage account was configured in the Cloud. You need to know both the Account Name and one of the Access Key values (Primary or Secondary – it doesn’t matter which).

In our case we will type in the following:

Account Name = bostonazuretemp

Access Key = Gfd1TqS/60hKj0Ob3xPbtbQfmH/R0DMDKDC8VXWpxdMvhRPH1A+f6FMoIzyP+zDQmoN3GYQzJlLOASKKEvTJkA==

Note: the Access Key above is no longer valid. Use a different real one if you like, or see the One Page of Code snippet below for how to do this using local storage in the Dev Fabric.

You may also want to check “Remember Me” and your screen will look something like this:

Now simply click on “Log In” and you will see your storage. The default tab is for Table storage, so click the BLOBs tab to view your Blob Containers:

In my case I see one – “billw” – and I can click on it to drill into it and see its blobs:

And for each blob, I can click on the blob to examine its attributes and metadata:

What Project Template Should I Use in Visual Studio?

Create a Visual C# Console Application on .NET Framework 4 using Visual Studio 2010 or Visual C# Express 2010:

Show Me the Code!

Okay, the working code - fully functional - on One Page of Code – appears below. After you create a new Visual C# Console application in Visual Studio 2010, as shown above, simply clobber the contents of the file Program.cs with the code below. That oughta be easy. Then start playing with it.

You will also need to add a reference to Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient – but first you’ll need to switch away from the .NET Framework Client Profile.

Sharing Files on the Public Web using Azure Blob Storage

Also note that the following code will post to Azure Blob Storage in such a way that the item stored will be accessible from a web browser. This is not the default behaviour; read the code to see the couple of lines that influence this.

Note that this code is intensionally compressed to fit in a short space and all in one place – this is not intended to be production code, but “here is a simple example” code. For instance, this code does not use config files - but you should. This is just to help you quickly understand the flow and take all the magic out of getting a code sample to work.

You can also download this code directly: SnippetUploaderInOnePageOfCode.cs.

Without further ado, here is your One Page of Code…

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.IO;
using Microsoft.WindowsAzure;
using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient;

namespace CodeSnippetUploader
{
    class Program
    {
#if false
        private const string AccountKey = “Put a real Storage Account Key – find it on http://windows.azure.com dev portal for your Storage Service”;
#else
        private const string AccountKey = null;  // use local storage in the Dev Fabric
#endif
        private const string AccountName = “bostonazuretemp”;
        private const string ContainerName = “snippets”;
        private const string MimeTypeName = “text/plain”; // since these are assumed to be code snippets

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // pass in the single snippet code file you want uploaded
            string snippetFilePath = args[0];

            string baseUri = null;
            CloudBlobClient blobStorage = null;

            if (AccountKey == null)
            {
                var clientStorageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.DevelopmentStorageAccount; // use storage services in the Developer Fabric, not real cloud
                baseUri = clientStorageAccount.BlobEndpoint.AbsoluteUri;
                blobStorage = new CloudBlobClient(baseUri, clientStorageAccount.Credentials);
            }
            else
            {
                byte[] key = Convert.FromBase64String(AccountKey);
                var creds = new StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey(AccountName, key);
                baseUri = string.Format(“http://{0}.blob.core.windows.net“, AccountName);
                blobStorage = new CloudBlobClient(baseUri, creds);
            }

            CloudBlobContainer blobContainer = blobStorage.GetContainerReference(ContainerName);
            bool didNotExistCreated = blobContainer.CreateIfNotExist();

            var perms = new BlobContainerPermissions
            {
                PublicAccess = BlobContainerPublicAccessType.Container // Blob (see files if you know the name) or Container (enumerate like a directory)
            };
            blobContainer.SetPermissions(perms); // This line makes the blob public so it is available from a web browser (no magic needed to read it)

            var fi = new FileInfo(snippetFilePath);
            string blobUriPath = fi.Name; // could also use paths, as in: “images/” + fileInfo.Name;
            CloudBlob blob = blobContainer.GetBlobReference(blobUriPath);
            blob.UploadFile(fi.FullName); // REST call under the hood; use tool like Fiddler to see generated http traffic (http://fiddler2.com)

            blob.Properties.ContentType = MimeTypeName; // IMPORTANT: Mime Type here needs to match type of the uploaded file
                                                        // e.g., *.png <=> image/png, *.wmv <=> video/x-ms-wmv (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_media_type)
            blob.SetProperties(); // REST call under the hood

            blob.Metadata["SourceFileName"] = fi.FullName; // not required – just showing how to store metadata
            blob.Metadata["WhenFileUploadedUtc"] = DateTime.UtcNow.ToLongTimeString();
            blob.SetMetadata(); // REST call under the hood

            string url = String.Format(“{0}/{1}/{2}”, baseUri, ContainerName, blobUriPath);
            Process process = System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(url); // see the image you just uploaded (works from Console, WPF, or Forms app – not from ASP.NET app)
        }
    }
}

A Surprising Exception is Raised

When there was an exception raised, this was the error message with some details:

The title bar reads “StorageClientException was unhandled” which is accurate, since that code was not currently in a try/catch block. No problem or surprise there, at least with that part. But the exception text itself was surprising: “The specified container does not exist.”

Uhhhh, yes it does! After calling GetContainerReference, container.CreateIfNotExist() was called to ensure the container was there. No errors were thrown. What could be the problem?

A Clue

Okay, here’s a clue: while running, testing, and debugging my code, occasionally I would want a completely fresh run, so I would delete all my existing data stored in the cloud (that this code cared about at least) by deleting the whole Blob container (called “AzureTop40”). This was rather convenient using the handy myAzureStorage utility:

This seemed like an easy thing to do, since my code re-created the container and any objects needed. Starting from scratch was a convenience for debugging and testing. Or so I thought…

Azure Storage is Strongly Consistent, not Eventually Consistent

Some storage systems are “eventually consistent” – a technique used in distributed scalable systems in which a trade-off is made: we open a small window of inconsistency with our data, in exchange for scalability improvements. One example system is Amazon’s S3 storage offering.

But, per page 130 of Programming Windows Azure, “Windows Azure Storage is not eventually consistent; it is instantly/strongly consistent. This means when you do an update or a delete, the changes are instantly visible to all future API calls. The team decided to do this since they felt that eventual consistency would make writing code against the storage services quite tricky, and more important, the could achieve very good performance without needing this.”

So there should be no problem, right? Well, not exactly.

Is Azure Storage actually Eventually Strongly Consistent?

Okay, “Eventually Strongly Consistent” isn’t a real term, but it does seem to fit this scenario.

I’ve heard more than once (can’t find authoritative sources right now!??) that you need to give the storage system time to clean up after you delete something – such as a Blob container – which is immediately not available (strongly consistent) but is cleaned up as a background job, with a garbage collection-like feel to it. There seems to be a small problem: until the background or async cleanup of the “deleted” data is complete, the name is not really available for reuse. This appears to be what was causing my problem.

Another dimension of the problem was that there was no error from the code that purportedly ensured the container was there waiting for me. At least this part seems to be a bug: it seems a little eventually consistent is leaking into Azure Storage’s tidy instantly/strongly consistent model.

I don’t know what the Azure Storage team will do to address this, if anything, but at least understanding it helps suggest solutions. One work-around would be to just wait it out – eventually the name will be available again. Another is to use different names instead of reusing names from objects recently deleted.

I see other folks have encountered the same issue, also without a complete solution.

I presented a talk on Building Cloud-Native Applications using Microsoft Windows Azure. My slides are available as a PPT download and on slideshare.net.

<aside>Maura and I went to Vermont a day early. We put that time to good use climbing to the summit of Vermont’s highest mountain: Mt. Mansfield. We hiked up from Underhill State Park, up the Maple Ridge Trail, over to the Long Trail, up to the summit, then down the Sunset Ridge Trail (map). It was a really tough climb, but totally worth it. I think the round trip was around 7 miles.

</aside>

• Check out Chris’ blog at:  http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen/

Here are my rough notes:

There was no slide deck – Chris jumped right into the code. Here are a few of my rough notes.

Consider Web Platform Installer 2.0 to install Azure tooling.

