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Things I learnt at the Windows Azure Camp in Hyderabad

Here are some of the new things I learnt at the Windows Azure Camp that was held yesterday at the Microsoft campus in Hyderabad -

* Windows Azure Service Management API is a REST API for managing your services and deployments programmatically to do many of the things that you can do through the Azure portal. Usage of the API is free

* Can the Service Management API be used to replicate a new portal that's like the Silverlight-based Azure portal?
- Not exactly, some info like Billing cannot be fetched through API

* csmanage.exe is a tool to manage your deployments and services, using the Windows Azure Service Management API

* What you can do with Windows Azure Service Management API -
- Integrate with Tools/Dashboards
- Integrate with Build & Deployment - Nightly builds
- Monitoring systems
- Specialized scenarios - Auto scaling

* Azure cannot (currently) auto scale dynamically. Options to implement auto scaling -
- use publically available command-line tools or cmdlets
- third party commercial tools like AzureWatch
- do it yourself using APIs - related link

* Why do Azure APIs use REST?
- REST APIs make Azure access language independent

* The Windows Azure SDK 1.3 adds the ability to use Remote Desktop Services to access Windows Azure roles and supports Full IIS, allowing your web roles to access the full range of web server features available in an on-premise IIS installation.

* Domino’s Pizza is a public site that uses Azure

Azure, Cloud, HOWTO

HOW TO try Windows Azure for free (without any credit card)

Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform offers .NET developers a great opportunity to extend their skills to this new platform. You don't have to spend a bomb to get started. While there is a free trial offer that doesn't have any upfront costs, you may have to submit your credit card.

The free Windows Azure Platform 30 Day Pass doesn't need a credit card to register. I've seen promo codes that are needed to get a Pass in various MSDN blog posts & Codeplex. The promo codes don't last forever so you may have to grab them when you see it or keeping looking at those places for new promo codes if you want it gratis.

Here are some free Azure learning resources I've found (work in progress):

Pluralsight currently has 5 Beginner & Intermediate level online training courses of totally 15 hours duration. Having received an annual subscription as a Pluralsight offer for MVPs, I've watched some of them & found them to be very helpful (will post a review shortly). Their monthly subscription price of $14.50 or roughly Rs. 700 in India for their entire course collection looks like a great deal to me.

Azure, Cloud

Windows Azure CDN locations

I asked on the WebApps StackExchange forum a few months ago out of curiosity, if it is possible to know where a Content Delivery Network's servers are located?

The unanimous answer was that it is not possible to know unless the CDN vendor gives it out. Both the respondents to the question also mentioned that big CDNs don't reveal exact details.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised when I recently came across a Windows Azure Team blog post that lists all of Windows Azure CDN's (currently) 24 physical nodes.

Azure, Cloud, Microsoft

Search for keywords in videos with Microsoft Research Audio Video Indexing System (MAVIS)

If you were searching for videos that reference the Razor (view engine) from among Microsoft videos from events like PDC, MIX 2010, Channel 9, MAVIS can get you results with direct links to the precise moment that word was uttered in a video.

This feature has also been implemented on the U.S. Department of Energy's videos at ScienceCinema.

MAVIS uses the Windows Azure cloud which affords massive scale & on demand computing capability to crunch through the videos.

The Microsoft Research Audio Video Indexing System (MAVIS) is a set of software components that use speech recognition technology to enable searching of digitized spoken content, whether they are from meetings, conference calls, voice mails, presentations, online lectures, or even Internet video.

Did you know, speech-recognition technology is already integrated in a number of Microsoft products, such as Windows 7, TellMe.com, Exchange 2010, and Office OneNote?

Using integrated speech-recognition technology in the Windows 7 operating system, users can dictate into applications like Microsoft Word, or use speech to interact with their Windows system. The TellMe.com service allows mobile users to get directory services using speech while on the go. Exchange 2010 now provides a rough transcript of incoming voicemails and in Office OneNote, users can search their speech recordings using keywords.

Also see:
Sound Search Results

Cloud, jQuery, Sharepoint

jQuery, Cloud Computing, Sharepoint 2010 sessions at MUGH Meet

Microsoft User Group, Hyderabad (MUGH) was formed in 2003. It has members from many of the 100+ software companies in Hyderabad. Since being at the very first UG meeting, I've made many friends over the last 7 years at these meets.

For long, I've been a member of the audience but last Saturday on May 15th, I delivered a session on jQuery. I had a kind & patient audience who sat attentively for more than an hour while I went on with all the jQuery tips, tricks and trivia that I've picked up during the past year. I also showed some simple code samples & explained about Plugins.

Accomplished MVP & author, Arun Ganesh presented an engaging session on Cloud Computing with Azure. It included a demo on Visual Studio 2010 & Windows 7.

Phani of Brainscale showed what's new with SharePoint 2010 from a developer's perspective. He made an interesting observation that SharePoint 2010 works best with the 32-bit version of Office 2010, because quite a few features of Sharepoint don’t work with 64-bit version of Office 2010. This Technet article has more on browser support -

Some of the features in SharePoint Server 2010 use ActiveX controls. In secure environments, these controls must be able to work on the client computer before their features will function. Some ActiveX controls, such as those included in Microsoft Office 2010, do not work with 64-bit browser versions.

Also see:
MS MVP Authors from India

Cloud, Google

More online storage options - Upload ANY file to Google Docs

It has been long rumored that Google has a plan to provide an online storage service called GDrive. Last month's announcement that you can upload (almost) any file of upto 1GB, brings a long standing expectation to fruition in a way.

Although the free total storage limit of 1GB pales in comparision to Microsoft Sydrive's limit of a whooping 25GB, it's noteworthy that Google Docs allows very large files of upto 1GB size to be uploaded at one go. Skydrive limits the maximum size per file to 50MB.

The above mentioned announcement also casually uses the word cloud (note the lower-case "c") in the title of the post as if the technology was already ubiqutous. The Cloud is probably what makes this scheme feasible. Folks needing storage beyond the free quota of 1GB can purchase storage for $0.25 per GB per year.

I guess we can expect the Cloud vendor wars to get hotter this year.

Also see -
Say Goodbye to Privacy
Google Docs Spreadsheet Size Limits