More Wally - Wallace B. McClure : azure

I'm Hooked on the Cloud

wallym — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 07:00:00 GMT

My DevProConnections article on Azure is now online - I'm Hooked on the Cloud.

Bytes by MSDN - Let's talk Cloud

wallym — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 16:33:00 GMT

While I was at DevConnections in Las Vegas, I was honored to be interviewed by Tim Huckaby for "Bytes by MSDN" on Cloud Computing.

Here's a short intro from the talk:

Do you believe in the Cloud? Wallace McClure, Founder and Architect of Scalable Development, Inc., does. His customers are extremely interested in the value and economies of scale that Cloud Computing, and more specifically, Windows Azure can bring. Building out an infrastructure that supports your web service or application can be expensive, complicated and time consuming. Or you could look to the Microsoft cloud. The Windows Azure platform is a flexible cloud–computing platform that lets you focus on solving business problems and addressing customer needs. Wally talks about all this, and more, in this interview with Tim Huckaby, and in his Windows Azure podcasts.

My challenges in upgrading my Windows Azure App from SDK 1.2 to 1.3

wallym — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 16:03:00 GMT

I finally got around yesterday evening to updating my Windows Azure Application from the 1.2 SDK to the 1.3 SDK. Wow, what a fun strange trip that was. Yes Virginia, it is possible to upgrade. I ran across the following two issues:

Don't try to use beta features if you aren't signed up for them. Ok, this one should have been obvious, unfortunately, it wasn't. What was my first thought when I started my upgrade? Of course, it was to try out the ExtraSmall VM. So, I plugged that into my .csdef file..........and my deployment promptly died with no info as to what had happened beyond some cryptic messages. Finally, I dug through and figure out that the "Windows.Azure.......PassWord.Encryption.........IDonCareWhatYouTriedToDoException" meant that my app did not have the ExtraSmall VM beta allowed on Azure. I went back to the Small VM Size to deploy my app with, and the app deployed. Problem #1 solved.
Did I test my app after I deployed it? Of course not. Its my test app. There are a few users, but nothing huge. I logged in this morning, and bomb, the app died. WTF had I done? WTF was broken due to moving from 1.2 to 1.3? I was getting this error

“SetConfigurationSettingPublisher needs to be called before FromConfigurationSetting can be used”

I looked at the error, set some break points and ran locally. Boom, it didn't work here either. Great, what was wrong. Finally, I found the answer. The change to using the Full IIS7 instead of the Web Core had introduced a breaking change in the app. So, I copied some code from my WebRole.cs to my Global.asax and things worked. Sweetness. Here is the code, it will look a little familiar to someone developing in Azure.

        void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            // Code that runs on application startup
            CloudStorageAccount.SetConfigurationSettingPublisher(
                 (configName, configSettingPublisher) =>
                 {
                     var connectionString = RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable
                     ? RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue(configName)
                     : ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[configName];
                     connectionString = RoleEnvironment
                              .GetConfigurationSettingValue(configName);
                     configSettingPublisher(connectionString);
                 });

            // For information on handling configuration changes
            // see the MSDN topic at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=166357.
            RoleEnvironment.Changing += RoleEnvironmentChanging;

        }
        private void RoleEnvironmentChanging(object sender, RoleEnvironmentChangingEventArgs e)
        {
            // If a configuration setting is changing
            if (e.Changes.Any(change => change is RoleEnvironmentConfigurationSettingChange))
            {
                // Set e.Cancel to true to restart this role instance
                e.Cancel = true;
            }
        }

Now, my Azure app is back running and chugging along. Hopefully, this helps you out some.

ASP.NET Podcast Show #144 - Windows Azure Part II - Worker Roles

wallym — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 16:30:00 GMT

This show is on Web & Worker Roles in Azure, Blob Storage, and the Visual Studio 2010 Azure tools.

Original url on the ASP.NET Podcast Site.

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ASP.NET Podcast Show #143 - Windows Azure Part I - Web Roles

wallym — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 13:00:00 GMT

Check the original url. This show is on Web Roles in Azure, Blob Storage, and the Visual Studio 2010 Azure tools.

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Speaking at DevConnections Las Vegas Fall 2010

wallym — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:30:00 GMT

I'm not sure if I mentioned this before, but I wanted to say that I am honored to be speaking at DevConnections Las Vegas, Fall 2010. I will be speaking on:

I'm very excited about this.