• Windows Azure Platform Tools
• Visual Web Developer 2010 Express

ASP.NET MVC concepts / benefits:

• “A lot of convention” – great in the long run, hard to grasp at first…
• Separation of Concerns – controller then view
• ASP.NET MVC is closer to the metal than traditional ASP.NET – if you want to implement, say, XHTML, then nothing stands in your way.
• Strongly-typed Controllers and Views can be generated once your model is in place.
• Controller may choose to pass along only a ViewModel – subset of full Model, or perhaps enhanced
• Model Binding is also by convention
• Hackable URLs

Tips and Tricks:

• Ctrl-Shift-Click on Visual Studio in Win 7 will launch in Admin mode which Azure requires.
• Can modify the T4 template for MVC to alter its UI options in wizards.
• Ctrl-M-G – bring me to the appropriate View for this Action

New in MVC 2 / ASP.NET 4:

• Html.DisplayForModel
• RenderActions – new in MVC 2
• New in ASP.NET 4 (not just ASP.NET MVC 2) is <%: “foo” %> where the “:” is a new feature as shortcut for HTML.Encode for the content.
• MVC 2 has powerful client-side validation based on characteristics of your model. Does not require a server-side round trip. You specify e.g., [Required] attribute on Model data – and you don’t need to write any imperative code.

http://asp.net/mvc – many great resources.

Windows Azure developer fabric – also known as “the fog” – is the Azure cloud simulator running locally.

Also check out by Arra Derderian’s write-up of the same Boston Azure meeting.

There were around 30 people in attendance at the meeting.

After our system or application reaches its capacity limits, what are our options to make it work even with the new demands? In other words, how do we make it scale?

The  following scalability approaches  allow us to handle more computations (with vertical and horizontal scaling) or more system instances (with juxtaposition scaling).

There are other very important scaling patterns that we might address in a future post – such as the scalability using algorithms that embrace parallelism (such as Map/Reduce), NoSQL-like schema-less storage, and data sharding. These are not covered in this article.

Scale Up with More Powerful Hardware

The obvious option in many cases is to address a scalability problem with better, faster, more capable hardware. If we can’t load that giant spreadsheet model on a computer with 512MB of RAM, we install 2GB and give it another try. If it is still too slow, we can use a machine with a faster processor or faster hard disk.

This approach can also be applied to web servers, database servers, and other parts of your system. Got an architecture problem? Get some better hardware.

This approach is variously called “scaling up” or “vertical scaling” – since we are addressing the problem by substituting a more capable system (usually a single server), but one that is still logically equivalent.

The essential point here is that, generally speaking, the limits of scalability are due to the limits of a single computer (or perhaps the limits of an affordable single computer).

In Scaling Up (also known as Vertical Scaling) the limitation is hardware related in a very specific way: how much memory, disk, and processor a single server can support…

The key challenge with Scaling Up is that you might run out of hardware options. What happens if you are running on the fastest available machine, or it can’t take any more memory? You may be out of luck.

Scale Out with More Hardware Instances

Another option is some cases is to leave the existing machines in place, and add additional machines to the mix to share the burden. This is variously called “scaling out” or “horizontal scaling” – a metaphor suggestive of spreading out the system as we add more machines beside the existing ones.

The key point here are that systems need to be architected to support Scaling Out – though the benefit is that they can generally scale a lot more than a Scale Up system – and scalability is enabled by the software architecture.

In Scaling Out (also known as Horizontal Scaling) scalability must be architected into the system… it is not automatic and is generally more challenging than Scaling Up. You scale by running on more instances of the hardware – and having these hardware instances share the workload.

As mentioned, scaling out is an attribute of the architecture of the system. This is a great fit for the elastic nature of cloud computing platforms.

Scale Side-by-Side with More Systems

In the real world, not all of our scaling concerns are with “the” system – we tend to have many copies of systems. I recently heard that for every production instance of SAP, there are seven non-production instances. And in my own experience, organizations *always* need many instances of systems: for development, test, training and … then we have different versions of all these systems … and the list goes on.

It turns out that another great use of the cloud generally (including the Azure Cloud) is for spinning up these other instances of our system for many purposes – sometimes we don’t want 1 N-node app, we want N 1-node apps.

I dub this use of cloud to be “scaling side-by-side” or “juxtaposition scaling” – a metaphor suggestive of putting similar systems beside each other, since they are a related collection of sorts, even though the instances of systems scaled side-by-side to are not connected to, or operationally related to, any of the other instances.

Scaling Side-by-Side (also known as Juxtaposition Scaling) happens when you use the cloud’s elastic nature to create additional (often  temporary) instances of a system – such as for test or development.

Also, scaling side-by-side (juxtaposition scaling) is orthogonal to scaling up (vertical scaling) or scaling out (horizontal scaling). It is more about scaling to support more uses of more variants (versions, test regions, one for training, penetration testing, stress testing, …) for overall environmental efficiency.

And, finally, like other ways to leverage cloud infrastructure, to efficiently scale side-by-side you will benefit from some automation to easily provision an instance of your application. Azure has management APIs you can call to make the whole process automagic. Consider PowerShell for building your automation…

[It was in a conversation at the Hub Cloud Club with several folks, including William Toll and John Treadway. John mentioned the SAP statistic and also suggested that adding more instances is just another type of scaling in the cloud. I agreed and still agree. So I am giving that type of scalability a name… Scaling Side-by-Side or Juxtaposition Scaling. Neither seems to have any real hits in Google, but let's see if this catches on.]

For web addresses, I used to consider the “www” prefix an anachronism and argued that its use be deprecated in favor of the plain-old domain. In other words, I used to consider forms such as bostonazure.org superior to the more verbose www.bostonazure.org.

I have seen the light and now advocate the use of the “www” prefix – which is technically a  subdomain – for clarity and flexibility. I now consider www.bostonazure.org superior to the overly terse bostonazure.org.

I am not alone in my support of the www subdomain. Not only is there a “yes www” group – found at www.yes-www.org – advocating we keep using the www prefix, there is also an “extra www” group – found at www.www.extra-www.org [sic] – advocating we go all in and start using two sets of www prefixes. While I’m not ready to side with the extra www folks (which would give us www.www.bostonazure.org), for those who do, you might want to know they offer the following nifty badge for your displaying pleasure.

While use of two “www” prefixes may one too many, here are 4 reasons to embrace a single “www’ prefix, followed by 2 tips on how to implement it correctly.

Four reasons to embrace the www prefix

Reason #1: It’s a user-friendly signal, even if occasionally redundant

The main, and possibly best, reason is that it is user-friendly. Users have simply come to expect a www prefix on web pages.

The “www” prefix provides a good signal. You might argue that it is redundant: Perhaps the http:// protocol is sufficient? Or the “.com” at the end?

First, consider that the http:// protocol is not always specified; it is common to see sites advertised in the form www.example.com.

Second, consider that the TLD (top-level-domain) can vary – not every web site it a “dot com” – it might be a .org, .mil, or a TLD from another country – many of which may not be obvious as web addresses for the common user without a www prefix, even with the http:// protocol.

Third, consider that even if there are cases where the www is redundant, that is still okay. An additional, familiar signal to humans letting them know with greater confidence that, yes, this is a web address, is a benefit, not a detriment.

Today, most users probably think that the Web and the Internet are synonymous anyway. To most users, there is nothing but the www – we need to realize that today’s Internet is inhabited by regular civilians (not just programmers and hackers).  Let’s acknowledge this larger population by utilizing the www prefix and reducing net confusion (pun intended).

Reason #2: Go with the flow

The application and browser vendors are promoting the www prefix.

Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook – two of the most popular applications in the world – both automatically recognize www.bostonazure.org as a web address, while neither automatically recognizes bostonazure.org. (Both also auto recognize http://bostonazure.org.) Other text processing applications have similar detection capabilities and limitations.

Browsers also assume we want the www prefix; in any browser, type in just “twitter” followed by Ctrl-Enter – the browser will automatically put “http://www.” and append “.com” forming “http://www.twitter.com” (though then we are immediately redirected to http://twitter.com). [Note that browsers typically are actually configured to append something other than “.com” if that is not the most common TLD there; country specific settings are in force.] For the less common cases where you are typing in a .org or other non-default setting, the browser can only be so smart; you need to type some in fully on your own.

Reason #3: Advantages on high volume sites

While I have been aware of most of the raw material used in this blog post for years, this one was new to me.

