A lap around the new Windows Azure Portal - Part 3

on Azure, Windows Azure

In Part 2 of the Windows Azure Portal Series I covered the The Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN tab of the new Windows Azure Portal. This post will cover the next tab in the series. Database As the name suggests, this tab allows you to create and manage Windows Azure cloud databases. The following screenshots show the different components of the tab. To start with the first few screenshots show how you would have managed databases in the old portal followed by screenshots from the new portal to illustrate the differences. After all a picture is worth 1000 words…

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A lap around the new Windows Azure Portal - Part 2

on Windows Azure

In Part 1 of this series I covered the Home tab of the new Windows Azure Portal. This post will continue on from where we started and will be covering the following tab Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN Deployment Health As you can see below the Deployment health menu provides a general view of your application deployments and their statuses. This tab allows you create an manage the application side of your Windows Azure application including the number of instances, deployment type such as Staging or Production ?etc. Using the menu bar at the top of the screen you…

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A lap around the new Windows Azure Portal - Part 1

on Windows Azure

You may have heard that at PDC 2010 along with the many announcements, the new Windows Azure Portal was announced. As you’ll see it say when you log on into the Windows Azure Portal (the old one) the new Windows Azure Portal has a ‘substantially enhanced user experience‘. It?s really hard not to agree I think! When you logon to the old portal you will see the following screen with the message above shown on top.  Once you click on the link to go to the new portal the following screen will show after the Silverlight application has…

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Beginners Guide: Hosting a Silverlight application on Windows Azure

on .NET, Silverlight, Visual Studio 2010, Windows Azure

I was wondering how easy it might be to build a Silverlight application and have it host in on Windows Azure and it turned out to be much simpler than I thought! The steps below will demonstrate everything from creating a Silverlight application all the way to having it live hosted on Windows Azure. It’s easy? Step 1: Create a new Azure Application in Visual Studio 2010 To begin we’ll start off by creating a new ‘Windows Azure Cloud Service’ in Visual Studio 2010 by selecting the ‘Cloud’ option under the Visual C# section as shown below, for…

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Bing gets social with Facebook

on Bing, Facebook

When Windows 7 started the marketing campaign with the statement ‘Windows 7 was my idea’ I really liked it because I was able to relate to it myself. A few years ago when Windows Vista came out I blogged about the Windows Vista Shutdown options and how I think they could improve to make things a bit easier. Before I knew it, when Windows 7 came out the Windows 7 Shutdown options looked like they included my suggestion, it may be the case that someone read it on my blog or it’s more likely the case that others had…

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IIS6 HTTP Compression/CSV Export issues

on .NET, HTP Compression, IIS

I’ve been investigating this problem for a couple of days and hope that this post would save others some grief. Here’s the situation: 2 web servers, same configuration (at least that’s what it seemed), and on one server I can successfully export data to a downloadable CSV file but on the other server the CSV export downloads as an ASPX page instead of the CSV file. Seems strange when all configurations on the server is supposedly the same. After several unsuccessful comparisons of configuration settings …etc I’ve gone down to the level of analyzing the HTTP…

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Getting started with Windows Azure: Development Storage install issues

on Visual Studio 2010, Windows Azure

I was playing around with some Windows Azure tutorials today and was following the Create Your First Windows Azure Local Application. The tutorial is pretty simple to follow but I ran into some little issues which were very annoying? After installing the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio v1.2 I followed the tutorial’s steps to try and get the Hello World app up and running. However, after starting the application without debugging as instructed in the tutorial I got the following error. "Windows Azure Tools: Failed to initialize the Development Storage service. Unable to start Development Storage. Failed…

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Visual Studio 2010 Certification Exams & Learning resources

on Certification, Visual Studio 2010

I’ve recently decided to get back into some study and maybe even do some more certification exams and though this is an opportunity to put up a post on the different exams/courses you could do that have coverage of the Visual Studio 2010 IDE. One of the ways you can get some coverage of Visual Studio 2010 in certification is through the .NET Developer certification exams ? mostly anything covering .NET 4.0 ? as can be seen in the two snap shots below which I took from the Visual Studio 2010 Certification Roadmap PDF file. And also some training…

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Visual Studio 2010 Recent Projects: Remove From List

on Visual Studio 2010

One of the things that used to really annoy me in previous releases of Visual Studio is that you cannot remove items from your Recent Projects list. This can sometimes lead to you having some unwanted items in your recent projects list and the only way to remove them is to change the location of the solution and then try to open it and when Visual Studio doesn’t find it it will prompt you to remove it from the list. Annoying right? Well in Visual Studio 2010 this is no longer a problem! From the Start Page you can…

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Visual Studio 2010 Framework Multi-targeting

on Multi-targeting, Visual Studio 2010

So I while I was enjoying working with the multi-monitor support in Visual Studio 2010 (Great feature!) I decided to have a play with the .NET multi-targeting features of Visual Studio 2010. I created a Visual Studio 2010 solution in .NET framework 4.0 and then decided to switch the framework version of my projects from .NET 4.0 to .NET 3.5, when I attempted to do this on my test project I got the following error message. It turns out that in Visual Studio 2010 all Test Projects must target .NET 4.0 and based on some reading…

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