Book Review - Chris Hay and Brian Prince bring us "Azure In Action"

wallym — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:00:00 GMT

In October, 2008, I first read about Microsoft's Azure Platform. I started working with the product soon after wards. I've built a couple of apps, one that has been up and running for about 18 months. I think of Azure as some great stuff. As you can well imagine, because I started really early on, I learned a lot of lessons the hard way. Thankfully, you don't have to. Chris Hay and Brian Prince have produced a book on building applications with Windows Azure. I've been really impressed as I have read it. It has several things that I really like and as a fellow author, I am thankful for. These are:

The book covers more than the 1.0 immediate release. As a writer, the market wants material immediately. Unfortunately, fast, fast, fast tends to lead to mistakes. Given that Azure 1.0 tools were released at the end of 2009 and their book is coming out in Fall, 2010, they've had the opportunity to get things right.
The book is based on the tools in Visual Studio 2010. Awesome, show me the most up to date stuff. It's what I'm likely to see going forward.
Messaging, messaging, messaging. Trying to explain the concept of messages is hard. Until you have used it, its really hard to explain the significance of it. Chris and Brian have devoted a good section of the book to messages and messaging.
It would have been really easy for Chris and Brain to just talk about Sql Azure. It's what Microsoft is going to push because that's what they will push. Chris and Brian wrote a good amount of material on Sql Azure. They also spent a significant amount of material/pages/time on Table Storage, which is Microsoft's cloud based NoSql product. I personally like Table Storage and find it fairly interesting to work with. I learned a couple of things about Table Storage from reading thier pages on the subject.

Overall, this book will help you as you develop an application that target's Windows Azure. You'll be glad when you buy a copy through Amazon or Manning's site.

DESCRIPTION

Cloud-based applications pose an intriguing value proposition for businesses. With an easily scalable, pay-as-you-go model and very small startup costs, the cloud can be a great alternative to systems hosted in-house. Developers are scrambling to understand the impact a cloud-based approach will have on current and future projects.

Azure is Microsoft's full-fledged entry into the "Cloud Services Platform" arena. Unlike other cloud offerings that address only one piece of the puzzle, Azure includes an operating system, a set of developer services, and a data model that can be used individually or together. It's designed to interact seamlessly with other .NET-based components, and leverages your knowledge of Visual Studio, the .NET platform, and SQL Server. It's also fully compatible with multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and XML.

Azure in Action is a fast-paced tutorial intended for architects and developers looking to develop on Windows Azure and the Windows Azure Platform. It's designed both for readers new to cloud concepts and for those familiar with cloud development but new to Azure. After a quick walk through the basics, it guides you all the way from your first app through more advanced concepts of the Windows Azure Platform.

The book starts by looking at the logical and physical architecture of an Azure app, and then moves to the core storage services—binary store, tables and queues. Then, it explores designing and scaling frontend and backend services that run in the cloud. Next, it covers more advanced scenarios in Windows Azure. After covering the core of Azure, it introduces the rest of the Windows Azure Platform with a particular focus on SQL Azure Database.

Table of Contents

Part 1 Welcome to the cloud
1. Getting to know Windows Azure
2. Your first steps with a Web role

Part 2 Understanding the Azure service model
3. How Windows Azure works
4. It's time to run with the service
5. Configuring your service

Part 3: Running your site with web roles
6. Scaling web roles
7. Running native, full trust, and other code

Part 4 Working with blob storage
8. The basics of blobs
9. Uploading and downloading blobs
10. When the blob stands alone Part 5 Working with structured data
11. The Table Service, a whole different entity
12. Working with the Table REST API
13. SQL Azure and relational data
14. Working with different types of data

Part 6 Doing work with messages
15. Processing with worker roles
16. Messaging with the queue
17. Connecting with AppFabric
18. Running a healthy service in the cloud

Orlando Code Camp

wallym — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:33:00 GMT

I'm heading off to the Orlando Code Camp this weekend. I'm leaving on a jet plane on Friday. I'm really excited about being a speaker. I'm hoping to meet up with a number of friends I haven't seen in a while.

I'll be speaking on:

Introduction to Windows Azure.
Introduction to iPhone Programming with .NET/MonoTouch.

I'm really excited about this.

.NET Talks in 2010

wallym — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 00:16:00 GMT

I've worked up the following talks for 2010.