High traffic web sites can get performance benefits by using www, as described in the Yahoo! Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site, though there is a workaround (involving an additional images domain) that still would allow a non-www variant, apparently without penalty.

Reason #4: Azure made me do it!

It turns out that Windows Azure likes you to use the www prefix, as described by Steve Marx in his blog post on custom domain names in Azure. This appears to be due to the combined effects of how Azure does virtualization for highly dynamic cloud environments – plus limitations of DNS.

In fact, it was this discovery that caused me to rethink my long-held beliefs around the use of www. Though I didn’t find any posts that specifically viewed this exactly like I did, my conclusion is the following:

I concluded the Internet community has changed over the years and is now dominated by non-experts. The “www” affordance inserted into the URLs makes enough of a difference in the user experience for non-expert users that we ought to just use the prefix, even if expert users see it as redundant and repetitive – as I used to.

In other words, nobody is harmed by use of the www prefix, while most users benefit.

Two tips to properly configure the www prefix

One of the organizations promoting dropping the www – http://no-www.org/ – describes three classes of “no www” compliance:

• Class A: Do what most sensible sites do and allow both example.com and www.example.com to work. This is probably the most easily supported in GoDaddy, and probably the most user-friendly, since anything reasonable done by the user just works.
• Class B: Redirect traffic from example.com to www.example.com, presumably with a 301 (Permanent) http redirect; this approach is most SEO/Search Engine-friendly, while maintaining similar user-friendliness to Class A.
• Class C: Have the www variant fail to resolve (so browser would give an error to the user attempting to access it). This is not at all user friendly, but is SEO-friendly.

So what are the two rules for properly configuring the www prefix?

Tip #1: Be user- and SEO-friendly with 301 redirect

Being user-friendly argues for Class A or Class B approach as mentioned above.

You don’t want search engines to be confused about whether the www-prefixed or the non-www variant is the official site. This is not Search Engine Optimization (SEO)-friendly; it will hurt your search engine rankings. This argues for Class B or Class C approach as mentioned above.

For the best of both worlds, the Class B approach is the clear winner. Set up a 301 permanent http redirect from your non-www domain to your www-prefixed variant.

You can set this up in GoDaddy with the Forward Subdomain feature in Domain Manager, for example.

You can also set it up with IIS :

• http://www.xoc.net/works/tips/domain.asp

Or with Apache:

• http://www.thesitewizard.com/apache/redirect-domain-www-subdomain.shtml

Tip #2: Specify your canonical source for content

While the SEO comment above covers part of this, you also want to be sure that if you are on a host or environment where you are not able to set up a 301 redirect, you can at least let the search engines know which variant ought to get the SEO-juice.

In your HTML page header, be sure to set the canonical source for your content:

<head>
    <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.bostonazure.org/" />
    ...
</head>

Google honors this currently:

• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Google is even looking at cross-domain support for canonical tag (though other search engines have not announced plans for cross-domain support):

• http://searchengineland.com/canonical-tag-2-0-google-to-add-cross-domain-support-27222

From an official Bing Webmaster blog post from Feb 2009, Bing will support it:

• http://www.bing.com/toolbox/blogs/webmaster/archive/2009/02/12/partnering-to-help-solve-duplicate-content-issues.aspx

Reportedly, Bing and Yahoo! are not yet supporting this very well:

• http://www.matthewsdiehl.com/seo/rel-canonical-link-tag-element-update/
• http://www.seoconsult.co.uk/SEOBlog/seo-techniques/rel-canonical-google-keeps-its-word-whilst-bing-and-yahoo-fail-to-provide.html

But it appears Bing and Yahoo! have either just implemented it, or perhaps they are about to:

• http://searchengineland.com/bing-yahoo-soon-to-support-canonical-tag-37405

You can also configure Google Webmaster Tools (and probably the equivalents in Bing and Yahoo!) to say which variant you prefer as the canonical source.

Unusual subdomain uses

There are some odd uses of subdomain prefixes. Some are designed to be extremely compact – such as URL shortening service bit.ly. Others are plain old clever – such as social bookmarking site del.i.cio.us. Still others defy understanding – in the old days (but not *that* old!), I recall adobe.com did not resolve – there was no alias or redirect, just an error – if you did not type in the www prefix, you were out of luck.

Another really interesting case of subdomain shenanigans is still in place over at MIT where you will find that www.mit.edu and mit.edu both resolve – but to totally different sites! This is totally legal, though totally unusual. There is also a web.mit.edu which happens to match mit.edu, but www.mit.edu is in different hands.

In the early days of the web, the Wall Street Journal was an early adopter and they used to advertise as http://wsj.com. These days both wsj.com and www.wsj.com resolve, but they both redirect to a third place, online.wsj.com. Also totally legal, and a bit unusual.

—

Credit for Traffic Light image used above:

1. capl@washjeff.edu
2. http://capl.washjeff.edu/browseresults.php?langID=2&photoID=3803&size=l
3. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
4. http://capl.washjeff.edu/2/l/3803.jpg

The first talk was an introduction to Cloud Computing, with a Microsoft slant towards Windows Azure. The second drilled into the Two Roles and a Queue (TRAAQ) design pattern – a key pattern for architecting systems for the cloud.

The PowerPoint slides are available here:

• Intro talk – bill-wilder-demystifying-cloud-computing-introducing-windows-azure-hartford-code-camp-19-june-2010
• More in-depth talk on the Window Azure Programming Model – bill-wilder-two-roles-and-a-queue-hartford-code-camp-19-june-2010

Also plugged the Boston Azure User Group to those attending my talks! Hope to see some of you at NERD in Cambridge, MA for talks and hands-on-coding sessions. Details always at bostonazure.org.

Currently Boston Azure meets monthly on the 4th Thursday of the month in Cambridge, MA in the USA. This is an in-person meeting. I have received a loud and clear vibe from the Boston Azure membership that there is a thirst for more hands-on stuff. That was fueled further first by the hands-on Azure SDK meeting we held April 29, then again by the all-day Firestarter held May 8. But we need more. So, I had this idea for an ongoing community coding project that we can hack on together at Boston Azure meetings and other times… I bounced the idea off the community at the May meeting… since I received a really positive response, I now officially declare I plan to go ahead with it…

Introducing the Boston Azure Project

Why are we doing this Project?

The community wants to code. There is a desire to learn a lot about programming in Windows Azure – and what better way to get really good at programming Windows Azure than by programming Windows Azure.

The primary goal of the project is to learn – to get good – really good - at Windows Azure.

How will the Project work?

To be hands-on, we need a project… so here’s a project to provide us with focus:

We shall build a “gently over-engineered” version of bostonazure.org.

This “gently over-engineered” version of bostonazure.org:

(a) will provide a productive environment where participants (developers and otherwise) can learn about Azure through building a real-world application by contributing directly to the project (through code, design, ideas, testing, etc., …), and

(b) will do so by taking maximum advantage of the technology in the Windows Azure platform in the advancement of the bostonazure.org web site (though thinking of it as “just a web site” is limiting – there is nothing stopping us from, say: adding an API; exporting OData or RSS feeds; being mobile-friendly for our visitors with iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7 devices; etc.), and

(c) will serve the collaboration and communication needs of the Boston Azure community, and

(d) will provide an opportunity for a little fun, meet other interesting people, and enhance our skills through sharing knowledge and learning from each other.

When will we code?

We will reserve time at Boston Azure meetings so we can collaborate in-person on a monthly basis. Participants are also free to hack at other times as well, of course.

Wait a second… Does it make sense to port a little web site like bostonazure.org to Azure?

It does not make sense – not in isolation. Go ahead and crunch the numbers on Windows Azure pricing and compare with an ISP-hosted solution. However, this is the “gently over-engineered” part: we are doing it this way to show off the capabilities of Windows Azure and learn a bunch in the process.

What is the output of the Project?

This project will be feature rich, easy to use, accessible, flexible… and open source.

Keep in mind: Since bostonazure.org is the web presence for Boston Azure community…

It Has To Work!

This project is for and by the community.

Anyone can contribute – at any seniority level, with any skill set, with many possible roles (not just developers).

Then how do we reconcile anyone can contribute with it has to work? The community process needs to be able to make the code work before we put it into production. We have to make this work. And we will.

So, now you’ve heard it all – the whole idea – at least the Big Picture. I will post more details later, but for now that’s it.

