I’ve been speaking about Azure at a number of events recently. One of the biggest challenges that I have had each time is due to local firewall restrictions. Firewalls will block port 1433/1434 outbound and this a major hassle to get changed, especially for a 20 minute demo. These ports are generally restricted due to the SQL slammer and SQL snake viruses (http://www.grc.com/port_1434.htm) from a few years ago. SQL Azure uses port 1433 for communication, for instance when connecting from man ... [Read more]

Logging diagnostic information plays a key part for any application. The .Net framework provides a number of Diagnostic features, which can be used to provide logging functionality in your application. However, in Windows Azure, the diagnostic API available in early CTPs was very limited. In the November release of Windows Azure, a new feature for  Windows Azure Diagnostics was launched. I will not delve into details of how to use the Azure diagnostic API. You can read about this here and al ... [Read more]

Read more about work on an Azure utility, which had to deal with the XML responses provided by the Service Management REST API: http://www.dotnetsolutions.co.uk/blogs/markrendle/archive/2010/02/17/working-with-namespaces-in-linq-to-xml/ on Mark Rendle’s new blog here: http://www.dotnetsolutions.co.uk/blogs/markrendle. ... [Read more]

This post should really be title: “how we (could have) migrated ScrumWall to Azure in less than 20 minutes”. But I’ll come on to that later. I’ve been speaking about Azure at a number of events recently. As part of the talks, I have given a quick overview of the developer portal for Azure and the Visual Studio tools. I’ve wrapped this up in a demo using our ScrumWall product (http://scrumwall.cloudapp.net). Winding back time conveniently to about a year ago, I explain how we could have migr ... [Read more]

Companies use Agile methods like Scrum and eXtreme Programming (XP) to deliver business value through software. Agile methods adopt an incremental approach where large complex projects are broken down into simpler mini projects that are delivered in iterations. These iterations can be one to four weeks in duration. The business person responsible for driving the project (known as the Product Owner or Customer) can align features with his/her business' strategy by prioritising them for deliver ... [Read more]

Two of Dot Net Solutions’ very own have recently been busy writing a book on Azure, which has just been published. Dan Scarfe and Marcus Tillett teamed up with Stephen Parker to write one of a new series of “Thinking of” books. The table of contents gives a brief flavour of the book, which is written in a very condensed style. Giving as much information, as quickly as possible. 1 Major players in IT are spending billions on the Cloud – why? 2 Could I have a platform in the sky? Sure th ... [Read more]

Imagine if you will that I represent a major international criminal organization. Like any business I have a vast amount of information to store: intelligence information on major law enforcement organizations, cash flow through money laundering, kickbacks, global sales reports etc.. Needless to say I want this information to remain private. I need this information accessible globally to my various business subsidiaries, and I definitely don’t want this information stored on my laptop as I ... [Read more]

In part 1 of this series we dealt with how to manage data in Windows Azure storage for ScrumWall. Then in part 2 we dealt with deployment of ScrumWall to Azure and in particular accessing configuration. Having completed moving ScrumWall to the Windows Azure Platform, we have encountered an issue that required additional work. ScrumWall uses Windows Live to provide authentication for users. A simple way to build Windows Live into Azure is to use the Windows Live Web Role then using the Windo ... [Read more]

Since we’ve deployed our ScrumWall application from a pure hosted solution to a cloud based application, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss how we went around moving and deploying the code to Azure.  As Marcus has discussed the architecture of ScrumWall (Part 1) we’ll dive straight into how we got ScrumWall up and running within a few hours. ScrumWall does have a web application that hosts the Silverlight control which does the necessary authorisation, authentication and hosts the ... [Read more]

Here at Dot Net Solutions, we have been developing a Silverlight version of a Scrum wall for a while now. We are advocates of both Scrum and XP for project delivery. You can read more about the project to date here: http://www.dotnetsolutions.ltd.uk/approach/scrumwall/. We are also keenly using the Azure Services Platform, most notably with our Wikipedia explorer, which was also ported to Azure. Read more about this here: http://www.dotnetsolutions.ltd.uk/evidence/wikiexplorer/. There are so ... [Read more]