maor.Blogging(); » Software Development

Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure

Maor David-Pur — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:46:54 +0000

Read the announcement here.

For years the Enterprise Library application blocks have helped developers address the typical cross-cutting concerns of enterprise development (such as diagnostic logging, data validation, and exception handing). With over 3.5 million downloads, they take a prominent place in the toolbox of a modern .NET developer. The good news is that most of the Enterprise Library 5.0 application blocks simply work on Windows Azure. However, developing for the Windows Azure platform presents new challenges, including how to make applications more elastic (via autoscaling), and more stable and resilient to transient failures. The Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure focuses on addressing these challenges. It provides reusable components and developer’s guidance designed to encapsulate recommended practices which facilitate consistency, ease of use, integration, extensibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness. Developers and IT professionals familiar with other Enterprise Library application blocks as well as those who are new to Enterprise Library will be able to benefit from the comprehensive set of content we are shipping today. You can pick and choose what matters to you and to your app, and adopt only those particular blocks/features.

Highlights

This release includes a comprehensive set of technical content, including:

Two new application blocks:
- Autoscaling Application Block ("Wasabi") to help you to automatically scale both web and worker roles in Windows Azure by dynamically provisioning/decommissioning roles or throttling. These scaling actions are based on timetables or on metrics collected from the application and/or Windows Azure Diagnostics.
- Transient Fault Handling Application Block ("Topaz") to help you make your Windows Azure application more resilient to transient errors when you are using these cloud services: SQL Azure, Windows Azure Storage, Windows Azure Caching, and Windows Azure Service Bus.
One new configuration source:
- Blob configuration source to load configuration information from a blob in your Azure Storage account so that you can modify it without having to redeploy your application to Windows Azure.
Windows PowerShell cmdlets to browse and manipulate the Autoscaling Application Block settings directly from Windows PowerShell.
Protected configuration provider to allow you to encrypt sections of your configuration files in Windows Azure.
Updated database creation scripts so that you can migrate your code using the database trace listeners of the Logging Application Block and the Caching Application Block.
A substantial collection of experience guidance help you ramp up quickly, including:
- Reference documentation
- Developer’s guide
- Tailspin Surveys sample application (reference implementation, installation guide)
- On-premises sample application for hosting the Autoscaling Application Block and exploratory testing (included with source under (install location)/WindowsAzure/Autoscaling/Hosts/ConsoleAutoscaler)
- Planning worksheet for Wasabi to help you understand the interactions between different timing values governing the overall autoscaling regime.

For detailed change log from Beta to Final and installation instructions, see Release Notes.

How to Get it?

The recommended way to obtain the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure is as NuGet packages. Alternatively, you can download self-extracting zip files with binaries, sources (including tests) and the reference implementation from MSDN. The configuration tool is available as a Visual Studio extension package (VSIX) from the Visual Studio Gallery.

Similar Posts:

Silverlight 5 Released

Maor David-Pur — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:35:14 +0000

Silverlight 5 has been released.

Silverlight 5 adds a ton of new features over what we had with Silverlight 4. Silverlight is part of a rich offering of technologies from Microsoft helping developers deliver applications for the web, desktop and mobile devices. Download Silverlight 5, a free plug-in less than 7 MB in size that can be installed in less than 10 seconds.

New features in Silverlight 5 include Hardware Decode of H.264 media, which provides a significant performance improvement with decoding of unprotected content using the GPU; Postscript Vector Printing to improve output quality and file size; and an improved graphics stack with 3D support that uses the XNA API on the Windows platform to gain low-level access to the GPU for drawing vertex shaders and low-level 3D primitives.

In addition, Silverlight 5 extends the ‘Trusted Application’ model to the browser for the first time. These features, when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, mean users won’t need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks such as multiple window support, full trust support in browser including COM and file system access, in browser HTML hosting within Silverlight, and P/Invoke support for existing native code to be run directly from Silverlight.

For more information, visit the Microsoft Silverlight site. For additional information on support policy, visit Microsoft Silverlight Support Lifecycle Policy.