Next Steps

Please contact me (on twitter or by comment to this blog post or by email) if you want to be one of the very first participants – I would like a couple of folks to be in a “private beta” to get some details squared away before I make the CodePlex site public.

Update 23-June-2010: The project is now live on CodePlex at bostonazure.codeplex.com.

1782^12 + 1841^12 = 1922^12

Wow! A counter-example for FLT. A theorem I’ve known about since I was a kid. One counter-example is all it takes to disprove the whole deal.

Fermat’s theorem states that the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ has no solutions for integer n > 2, and integers a, b, and c not equal to zero. For n = 2 we have many solutions (Pythagorean triples), but none for n > 2. Nor should we, according to English mathematician Andrew Wiles, who proved FLT in 1995.

Until now. Or do we? The equation Jeff posted is a little awkward to validate since most calculators cannot handle numbers this size at full precision. They appear equal with a normal calculator – due to precision limits (round-off errors). Same problem with Excel.

So, since I’ve recently started playing with F#, I put together a trivial F# program (included below) to show the math at full precision, with the following results:

1782^12 + 1841^12 = 2541210258614589176288669958142428526657
and
1922^12 = 2541210259314801410819278649643651567616
which differ by
700212234530608691501223040959

So Fermat is safe. Saved by F#. But don’t feel bad if you fell for it – just be glad you knew what it meant. Bonus if  you noticed it on The Simpsons or Futurama.

We had 60-something folks attend the Boston Azure Firestarter (more photos) on May 8, 2010 in Cambridge, MA. This event provided both talks about important Azure concepts and hands-on-roll-up-your-sleeves-and-write-some-code Labs. Yes, attendees brought laptops! Feedback was positive. Many thanks to all the folks who helped make this event possible. This was a Boston Azure cloud computing user group event, supported by and hosted at Microsoft.

Many Thanks!

Those who helped prepare for the event, work the sign-in desk, help with technical problems, and handle the pair-programmer matching service included Nazik Huq, Chander Khanna, Joan Linskey, and Maura Wilder. Jim O’Neil and Chris Bowen (our East Coast Microsoft Developer Evangelists) were also on hand for trouble-shooting and general support and help.

Here was our speaker lineup:

1. David Aiken from Microsoft’s Windows Azure team came from the left-coast in Redmond to the right-coast in Boston to keynote the event. David gave many demos, a couple of which were My Azure Storage and his new URL shortening service hmbl.me.
   David’s keynote was followed by:
2. Bill Wilder: Roles and Queues talk + lab (http://hmbl.me/1OHBMZ)
3. Ben Day: Azure Storage + lab
   
4. Andy Novick: SQL Azure + lab (http://hmbl.me/1H46PK)
5. Jim O’Neil: Dallas and OData (http://hmbl.me/1OHC5W)
6. Panel Q&A (in the order shown in photo below): Mark Eisenberg (Microsoft), Bill Wilder, Ben Day, Jason Haley, and Jim O’Neil
   

After hours, a smaller group unwound at the sports bar over at the Marriott. This included Jim O’Neil, Maura Wilder, Joan Linskey, Bill Wilder, Sri from New Jersey, (okay, other names are vague!) …

At the Firestarter event on May 8, 2010, I spoke about Roles and Queues and worked through a coding lab on same. The final code is available in a zip file. The Boston Azure Firestarter – Bill Wilder – Roles and Queues deck can be downloaded – though since there were so many questions we didn’t get to covering a number many of the slides! – this was a hot topic!

The remainder of this post contains the narrative for the LAB we did as a group at the Firestarter. It probably will not stand alone super well, but may be of interest to some folks, so I’ve posted it.

• The TEMPORARILY Running Visualizer: http://baugfirestarter.cloudapp.net/
• The TEMPORARILY Running Roles and Queues Sample: http://bostonazuresample.cloudapp.net/
• These are “temporary” since the tokens for the accounts they are running expire soon (mid/late May or early June); the live instances will automatically stop working at that time.

The following procedure assumes Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2010 Express on Windows 7. The same general steps apply to Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, and Web Developer 2008 Express versions, though details will vary.

0. Open Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2010 Express and select File | New Project

1. Select Windows Azure Service and click Okay:

If you have trouble finding the Windows Azure Service template, you can type “Azure” into the search box in the top-right to narrow the options. Also, if you don’t have the Windows Azure SDK installed, you will need to install that before proceeding – but there will be a link provided by Visual Web Developer 2010 Express that will direct you to the right page. Install it if you need to and try again up to this point.

2. You will see a special dialog box for New Cloud Service Project from which you will add both a Web Role…

and a Worker Role…

Verify that both WebRole1 and WorkerRole1 are in the list on the right side, then click OK.

3. Before you begin making code changes, you can run your new application. You can run it in the debugger by pressing the F5 key.

You will probably get the following error message:

The error message is telling you that you need to close Visual Web Developer 2010 Express and restart it with elevated privileges.

4. To start any Windows program with elevated privileges , right-click on the application then choose Run as administrator from the pop-up menu:

Before it obeys your request to run as administrator, Windows 7 will double-check by popping up a security dialog.

Now you can reload your project and try running it again. The app should run and you should see a blank web browser page.

5. Once you’ve proven your application runs, it is time to make some changes.

Make the code changes indicated for the Two Roles and A Queue Lab in CODING STEP 1.

Note: the “coding step 1″ and future coding steps were handouts (paper!) at the Boston Azure Firestarter on Sat May 8, 2010. In lieue of reproducing them here, I will post the final solution.

This lab will establish some WebRole basics.

6. When done applying CODING STEP 1, run the application again.

7. After demonstrating your application runs, Deploy it to Azure.

This is a simple application so it helps us get through the initial deployment with minimal challenges.

8. Apply CODING STEP 2 – Add Queue (in local dev fabric storage)

9. CODING STEP 3 – Add “DumpQueue” method and “FirestarterWebRoleHelpers.cs”

You will get the following dialog box – type “code file” into the search area on the top-right, select Visual C# Code File, and type in the filename “FirestarterWebRoleHelpers.cs” as shown and click Add:

The new file “FirestarterWebRoleHelpers.cs” will open in the editor. It should be empty to begin with. Cut and Paste in the contents from http://bostonazure.org/files/FirestarterWebRoleHelpers.cs.txt.

Why? The contents of this file has little to do with Windows Azure, so we don’t want to focus on it. But we want to use some utility routines from it so that we can focus on Azure concepts.

10. CODING STEP 4 – Adding Cloud-based Queue

First we need to configure the cloud.

Go to http://windows.azure.com and log in. You may wish to consult instructions on redeeming a token at http://blog.codingoutloud.com/2010/05/06/redeeming-an-azure-token/ or http://bit.ly/dgCuMn

Your storage account has a subdomain, as circled above. This – and the Access Key – need to be added to your Web Role and Worker Role so that they can access (and share the same queue within) cloud-hosted storage.

Right-click in Visual Studio on the WebRole1, select Properties, and select the Settings tab on the left. It will appear something like this:

Now click on Add Setting and give the new item the name “DataConnectionString”, the Type “Connection String”, and click on the “…”

This will bring up the Storage Connection String editor – fill in the fields – where your “Account name” is the same as the subdomain shown on the Storage Service (see above – in that screen shot it is “bostonazurequeue”) and the Key can be either Primary or Secondary Access Key (from same area in the Azure Portal):

You are NOT DONE in the screen yet. Also add a Setting named “StatusUpdateQueueName”– of Type “String” – with Value “updatemessagequeue1” as follows:

Click OK.

11. Now REPEAT BOTH STEPS for WorkerRole1.

Yes, add both Settings also to WorkerRole1 – they both will end up with the same settings. You can “cheat” with cut and paste in the .cscfg and .csdef files.

12. Enable Cloud-hosted Queue from Web Role

Now you are ready go on to make the code changes to use this new configuration item.

Apply CODING STEP 4: Enabling the Cloud-hosted Queue from the Web Role

Now run your application using cloud storage for the queue:

Note that you can also examine the contents of the queue online by visiting http://myAzureStorage.com and providing the same credentials you used when setting up the DataConnectionString above for both the Web and Worker roles.

13. Enable Cloud-hosted Queue from Worker Role

Now you are ALMOST ready go on to make the code changes to use this new configuration item.

Before applying the coding, we need to add a project reference (otherwise you won’t be able to Resolve use of networking classes used in the FirestarterWorkerRoleHelpers.). In Visual Studio on the right side, under the Solution Explorer, right-click on the References element underneath WorkerRole1 and select Add Reference, then from the .NET tab, select System.Web and click okay:

Also, similar to step 9 above, add a new Code File called “FirestarterWorkerRoleHelpers.cs” to hold some additional needed (but not core to Azure) code.

The new file “FirestarterWorkerRoleHelpers.cs” will open in the editor. It should be empty to begin with. Cut and Paste in the contents from http://bostonazure.org/files/FirestarterWorkerRoleHelper.cs.txt.

Now you can apply Apply CODING STEP 5: Enabling the Cloud-hosted Queue from the Worker Role.

14. Deploying to Staging Area in Cloud to Staging

15. Cutover from Staging to Production

16. Add in secret Twitter posting code from your Worker Role…

Yes, this can be done by including a hash character (#) as part of the message you type into your web application.

Illegal name causes “One of the request inputs is out of range”

Here is the code – why might this Windows Azure code snippet throw an Exception on the call to queue.CreateIfNotExist()?

CloudQueueClient queueStorage = storageAccount.CreateCloudQueueClient();
CloudQueue queue = queueStorage.GetQueueReference(“My Queue”);
bool queueJustCreated = queue.CreateIfNotExist();

The answer lies in the name we are using for the queue. Since the name is just a string, I assumed it can be any string. It cannot be any string.

Experimentation suggests the rules for naming a queue include: (a) use only lower case letters, (b) digits are allowed anywhere, and (c) internal single hyphens are okay too, but (d) name should not contain any spaces (e) nor any punctuation (other than hyphen).

So there would be no problem with valid names like:

• myqueue
• my-queue
• myqueue-3

But there would be problems with illegal names like:

• MyQueue
• my queue
• bill’squeue
• -nogood
• x-
• not—quite
• bad(name)

There may be additional nuances to the rules I didn’t discover, of course. One way to test out possible names quickly is with the myAzureStorage utility; just try to create a queue using the name and see if you get an error. Note that you can feed upper case chars to myAzureStorage but the created object will return with lower-case letter and will not cause an error.

Also, I only experimented with Queue names, but I assume the same rules apply to Blobs and Tables. Further research indicates this indeed is the case...

My challenge originally was to figure out why I got the Exception that was raised – that was the non-obvious part – the exception message did not tell me it was a problem with the name. After I figured it out and experimented a bit, of course then I found the documentation on allowed names which supports my conclusions… and adds details like length of name and the fact that the name is required to be a legal DNS name.

Note that you will be interacting with the Windows Azure Developer Portal (or Dev Portal for short) to redeem your token and establish your temporary account. The Dev Portal is useful to learn about and get to know.

1. First visit http://windows.azure.com and log in with the provided credentials. Use the provided email address for your Windows Live ID.

(NOTE: If any of the images in this post are too small to read, click on them to see a larger version.)

2. You will see a screen like the following. Note the row with the light blue background; this background color only appears when your mouse is hovering there. Click on the Project Name that matches your token account name.

(Notice that the account owner is “waaccts@microsoft.com” – this is because you are using a Token. Azure supports having an overall account that pays the bills, then sub-accounts for developers. This is an example.)

3.  Now you are in! You can proceed to review some of the help resources lists, or click around on any of the tabs to the left. But to create a new application that you can host on the Azure cloud, you can click on the “New Service” link next to the green “+” sign.

4. After you choose “New Service” you will see the following. Note the two main options in the middle for Storage Account and Hosted Services.

Select Hosted Services to begin. Be sure to click on the words “Hosted Services” as opposed to the “Learn More” link, as they are different.

5. The next page will ask you for a name – this name will only be used to help you identify this service from a list in the developer portal, so don’t spend too much time coming up with the perfect name. You don’t need to provide anything for the Description.

After providing a name, click Next.

6.  Now you are faced with a form where the choices you make actually do matter.  Here’s what’ you’ll need to do:

Type in a “Public Service Name” – this will be the Internet-visible sub-domain from which your deployed application will be visible. For example, if you choose “foo” then your Azure Service will live at http://foo.cloudapp.net after you publish it.

After you settle on a Public Service Name (using Check Availability button as need), you also need to select a Region. Pick the “anywhere” region in your continent (or closest to your continent) such as Anywhere US and click Create.

Here’s what mine looked like before I clicked Create:

Now your Azure Service has been created.

7. You will see a screen inviting you to Deploy a Hosted Service Package. We won’t do that now (though you could if you had an application ready). Instead, we will create an Azure Storage Account. From here:

Click on the “New Service” link which is near the top-left – below the large Windows Azure logo – and you will see the same screen you saw in step 4:

This time select Storage Account and you will see the following:

Give it a name, as I did in screenshot, and click Next.

8. As in step 5, this is also an important choice, though not visible to humans visiting your site. You will need to know this address to program against it. Of course you can look it up in the Dev Portal at any time, but why not choose a logical name. Fill in the fields similar to step 5 – be sure to choose the same Region you chose with step 5 – and click Create.

9. You are now ready to build and deploy Azure applications that use Web Roles, Worker Roles, and various kinds of storage.

You will need the keys shows to programmatically access your storage.

You can always come back and look up the values of these keys, of course. Also, if a key is compromised, you can regenerate it easily, invalidating the prior one. There are two separate keys that can be used/invalidated independently. These keys are specific to this Storage Service you created; you can create more Storage Services with different keys and even use multiple of them together.

Five easy steps to Enable IIS 7.5 for Windows 7 Developers

1. Open Control Panel. From the Search Control Panel search box in the top right, type in “turn windows features on or off” to show just this option. Click on the “Turn Windows features on or off” link underneath the “Programs and Features” heading.

This launches the Control Panel applet you will need.

Here are the Control Panel screens you will now see:

(If the graphics are too small for you, click on them to bring up a larger version.)

Eventually it loads.

2. Once loaded, scroll down to Internet Information Services as shown below, and check the desired boxes (the one I chose are shown in the next two screen shots):

(If the graphics are too small for you, click on them to bring up a larger version.)

3. The hit okay and wait …

4. Once complete, you will see this browser window – note the yellow bar:

5. You may want to select “Enable Intranet Settings” as shown below:

Done!

On May 8, 2010 there will be a Firestarter event focused on learning about Microsoft’s Windows Azure Cloud Platform. This FREE, ALL-DAY, HANDS-ON, IN-PERSON event will be held at the Microsoft NERD building in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Here’s the idea…

You show up in the morning curious about Cloud Computing and the Windows Azure platform… and you leave at the end of the day loaded up from a crash-course/deep-dive into Azure, including a series of Azure-specific technical talks, Azure-specific programming experience (and working code), and access to resources to continue into the future…

Registration is now open!

Register at Eventbrite now.

What will be covered?

While we are still tweaking the schedule and exact contents, we didn’t want to delay opening registration. Rest assured the focus of the event is covering the most important Azure topics through a combination of informative talks and hands-on coding sessions.

We have some outstanding speakers lined up (including a keynote speaker we will announce soon).

More information on this community event – including a more complete/detailed schedule – will be updated progressively over the next few weeks on the web site of the Boston Azure cloud computing using group.

See you there!

[image credit: Firestarter logo built based on http://shaedsofgrey.deviantart.com/art/fire-45734782?moodonly=1 under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.]

1. Azure Talk

• Title: Cloud Computing, Microsoft Style: What is Windows Azure and Why You Should Care:

• Slides: Intro to Cloud Computing with Windows Azure – NE Code Camp – 27-March-2010
• Abstract / description

2. Prism Talk

• Title: Demystifying Prism for Silverlight & WPF:

• Slides: Demystifying Prism – NE Code Camp – 27-March-2010
• Abstract / description

How-To Configure an Azure Development Environment

0. Operating System Running IIS 7.x

No way of getting around the need for a Windows operating system that runs IIS 7.0 or IIS 7.5 — either directly or indirectly (see note below on using virtualization).