If you are interested, get ahold of me. Contacting me through LinkedIn and Twitter are the best.

iPhone Development for .NET/C# Developers.	The iPhone is the smartphone leader in mindshare and the amount of money spent on applications. This lead in money spent on applications is expected to grow over the next several years. Objective-C is the native language for iPhone development. .NET developers, who work in the largest general area of development frameworks, have looked at iPhone developers with a great deal of envy. But with the release of MonoTouch, .NET/C# developers can apply their knowledge to iPhone development. This talk with show .NET developers how they can write applictions that run natively on the iPhone. In this talk, the attendee will be able to immediately being writing and exploring code on the .NET
Intro to Windows Azure.	Windows Azure is Microsoft's entry into the cloud computing marketplace. We'll look at getting an application up and running with azure, data storage in azure, exposing web services over azure, and finally an overview of a running application in Azure. Attendees will be able to start writing applications for Windows Azure immediately after attending the session.
Introduction to ASP.NET 4 AJAX Client Templates	With the initial release of ASP.NET AJAX, Microsoft released an AJAX solution that allows developers to call from the web browser back to the server and retrieve data. With ASP.NET 4 Microsoft will provide an improved set of features including an easy and simple way to beind data, use client templates to easy bind data to on the client, provide client side events that can be processed, and an improved set of client side controls. Attendees will be able to immediately able to use the the features of ASP.NET 4 AJAX in their applications after attending this session.
Introduction to the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel	This session is a deep dive into the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel. The UpdatePanel provides for a mechanism to add client side Ajax capabilities through a server side control. We'll look at: Quick Intro to the UpdatePanel. How to debug with it. The UpdatePanel provides client side Ajax functionality. We'll look at how to debug with it and see that the UpdatePanel allows for the server side debugging functionality that mostdevelopers are used to. Its client side programmability features. The UpdatePanel provides a client side interface into its features. We'll look at the events provided and how they allow developers to add to their applications to improve the user experience. Error Handling. By default, errors are generated as JavaScript alerts, we'll look at the options for handling errors so that user's aren't forced into the annoying JavaScript alert popup. The data format that the UpdatePanel uses. When does AJAX not use XML or JSON for data transfer? When it the UpdatePanel is used. We'll look at the Update Panel's data transfer format. History with the UpdatePanel. One of the most frustrating things from a user's standpoint is that hitting back on Ajax application takes them out of the application. We'll look at what a developer must do so that a user hitting back does not exit from the application, but merely goes back to the previous state of the application.
Introduction to ASP.NET AJAX	With the introduction of ASP.NET AJAX, Microsoft has release support for AJAX applications using their stack of products. We'll look at: • What is AJAX. • The Script Manager and options on adding web services and client side scripts. • Javascript Intellisense increase developer productivity by providing a set of hints regarding the methods that may be called as well as how to add this functionality to scripts that the developer authorizes themself. • How to call a Web Service and process the result. • How to debug. • The UpdatePanel. • Integration with ASP.NET Services (Membership, Roles, and Profiles).
Opening a Windows Azure application with Web Services and then consuming these services in Silverlight - This is a two person talk with Wally McClure and David Silverlight.	We'll look at opening up a Windows Azure application through a set of web services for third parties to develop clients that interface with your application. Items discussed include: Windows Azure in general. Why you want to open your application. The mechanics of opening an applications. Some of the choices that I ran into with regards to the web services. Then we will switch and open up a silverlight application that interfaces with this application. In it, we'll look at the challenges of using web services for a third party within a silverlight application.

INETA - Tri Cities, TN

wallym — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:00:00 GMT

I'm going to speak at the User Group in Tri Cities on October 20. The talk will be on Programming in Windows Azure.

Get the real error for "Role instances did not start within the time allowed."

wallym — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:53:00 GMT

Do you get the error "Role instances did not start within the time allowed." when you are working in Visual Studio and attempting to debug a Windows Azure application? I just rebuilt my laptop and bang, I was getting the error. Its not a very helpful error at all. How do you find out the real error? I've been googling for this off and on all afternoon. Bang, here's the solution: "Start things in Visual Studio spinning up, and in the 30 seconds before everything came crashing down, try to hit http://127.0.0.1:81 (the default location for Azure web roles)." By pointing my browser at the url, I got the real error, which happened to be a couple of missing assemblies, and I was off and running again.

ASP.NET Podcast Show #139 - David Penton and Pat Helland on Cloud Computing - audio

wallym — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

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Original Url: http://aspnetpodcast.com/CS11/blogs/asp.net_podcast/archive/2009/04/01/asp-net-podcast-show-139-david-penton-and-pat-helland-audio.aspx

Show Notes:

Pat Helland: http://blogs.msdn.com/pathelland/
Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/
Microsoft SQL Server (architecture team): http://www.microsoft.com/SQL/default.mspx
Tandem Computers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers
NonStop: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NonStop_SQL
Microsoft Azure: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/
HAL Computers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Computer_Systems
Google AppEngine: http://code.google.com/appengine/
Amazon EC2: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
Electricity Rate Comparison by State: http://www.neo.ne.gov/statshtml/115.htm
Above the Clouds: http://berkeleyclouds.blogspot.com/2009/02/above-clouds-released.html
Azure Cloud Computing Forums for getting an application up and going: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazure/threads

More things that I have learned with Azure

wallym — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 09:30:00 GMT

I've been working on this application to run on Windows Azure. I wanted to share a few things that I have learned. I'm not sure if I have missed these being covered else where, but I want to bring them up here for my own knowledge. I find that I remember things much better if I blog them than if I put them on twitter.

Resource not found for the segment 'ObjectTableName." Steve Smith has a good blog post on this at http://stevesmithblog.com/blog/azure-table-storage-gotcha/. I got this message, followed Steve's instructions and bang, still go the message. WTF is that about! Anyway, I found that I had to reset the table storage through the azure development storage applet and then recreate the tables from the objects in Visual Studio. Once I did that, things seemed to work better. Yippee!
Another note, that you can get this error when you operate on a LINQ query that returns no objects.
I was running queries that were not returning any data. WTF is that about! Then it hit me, LINQ doesn't return data until you actually ask for that data. I need to force LINQ to send me some data in some situations. How can I force this to occur? I saw that some of my queries were returning data and some were not. I started playing around and found that if I called .ToList<T>() after my query that the data always came back to me. I figure that was a step in the right direction.
Azure Development Tools use Sql Server Express on the local development machine to store data during development. I decided to look and see what is happening. Guess what, you can connect up and see your data just like you thought you could in any application. Also, you can use Sql Server tools to see WTF is going on. I used that to figure out the issue above.
DateTime.Now vs. DateTime.UtcNow. Have you used DateTime.Now in an Azure query? It works just fine when you are running in the local development fabric. Deployed to the azure hosted fabric and I got an error. You can't quite connect VS.NET to the hosted fabric to see what is going on. After lots of testing, I changed the query I was doing to use DateTime.UtcNow and low and behold my app started posting messages to twitter from the hosted fabric.

eTag error in Windows Azure

wallym — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Have you gotten this type of error in Windows Azure:

Since entity type 'ObjectName' has one or more etag properties, If-Match HTTP header must be specified for DELETE operations on this type.

If so, the fix is really simple. The problem is that you have created a new object and are trying to stuff it back into your entities.

My code to resolve this looks like this:

        public void TwitterEntryDelete(string PartKey, string RowKey)
        {
            TwitterEntry te = new TwitterEntry()
            {
                PartitionKey = PartKey,
                RowKey = RowKey
            };
            AttachTo("TwitterEntries", te, "*"); // <-- The final parameter is the key to solving the problem. You need to tell EF to disregard where this object came from and to put the object into the collection.
            DeleteObject(te);
            SaveChanges();
        }

By disregarding where the object came from, we can go ahead and tell the system to put the object in our collection(attach) and then operate on the object.

More reminders / gotchas from the trenches with Azure

wallym — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:00:00 GMT

I've been working on setting up my VPC for Azure's March CTP. This is a fresh install. I had everything installed. Here are a couple of gotchas that you have to remember:

SqlExpress needs to be running. I had the .\SqlExpress service turned off in my archived vpc. With the service off, the dev tools can't see the database service so they fail.
A database can be setup by right clicking on your cloud service and selecting "Create Test Storage Tables."
With a new installation, windows communication foundation (WCF) is most likely not setup. You may need to setup calls to WCF. To setup WCF, you may need to login as an Administrator and run "ServiceModelReg -i"

More Wally - Wallace B. McClure : azure

I'm Hooked on the Cloud

Bytes by MSDN - Let's talk Cloud

My challenges in upgrading my Windows Azure App from SDK 1.2 to 1.3

“SetConfigurationSettingPublisher needs to be called before FromConfigurationSetting can be used”

ASP.NET Podcast Show #144 - Windows Azure Part II - Worker Roles

ASP.NET Podcast Show #143 - Windows Azure Part I - Web Roles

Speaking at DevConnections Las Vegas Fall 2010

Book Review - Chris Hay and Brian Prince bring us "Azure In Action"

Orlando Code Camp

.NET Talks in 2010

INETA - Tri Cities, TN

Get the real error for "Role instances did not start within the time allowed."

ASP.NET Podcast Show #139 - David Penton and Pat Helland on Cloud Computing - audio

More things that I have learned with Azure

eTag error in Windows Azure

More reminders / gotchas from the trenches with Azure