Similar Posts:

Kinect for Windows Is Live

Maor David-Pur — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 14:22:20 +0000

The new website is now live: http://www.kinectforwindows.org

Similar Posts:

Silverlight 5 RC Available for Download

Maor David-Pur — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:06:58 +0000

The release candidate for Silverlight 5 is now available to developers on the Silverlight developer site. You can get the release itself and additional details on Silverlight Downloads.

New Features Announced for Silverlight 5

Silverlight delivers the richest set of capabilities available to developers today through a Web‐browser plug‐in. Announced last December and shipping later this year, Silverlight 5 makes further advances in media, application development and user experience, adding over 40 new features.

The Silverlight 5 RC provides developers their first opportunity to start exploring these new capabilities. More information on the Silverlight 5 announcements is available at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/future .

Similar Posts:

Windows Phone Mango Silverlight developer toolkit released

Maor David-Pur — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 22:36:08 +0000

The Silverlight toolkit for Windows Phone’s Mango update has been released. You can download the toolkit here.Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit offers developers additional controls for Windows Phone application development, designed to match the rich user experience of the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK.

New Components for Aug 2011

Smooth new LongListSelector designed for Windows Phone 7.1 OS
MultiselectList
LockablePivot
HubTile
ExpanderView
LocalizedResources
DateTimeConverters
DateTimePickers
HeaderedItemsControl
PhoneTextBox
Improved Transitions performance
Improved ContextMenu performance
ListPicker supports multiselect
Various bug fixes

Components in the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit

Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit Components

AutoCompleteBox
ContextMenu
DatePicker
DateTimeConverters
DatePicker
ExpanderView
GestureService/GestureListener
HeaderedItemsControl
HubTile
ListPicker
LocalizedResources
LockablePivot
LongListSelector
MultiselectList
Page Transitions
PerformanceProgressBar
PhoneTextBox
TiltEffect
TimePicker
ToggleSwitch
WrapPanel

Get the tools

You can download the new release straight from the CodePlex site at http://silverlight.codeplex.com/ – it requires the latest ‘Mango’ developer tools as well.

The release is also available on NuGet as the SilverlightToolkitWP package.

Similar Posts:

Challenges Current CTOs Are Experiencing

Maor David-Pur — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 19:50:39 +0000

During my meetings with CTOs in ISVs (and I have a lot ) I try to help them to solve their challenges.

First, what is CTO?

A Chief Technology Officer (or Chief Technical Officer; CTO) is an executive-level position in a company or other entity whose occupant is focused on scientific and technological issues within an organization. It typically involves overseeing Research and Development (R&D) activities, and formulating long-term visions and strategies at the officer level. Essentially, a CTO is responsible for the transformation of capital – be it monetary, intellectual, or political – into technology in furtherance of the company’s objectives. They typically combine a strong technical or scientific background with business development skills.

source:Wikipedia- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_technology_officer

Now, when we know what is the definition of CTO, I’d like to summarize the current challenges CTOs are experiencing as I understand them:

Recruiting talents is one of the most challenging endeavor.If you have great talent you could probably be a mediocre manager and still excel! I do believe that people is the most important asset we have. However, there is plenty of talent in supply. What might be lacking are:

Ability to attract talent
Ability to recognize talent
Ability to train/coach/grow talent

Alignment of technology and business strategy: "What we can do does not sell, and what sells we cannot do." Need to navigate the markets.Seek to discover gaps between the realized and potential value of the applicable technologies to our customers. Technology product development is effectively the organization and packaging of available technology.
Execution. We are in the age when companies compete based on their execution capabilities (product development infrastructure) rather than products themselves. Building an efficient infrastructure requires systemic thinking and good system engineering practices. Not every CTO is a system engineer by birth.
Technology: technology is getting much simpler and more complex at the same time.But it is almost always the case that problems and opportunities get less expensive every month. So the challenge is to plan (predict) when changes to tools and infrastructure should occur.
Cloud! “how do I get distributed processing power in the cloud?".
Global market: where you are collecting data from many differing countries with differing infrastructure capabilities, where is the processing power?
Simplicity over Functionality: People/Customers always want a system that does it all for them rather than make the important parts efficient and effective. That is partially why SaaS is becoming more and more important everyday.