The operating system versions that support IIS 7.0 include:

• Vista Business Edition and Ultimate

The operating system versions that support IIS 7.5 include:

• Windows 7 Home Starter, Home Basic, and Home Premium (instructions for installing IIS 7.5 on Windows Home editions)
• Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate (instructions for installing IIS 7.5 on Windows 7 Pro or Ultimate)
• Windows Server 2008 R2 (instructions for installing IIS 7.5 on Windows Server 2008 R2)

What happens if I don’t have Vista, Win 7, or Server 2008?

There is one other hope. Use Virtual PC (or your favorite virtualization solution) and run an instance of a supported operating system in a virtual mode. (This blog post on creating a virtual machine image for Windows 7 using Virtual PC 2007 may help.)

Once you have an operating environment – real or virtual – the rest is the same.

How do I enable IIS 7.x to run?

If you are running a desktop version of Windows (Vista or Windows 7), it is likely you need to enable IIS through the control panel. Here are step-by-step instructions for enabling IIS 7.5 on Windows 7.

If you are doing this to prepare for the April 29 Boston Azure or the May 8th Firestarter meeting, please make sure you have enabled IIS7 with ASP.NET and have WCF HTTP Activation enabled.

1. Visual Studio

You need a copy of Visual Studio that supports Azure development. Currently your options are Visual Studio 2008 SP1,  Visual Studio 2010 (many editions), and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition.

If you don’t know which version of Visual Studio to install, go with Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition (which is also free).

2. Windows Azure Tools and SDK

Download and install Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.1 (Feb 2010) – this includes the Windows Azure SDK (and its samples)

Pay special attention to the first note at the top of that post:

Visual Studio must be run as an Administrator

You must run Visual Studio with elevated permissions when building Cloud Services for Windows Azure.

It is possible to create a shortcut that will launch Visual Studio with administrative permissions by setting the “Run as Administrator” checkbox in the Advanced Properties page of the Shortcut tab; this is available from the Properties menu option off of the context menu.

3. Microsoft SQL Server

A local installation of SQL Server is needed for local development work involving SQL Azure, Azure Table Storage, or Azure queues.

You only need to do this step if you didn’t install a version of SQL Server during Step 1 (above) while installing Visual Studio.

If you do not have a paid license for SQL Server, your best bet is to download a free copy of either Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express or Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express.

If you don’t know which version of SQL Server to install, go with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express (which is also free).

4. Windows Azure Platform Training Kit

At least for the April Boston Azure meeting, you will  also need the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit (Dec 2009 update) since Jason Haley (the main speaker) will assume we have this installed so he can reference it during the meeting.

5. Future Optional Extra Credit Tools

Once you have deployed to the cloud, you may also be interested in:

• Fiddler (for IE) and Firebug (for Firefox) to spy on http traffic going back and forth to a deployed Azure app
• What else?

6. Do You Have a Token?

If you are lucky enough to have a token for free (though time-limited) access to Azure services in the cloud, here’s How to Redeem an Azure Token.

Here are several convenient ways to tell whether a .NET assembly is strongly named.  (English language note: I assume the form “strongly named” is preferred over “strong named” since that’s the form used in the output of the sn.exe tool shown immediately below.)

Towards the end, this post discusses use of Strong Names with Silverlight.

Then in the final section of this post the often confusing – though very important – differences between Strongly Named assemblies and Digitally Signed assemblies are clarified.

But first, here are three approaches for telling whether a .NET Assembly is Strongly Named...

Approach #1: Testing for Strong Name on Command Line or in a Script

You tell whether an Assembly/DLL has been successfully strong-named using the Strong Name Tool (sn.exe) (which can be found somewhere like here: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin\sn.exe) by running the following at the command line:

sn -vf System.Data.dll

Here are the results when running against a strongly named assembly, then one that is not strongly named.

C:\> sn -v C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.Data.dll

Microsoft (R) .NET Framework Strong Name Utility  Version 4.0.30128.1
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.
Assembly 'C:\...\System.Data.dll' is valid

C:\> sn -v C:\WINDOWS\ismif32.dll

Microsoft (R) .NET Framework Strong Name Utility  Version 4.0.30128.1
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.
C:\WINDOWS\ismif32.dll does not represent a strongly named assembly

Since the return value from sn.exe is 0 (zero) when the strong name is in place, and 1 (one) if not correctly strong named, you can test for this in a script by examining ERRORLEVEL, as in the following (put it into a text file called “sn-test.bat” for example and run as “sn-test foo.dll”):

@ echo off

if "%1"=="" goto END sn -q -vf %1 > NUL if ERRORLEVEL 1 goto NOT_STRONG

:STRONG
echo Has strong name: %1
goto END

:NOT_STRONG
echo Not strong named: %1
goto END

:END

Note that this will tell you whether it has SOME strong name, but does not tell you which one. So this technique is not appropriate for all uses, but might help in, say, an automated script that checks your about-to-be-released assemblies to make sure you remembered to add the strong names to them. (See note below – “Strong Names not for Security”.)

If you need finer-grain control and wish to write low-level code to ascertain the strong-naming status of an assembly, you can do that too.

Approach #2: Viewing Strong Name Details with IL DASM

Visual Studio ships with a handy utility – the Microsoft Intermediate Language Disassembler (ILDASM.EXE (tutorial)) – which can be used for disassembling .NET binaries to peruse the contents, perhaps for viewing the method signatures or viewing the .NET Assembly Manifest. It is helpful to load an assembly using IL DASM and examine the manifest to see whether there is a strong name key available. Your first step is to load the desired Assembly using the ildasm.exe utility. On my Windows 7 machine, IL DASM is found at

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\bin\ildasm.exe

and you can load up the System.Drawing.dll .NET Assembly as in the following example:

C:\> ildasm C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.Drawing.dll

Once loaded, you will see a screen like the one below.

Note the MANIFEST section highlighted. Double-click on MANIFEST which load the following screen of manifest-specific data:

Find the section for the Assembly you’ve loaded – in this case, System.Drawing and following the section (which is marked with the “.assembly System.Drawing” directive highlighted above, and the content begins with the opening brace (“{“) shown above, and ends with its matching brace later in the manifest, and shown below.

The highlighted part of the manifest is the public key for this assembly. This public key can also be seen using the sn.exe tool, as follows:

C:\> sn -Tp C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.Drawing.dll echo Not strong named: %1

Microsoft (R) .NET Framework Strong Name Utility  Version 3.5.30729.1
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

Public key is 002400000480000094000000060200000024000052534131000400000100010007d1fa57c4aed9 f0a32e84aa0faefd0de9e8fd6aec8f87fb03766c834c99921eb23be79ad9d5dcc1dd9ad2361321 02900b723cf980957fc4e177108fc607774f29e8320e92ea05ece4e821c0a5efe8f1645c4c0c93 c1ab99285d622caa652c1dfad63d745d6f2de5f17e5eaf0fc4963d261c8a12436518206dc09334 4d5ad293

Public key token is b03f5f7f11d50a3a

Note that the Public key in the output from sn.exe matches the highlighted public key in the image immediately above it (of course you should ignore the spaces between pairs of digits in the screen shot).

If an assembly is not strongly named, the Public key will be missing from the manifest and will not be displayed by sn -Tp command.

Since IL DASM comes with both Visual Studio and with the .NET SDK, it is already on the desktop for most .NET Developers, and is therefore sometimes the handiest tool. The third option, .NET Reflector, is a third-party tool, though one adopted by many .NET Developers due to its awesomeness. Reflector conveniently shows more details about the strong name.

Approach #3: Viewing Strong Name Details with Reflector

You can load an assembly in the free version RedGate’s .NET Reflector and quickly see the strong name details – or lack thereof for non-strong named assemblies. In the image below, see at the bottom where the strong name string is highlighted. Note that the strong name has five parts (though the Culture is optional):

1. Simple Name or Assembly name without the “.dll” extension (“System.Data” in case of assembly “System.Data.dll”)
2. Assembly version (“2.0.0.0″ in case of “System.Data.dll”)
3. Culture (“neutral” in case of “System.Data.dll”, but might be “en-us” for US English, or one of many others)
4. Public Key or PublicKeyToken (public part of the cryptographic public/private key pair used to strong name the assembly, “b77a5c561934e089″ in case of “System.Data.dll”)
5. Processor Architecture – Defines the assembly’s format, such as MSIL (intermediate language) or x86 (binary for Intel x86 processors)

In the next image, see at the bottom where the LACK OF complete name string is highlighted; this assembly does not have a strong name to display, so “Name” field includes a null value for PublicKeyToken. (Note that in the real world, Spring.Core.dll is in fact released as strongly named by the good folks on the Spring.NET project; the screen shot below was done on a non-production version of that DLL.)

While you are at it… make Reflector the default program for “launching” assemblies (actually would need to be for all files ending in the .DLL extension, but Reflector is smart enough to not choke on non-.NET assemblies).

Approach #4: (Bonus!) Viewing Strong Name with Windows Explorer

This post promised three ways to tell if a .NET Assembly has a strong name - but here is a bonus 4th way. Windows Explorer will not show you the strong name characteristics of an assembly, with one exception – for assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC), strong name data is included in the Properties dialog. If  you are examining the GAC, this can be handy.

Of course, if an assembly is in the GAC at all, it is strongly named by definition; assemblies are required by .NET to be strongly named to be allowed in the GAC.

Strong Naming for Silverlight

Silverlight also has support for strongly named assemblies, which is needed for the Cached Assembly Feature introduced in Silverlight 3.0.

(Silverlight 4 also introduces supports for digital signatures on XAP files, created by signtool.exe, which are validated by the Silverlight runtime for out-of-browser (OOB) applications running with elevated trust.)

Strongly Name Assembly != Digitally Signed Assembly

Strong Names and Digital Signatures are Orthogonal Concerns - Almost

Strongly Naming and Digitally Signing are largely orthogonal concerns. They have different purposes, different tools, and the digital certificates may come from different sources (for publicly distributed binaries, the certs for Digital Signing usually will come from a PKI source, though that is not essential for the Strong Naming certs).

The only dependency among them is that if the Assembly is to be Strongly Named, then the Strong Naming step has to happen before the Digital Signing step.

How do I check whether an assembly is Digitally Signed? You can run the following command to determine whether assembly “foo.dll” is digitally signed:

signtool verify /pa foo.dll

If you want to see the hash – for example, to compare with another assembly’s hash – then you can view it using the following command sequence:

signtool verify /v /pa /ph foo.dll | find "Hash"

Of course, you can use sn.exe and signtool.exe together (one after another) to examine an assembly to ascertain both whether it is strongly named and whether it has been digitally signed.

Strong Names are NOT for Security!

Finally, a word of caution… Strong names are about versioning, not about security. Strong names are more about avoiding DLL Hell (which is largely an accidental concern) than about avoiding hackers (which is deliberate). While a strong name may help alert you to tampering, realize that strong names can be hacked, and Microsoft emphasizes that  strong-named assemblies do not give the same level of trust as digitally signing:

Strong names provide a strong integrity check. Passing the .NET Framework security checks guarantees that the contents of the assembly have not been changed since it was built. Note, however, that strong names in and of themselves do not imply a level of trust like that provided, for example, by a digital signature and supporting certificate.

Consider digitally signing your .NET assemblies if it is important to you or your customers that the origin of the assemblies be traceable and verifiable. One source of digital certificates that can be used for Digitally Signing assemblies is Verisign which has Authenticode Certificates.

See also the response to this comment for more details.

1. Download Reflector and install it; remember where it is installed

2. Using Windows Explorer, navigate to any DLL file on your computer

3. Right-click on the DLL and select “Open with…” from the popup menu

4. From the Caution dialog that appears, select “Open with…” (yes, you have to select it twice, once in step 3, again in step 4):

5. From the dialog that appears, choose the second option – “Select a program from a list of installed programs”:

6. Now you will simply need to choose  the “Browse…” button and navigate to wherever it is you installed Reflector.exe, click the “Open” button and you are done.

Now whenever you want to examine a DLL in Reflector, you can double-click on it from Windows Explorer. If you tool around in the command line like I sometimes will do, you can also launch the DLL in Reflector by just “running” it from the command line like you might do for a .txt document to open it in Notepad.

Realize that Reflector can’t do much with a DLL that is not actually a .NET Assembly, but will handle that case gracefully.

I just made some updates to improve the user experience (UX). Here are the changes I made, and I list the handy web resources I used to help me decide (where applicable).

For field labels, I place the label directly above the field it describes. I use <fieldset> and <label> to describe my markup, presumably making it friendly to screen readers. (Credit to templates provided with ASP.NET MVC for making this part easy.) This is the layout that Luke Wroblewski (author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks) recommends in his Best Practices for Web Form Design for scenarios where you want to maximize speed, and the user is likely familiar with the data being requested.

Luke’s work is packed with clear, actionable, useful guidance that is easily applied and backed by user research. A gold mine…

Other recommendations I adopted from LukeW include:

• Since I have two required fields and three optional ones, I removed the (Required) labels, and stuck with the (optional) ones only.
• Added field length for optional Notes field.
• Made the Primary Action of the form (the Subscribe button) green, just like Apple Store (got the idea from UIE mailing).

Also from LukeW, but from a different source (The Apple Store’s Checkout Form Redesign, which I learned of from a UIE mailing):

• After the form is submitted, the user does not get an immediate email. I made that clear in the resulting text.

More improvements I can make in the future, also based on LukeW, include:

• Validate the data entered. In my case, this is currently only that a well-formed email address is provided.
• Provide more context on why data is being requested.
• Disable the Submit (Subscribe) button after it is clicked to avoid double clicks.

Other changes, outside of LukeW’s guidance:

• Mentioned “low volume” and “will not spam you” – though also need a privacy policy. Will get to that eventually..
• Programmatically set focus to the first field in the form when the page is loaded. I used the jQuery technique described here.
• Dropped “:” (colons) at end of labels while also changing labels text from leading caps style to mixed case (“Job title” instead of “Job Title:”). While not decisive for me, I found an interesting discussion around whether to use a colon in form labels.
• Made sure users could press Enter at any time to submit – but this will only work if they are not in the single multi-line field on my form. Need to consider removing that field … Need to consult with Joan on that one.

Used semantic mark-up to implement the green Submit (Subscribe) button mentioned above:

Submit (Subscribe) Button

HTML:

<input type="submit" id="primaryaction" value="Subscribe" />

CSS:

#primaryaction
{
 padding: 5px;
 color: #FFFFFF;
 background-color: #267C18;
 font-weight: bolder;
}

Old form:

sign-up form BEFORE the make-over

New form:

The AFTER screen shot

Dealing with the dreaded blocked files problem

Quickly Unblocking files marked as Unsafe

Ever download a Zip (or other files) and have to manually “Unblock” one or more files through Windows Explorer’s Properties dialog, like this?

Perhaps you been mystified by a message like this one from Visual Studio?

Mysterious Visual Studio error message

Read on to understand what’s happening and to learn how to more easily deal with Unblocking such downloaded files on Windows 7, Vista, and XP.

Why does this happen? Why do files become “Blocked”?

It appears that Internet Explorer (versions 7 and  8, maybe late patches in IE 6) applies the “block” in a stream (see below for more on streams). Some programs handle these “blocked” files more gracefully than others (looks like the latest Adobe PDF reader can read files like this w/o error).

I’ve seen blocking happen when downloading Visual Studio solutions from the web or from an email. I’ve also seen it when downloading documents to disk for use later. You can view the file’s properties in Windows Explorer to see if the block is there (look for the “Unblock” option, as seen above).

Another option is to use Notepad as illustrated in Colin Mackay’s Tip of the Day from nearly a year ago:

notepad MyDownloadedFile.zip:zone.identifier

Of course, substitute your filename in instead of BostonAzureSite.zip, but keep everything else identical. You will see the external zone stream:

[ZoneTransfer]
ZoneId=3

Windows is protecting us from ourselves. I guess if you don’t know what you are doing, you could hurt yourself; you’ve downloaded something “untrusted” from the interweb. This “protection” is in Windows 7 and Windows Vista, and apparently can even appear in Windows XP if certain Microsoft software updates are installed. I assume this has some benefits to someone!

But if you are a programmer / hacker / techie, and are comfortable hacking and generally know what you are doing, read on…

Easily Unblock downloaded files marked by IE as Unsafe

Normally, to Unblock files, you need to visit them one at a time with Windows Explorer, pop up the properties, and click on the Unblock button. This is tedious. If you want to be able to Unblock files more quickly, including whole directory trees at once, then consider doing the following.

Go get streams.exe from the big brains at Systinternals (which is part of Microsoft) and copy the executable to c:\bin\streams.exe. (If you put it somewhere else, make a compensating adjustment in the next step.)

Use Notepad to save the following into a text file named unblock-menu.reg and save it to disk:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\UnBlock]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\UnBlock\command]
@="c:\\bin\\streams.exe -d -s \"%1\""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\UnBlock]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\UnBlock\command]
@="c:\\bin\\streams.exe -d \"%1\""

What do these Registry Settings do?

This file lists some registry settings that will allow you to invoke streams.exe from the right-click context menu in Windows Explorer. Depending on whether you right-click on a folder or a file, the context menu will vary, as will the action. For a folder (directory), the registry setting says “call the program streams.exe with the parameters ‘-d -s’ and name-of-whatever-folder-i-clicked-on” which will cause streams.exe to visit each file in that directory tree and remove its streams information. If you right-click on just one file, the command is similar, except does not use the “-s” flag (which says to recurse into subdirectories).

Now install these registry settings by executing this file, probably by double-clicking on unblock-menu.reg from Windows Explorer. You will probably get a warning from Windows saying you must be nuts to attempt to modify the registry. However, if you are a programmer you are probably cool with it (and may also be nuts).

Now you are ready for the next time Windows protects you from yourself by blocking content you didn’t want marked as unsafe in the first place. You can right-click on any file or directory on your computer and select “Unblock” and that will apply the Unblock process. If you apply it to a file, it will only impact that file. If you apply it to a directory (aka folder) then it will recursively apply to all files and directories below that folder.

Here’s what you will see when you right-click on a directory / folder from Windows Explorer – note the new option:

And here’s what you will see when you right-click on a file:

Other Options

I learned about the streams.exe utility from a handy post about unblocking files for Vista. In that same post, they describe how to turn the feature off altogether using the Policy Editor.

Caveat Emptor

With great power comes great responsiblility.

I do not advise applying streams.exe to C:\ as I have no idea whether it is ever a good idea to remove all streams from all files. This may in fact be a very bad thing to do. I just don’t know.  I am personally comfortable doing it with Visual Studio projects and various documents I’ve downloaded, and have not run into any trouble, but be careful out there…

Note that the streams utility will nuke *all* the streams. So if your files contain useful additionals streams, this is probably not going to be a helpful strategy. I expect this is not likely to be a problem for the vast majority of people.

Interesting write-up on Alternate Data Streams, which are a feature of NTFS file system. Even some interesting streams hacks out there.

If you try to use Visual Studio 2010 RC to open an existing ASP.NET MVC web site that was built on ASP.NET MVC 1.0 under Visual Studio 2008, you might expect it to be converted and to open successfully. That’s what I expected, but that did not happen. Visual Studio 2010 gave me conversion errors.

But.. there is a straight-forward way to migrate your ASP.NET MVC project from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010 RC.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Uninstall the MVC 2.0 RC (or RC 1) bits that ship with the RC if you’ve already installed Visual Studio 2010 (and you probably have if you are reading this blob post – but refer to Phil Haack’s post for full details)

2. Download the latest MVC 2.0 RC 2 bits and install them into Visual Studio 2010

3. Download the work-in-progress MVC converter tool and run it on your project

4. Open your project in Visual Studio 2010 and it will now be able to complete the conversion

One step in the conversion to Visual Studio 2010 will also ask you if you wish to convert to .NET 4.0:

Since I wish to deploy this site back to a host with .NET 3.5 SP1, I chose No. I am willing to live with deploying the ASP.NET MVC RC 2 bits, but not so with .NET 4.0 as I don’t have control over that (I deploy onto a shared server).

Presumably this will all be integrated and seamless in the final release of Visual Studio. But it worked for me…

Identity, Claims, Geneva, and Trust in the Cloud

This was Boston Azure meeting #4, Feb 25, 2010

(Curt’s slide deck will be made is now available (PPT 2003 format))

Some notes from Curt’s talk:

• Azure devs need to care about claims-based-identity and federated identity
• Geneva is Microsoft’s solution in this space
• Perfect storm of paradigm shifts
• Caution: Geneva is not a panacea for “Identity in the Cloud”

“The most important thing Microsoft has done in identity since they came out with ActiveDirectory” – and think about how much we rely on AD for enterprise-class apps – “it’s like air”

First two lines of every program (with nod to Kim Cameron):

1. Who are you?
2. What are you allowed to do?

• The answer to the second generally depends on the answer to the first. “Identity” is an input.

Big architectural problem: the ‘net was built w/o any way of knowing who you are connecting to (http has no identity)

• RBAC (role-based access control) is not as flexible or powerful as claims
• Any statement that can be validated can be a claim

Microsoft’s Federated Identity Group very focused on standards. To be serious also about Azure, you need to pay deep attention to the key standards.

Azure is only cloud solution REALLY solving the SSO problem in the cloud – and into your data center. Identity must flow…

Geneva Technology stack:

• Microsoft Federation Gateway (“ADS 2.0 in the sky”)
• Windows Identity Foundation (some .NET namespaces)
• Active Directory Federation Services 2.0
• Windows CardSpace 2.0

Curt will focus for a while in his talk on Windows Identity Foundation…

Consider three parties – Security Token Service, Your App, End User

1. Secure Token Service <=> Your App – Initial handshake uses WS-Federation (metadata, X-509 cert)
2. End User <=> Your App – claims via WS-Policy (which Security Token Service(s) I trust)
3. End User <=> Security Token Service – verify policy
4. End User <=> Security Token Service – WS-Trust
5. End User <=> Your App – lots of interactions – signed tokens, claims

ADF 2.0 – same programming model across web and desktop

RP = relying party – someone that consumes tokens

PingIdentity.com

OpenID cannot help with Man-in-the-middle attacks

“Shred the token” is lingo meaning to decrypt a token.

Coded example showing implementation of Passive Federation.

• Showed the 8 (!) prerequisites
• Create full-trust app (Since runtime not fully baked in Azure yet – and certainly not yet in GAC)
• Add a reference to Microsoft.IdentityModel (which is a stronger programming model than older System.IdentityModel)
• using Microsoft.IdentityModel.Claims;
• using System.Threading;
• Then write like 5 lines of code…
• Subclasses from IIdentity, IClaimsIdentity, IClaimsPrincipal (same ones used in other .NET apps)
• WIF ASP.NET Processing Pipeline does a lot of behind-the-scenes work for us
• IsInRole method is key
• Then in the ASP.NET app, there is some 10 lines of key code for X-509 cert – which contains the URL (or domain, really) of the web site that the cert applies to – a problem with “localhost” and “stage.foo.com” etc. due to mismatch – this goes in Global.asax – plus several other blocks of code…

Now for the STS (which you don’t need if you have ADFS 2.0)

• There is a Token Service for ASP.NET visual studio template with Geneva install
• Many coding steps here (see slides)
• Use FedUtil (which comes with Geneva and VS 2008, VS 2010) to create a trust between your application and your STS
• There is a lab to create your own STS

Claims-based systems externalized the work of AuthZ, AuthN to your STS – not stuck in your code.

Geneva supports delegation – embedding one token within another…

(21 people at the meeting)

Guest speakers were Michael Stiefel and Mark Eisenberg

Meeting was held December 3, 2009 at the Microsoft NERD

We opened with Boston Azure Theater, kicking off a few minutes after 6:00.  For around 45 minutes we watched a video of Microsoft Director Manuvir Das’ PDC talk A Lap Around the Windows Azure Platform.

From there, Microsoft’s Mark Eisenberg walked us through a summary of key Windows Azure announcements made at (or right before) the Microsoft PDC in November. The deck Mark used is available BAUG_PDCHighlights. There was a lot of interest in the announcement details and in the pricing model.

Our keynote speaker, Michael Stiefel, followed with a detailed look into the project “Dallas” announcement, showcasing the Dallas “Data as a Service” platform, working through sample apps, a custom mashup – with code, demonstrating the straight-forward programming model (ATOM feeds), and showing use of the data directly within Excel. Michael wrapped up by reviewing the business model – and discussing the interesting possibilities (publishers can publish – and others can consume – data so much more easily than today since Microsoft will have eliminated the “contract friction” we’d have if every consumer had to strike a deal with every publisher).