Artificial ignorance

Today we are launching “new CloudApp()” a US-based developer challenge to promote applications running on the Azure Services Platform. This contest will have three categories of winners for applications running on the Azure Services Platform –

• a best .NET application,
• a top PHP application, and,
• a community winner.

What could a contestant win?

The winning submissions will:

• Be featured on www.azure.com as well as at major Microsoft events
• Be featured in a video interview on Channel 9 with the application author
• Winners will be announced at Structure 09
• Receive cash ($):
  • .NET Applications Category winner: $5,000 Visa gift card
  • PHP Applications Category winner: $5,000 Visa gift card
  • Community winner: $2,500 Visa gift card

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The Azure Services Platform team is delivering on its commitment to providing an interoperable, comprehensive and flexible cloud platform.

Windows Azure

At MIX09, the Windows Azure team is updating its CTP to include feature updates which will allow developers to take advantage of:

• FastCGI: allows developers to deploy and run web applications written with 3rd party programming languages such as PHP. This provides developers using non-Microsoft languages the ability to take advantage of scalability on Windows Azure. (Read more here: Using 3rd Party Programming Languages via FastCGI)
• .NET Full Trust: provides developers with a level of flexibility in Windows Azure that removes limitations on .NET Libraries which require full trust (including .NET Services) .NET Full Trust, via spawning process and p/invoke, also allows developers to utilize existing investments in native code or legacy components that they will now be able to invoke on Windows Azure. (Read more here: .NET Full Trust)
• Geolocation: provides developers with the ability to specify a location for their applications and data to build responsive services with lower network latency as well as the capability to meet location-based regulatory and legal requirements. This feature will be available a few weeks after MIX 2009. (Read more here: Geo Location Enables Developers To Choose Data Centers and Group Applications & Storage)

A new version of the developer SDK and Tools for Visual Studio will be available for download to enable developers to take advantage of the new features. The SDK update will include: Continue reading

A couple of months ago, I met Dan Merritts from RSWP, Inc. at a coffee shop in South Park, San Francisco. It was a short meeting, but as soon as Dan described the idea that RSWP had been working on, I got really excited. Eduify is a web application that lets students edit and store documents, capture and discover research, find writing tutorials and safeguard against plagiarism. I remember spending countless hours in school looking for quotes and finding the right way to cite them.

Anthony Ha, from VentureBeat, has a good way of describing a student’s typical paper-writing process: Continue reading

Windows Azure has been getting a lot of press since launch. A few weeks before launch, I tapped my friend Sriram Krishnan, Program Manager on the Windows Azure team and just overall great guy, to come down and participate at our annual Silicon Valley CodeCamp to do a talk on Windows Azure. Krishnan is not just a great Program Manager, but he is also one of my friends up in Redmond who just plain gets it – and if I know him, I’m sure he’ll be "valley-speaking" (aka startups, web 2.0 as it relates to Azure).

Krishnan did a great job of presenting Azure at PDC2008 (link to his presentation) and I’m sure he’ll rock the house at CodeCamp as well. If you didn’t have 117 other reasons (sessions) to attend Silicon Valley Code Camp, now you have one more. Continue reading

At Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, CA today, Ray Ozzie, our Chief Software Architect announced our new cloud operating system, Windows Azure. Windows Azure, built on Windows Server 2008, extends the Windows environment to the cloud for developers who want

• service hosting,
• scalable storage, and
• automated service management

of their software applications. Azure is a component of the Azure Services Platform, a set of cloud-based technologies such as storage, identity, and multi-device sync that extend software development for both enterprise server and PC/browser/phone applications with services on the Web.

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