There are many challenges for a modern CTO. I summarized here my opinion, but of course, the challenges vary greatly by the industry and business size. Use the comments mechanism to add your insights.

Similar Posts:

Windows Azure Tools, Developer Training Kits Updated

Maor David-Pur — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:49:43 +0000

Updates have been released for Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Azure Platform Training Kit for developers.

You can download the tools here using the Web Platform Installer.
You can download the updated developer training kit here.

The release of the tools was made at Announcing the August 2011 Release of the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

New in this release of the tools:

Profile applications running in Windows Azure.
Create ASP.Net MVC3 Web Roles.
Manage multiple service configurations in one cloud project.
Improved validation of Windows Azure packages.

Updated Training Kit

The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit has been updated for the new tools. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content including hands-on labs, presentations, and demos that are designed to help you learn how to use the Windows Azure platform.

The August 2011 update of the training kit includes:

Labs and Demos
- All the labs and demos have been updated to leverage the new Window Azure Tools 1.4.
- Updated SSMS dependency of affected labs to SSMS SP1.
Windows Azure Deployment
- Applied fix in the setup experience for the Windows Azure Platform Management Cmdlets.
- Updated the Windows Azure Platform Management Cmdlets to the latest version.
Building ASP.NET Applications with Windows Azure
- Changed the way the membership password was encrypted to fix minor bug when deployed to azure.
Exploring Windows Azure Storage
- Updated the code to support deleting snapshots.
Windows Azure CDN
- Applied fix to a minor bug in the Overview section.

Key Updates To Azure Tools

With profiling support in the Windows Azure Tools you can easily detect performance bottlenecks in your application while it is running in Windows Azure.

If you want to maintain different settings for different deployment environments, the Windows Azure tools now support multiple service configurations in the same Windows Azure Project. This is especially useful for managing different Windows Azure Storage connection strings for local debugging and running in the cloud.

the new tools will help you avoid some of the common problems when you deploy your application to Windows Azure. If you are forgetting to include a local assembly in your package or you publish with a local Azure Storage connection string. The tools will let you know.

Similar Posts:

Windows 8 Engineering Team Launches ‘B8’ Blog

Maor David-Pur — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:32:56 +0000

Microsoft’s Windows Engineering Team recently created this blog post to keep you updated on Windows 8. All the official news, information, details will be shared to everyone via this blog. The goal of this blog is to start a dialog about design choices, real-world data and usage, and new opportunities that are part of Windows 8. There’ll be regular posts throughout the development of Windows 8, focusing on the engineering of the product.

Steven Sinofsky, President of Windows and Windows Live Division, has penned the first posting on a new Building Windows 8 blog.

Keep up with the new posts by following @BuildWindows8 on Twitter.

Similar Posts:

Hadoop Connectors Coming for SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse

Maor David-Pur — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:38:21 +0000

SQL Server team blog posted about Parallel Data Warehouse News and Hadoop Interoperability Plans. In a nutshell, Microsoft announced its intentions to bring Hadoop to SQL Server and Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW).

The connectors provide interoperability between SQL Server/PDW and Hadoop environments, enabling customers to transfer data between Hadoop and SQL Server/PDW. With these connectors, customers can more easily integrate Hadoop with their Microsoft Enterprise Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence solutions to gain deeper business insights from both structured and unstructured data.

You can read the announcement about these connectors from here.

Similar Posts:

C9::GoingNative

Maor David-Pur — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 07:07:22 +0000

C9::GoingNative is a monthly show on Channel 9 focused on native development with an emphasis on C++.

Each episode will have a segment including an interview with a native dev in his/her native habitat (office) where we’ll talk about what they do and how they use native code and associated toolchains, as well as get their insights and wisdom—geek out. There will be a small news component or segment, but the show will primarily focus on technical tips and conversations with active C/C++ coders, demonstrations of new core language features, libraries, compilers, toolchains, etc.

You can also follow thjeir Twitter account, @C9GoingNative, and share this good news in your relevant social circles. Please send your feedback and suggestions to their public email account.

Similar Posts: