This post is part of a series of posts that aims to capture a number of emerging design patterns for the Windows Azure Platform. This series will begin with emerging design patterns for Windows Azure Table storage. The Chronological Query Pattern aims to support queries that must return data in chronological or reverse chronological order. Example Looking at a standard example of blog data, stored as: PartitionKey (User) RowKey Titl ... [Read more]

This post is part of a series of posts that aims to capture a number of emerging design patterns for the Windows Azure Platform. This series will begin by tackling emerging design patterns for Windows Azure Table storage. The Starts With Query Pattern enables performance optimised begins with partial match operations. Example Provide a fast search for articles that begins with the term “Metabolis” from a list of article titles, such as those found on Wikipedia. A subset is shown below: Me ... [Read more]

This post is part of a series of posts that aims to capture a number of emerging design patterns for the Windows Azure Platform. This series will begin by tackling emerging design patterns for Windows Azure Table storage. The Transactional Master-Item Record Pattern ensures that modifications to a master record and its item records are performed in a transactional way. Example Changes to an expense record with expense line items is an set of data that needs to be managed in a transaction w ... [Read more]

This post is part of a series of posts that aims to capture a number of emerging design patterns for the Windows Azure Platform. This series will begin with emerging design patterns for Windows Azure Table storage. The Table Name Key Pattern enables the key for an entity to be extended beyond the partition key and row key, to provide faster querying or deletion/archiving. Example Data with short lifetime such as log or diagnostic data or temporary working sets, are generally only needed fo ... [Read more]

The Hash Partitioning Pattern aims to improve the performance of parallel and batch queries. Example As part of the pre-processing done for Wikipedia Explorer, the HTML/XML representation of a Wikipedia page is converted in to a set of POCO objects and the incoming and outbound links are analysed. The core data is stored in a Windows Azure Table and is used when pre-processing a page, which is a massively CPU intensive operation. As optimisations this work is done in parallel and is also fo ... [Read more]

With the release of Azure, ScrumWall needed to be updated from the sample data access code to the new API. Cloud Storage Account The first change that we made was the addition of CloudStorageAccount to handle access to storage. Instantiating a storage account requires that a configuration setting publisher has been set. We do this with the SetConfigurationSettingPublisher method. It takes a single parameter, which is a wrapper delegate for the configuration reading and handling of the confi ... [Read more]

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]