Dark clouds rising

It’s not always sunshine and troublefree days when you move your business to the Cloud. Mary-Jo Foley reports on a multiday outage in Microsofts BPOS offering.

 Both Amazon and Google have had outages on their cloud delivery earlier this year and last year. You just have to be prepared for outages and calculate the business consequences when they happen.

This is true also for hosted applications and them you run yourself of course.

Hoppas få testa en HP Pavilion dm1-3110eo Notebook PC

Smartson Testpilot söker 10 stycken testpiloter som under en månad ska få testa en HP Pavilion dm1-3110eo Notebook PC.

Jag har inte varit testpilot på Smartson tidigare, upplägget verkar trevligt.

Prova maskinen i en månad, skriv vad du tycker funkar bra och mindre bra och få sedan chansen att köpa ut den

Skulle verkligen vilja få chansen. Det vore kul att ha en liten notebook att kunna ta med sig på resa, till och från jobbet och även flippa upp lite snabbt hemma för att kolla recept på Tasteline.

Man blir ännu mera sugen när man kikade på deras reklamvideo

WebMatrix, the resurrection of Visual Interdev?

Probably not quite the resurrection of Visual Interdev, but the description of the goals for WebMatrix and the features offered are strikingly similar to the promises of Visual Interdev  back in the days.

I read the following about WebMatrix at All About Microsoft

WebMatrix is a bundle of a lightweight version of Microsoft’s IIS Web Server, known as IIS Express; an updated version of SQL Server Compact Edition; and a new “view-engine option” for ASP.Net, known as “Razor,” which enables developers to embed Visual Basic or C# within HTML.

The goal of WebMatrix, according to its developers, is “to make it really easy to get started with web development.” The new tool “minimizes the number of concepts someone needs to learn in order to get simple things done, and includes and integrates all of the pieces necessary to quickly build Web sites,” Microsoft officials have said.

That sounds a lot like the promises of RAD that Visual Interdev gave in the previous millennium. From the description above Razor sounds an awful lot like ASP-pages.

Microsoft® Visual InterDev™ is the Web development component of Microsoft® Visual Studio® 6.0. Using Visual InterDev 6.0, you can create anything from a simple HTML-based Web page to complete data-driven Web sites and applications as well as integrated solutions that incorporate components written in any Visual Studio language.

Quite fun how power vs. simplicity swings back and forth, HTML=>ASP=>Web Classes=>COM/MTS=>.NET Web Forms=>.NET MVC=>Razor

Check if log files are comming in to a RUEI Reporter

We sometimes get warnings that the RUEI Reporter doesn’t receive any log files from the Collector.

We were unsure if this was due to the fact that the Reporter was under high CPU load or that files really didn’t arrive on the Reporter.

We found out that you can view the files that arrive on the reporter,
   /var/opt/ruei/processor/data/wg_2/http/
this directory contains one subdirectory for each day that you save session data.

So if you enter the directory for current date and issue ‘ls -ltr’ you will be shown the latest files that arrived on the reporter.

StorageServerException on Azure

I was experimenting with the Azure GuestBook sample application provided with the Azure platform training kit.

I quickly ran into trouble when the application tried to create the blob container. An exception was thrown: “The remote server returned an error: (300) Amiguous Redirect.”

This was a bit confusing since i had used the development blob storage earlier.  My first reaction was to check in on the sample code and it’s configuration since this was my first test drive with the June SDK. All things looked perfectly ok though.

If the code was working it had to be something with my local environment, what had changed since last time I ran local Azure development?

After some investigation I found that another application, µTorrent, had snatched the port 10000 which blob storage was configured to use. Once I shut down µTorrent and restarted blob storage everything worked perfectly.

Azure and interoperability

Microsoft announced at PDC09 that they will support more platforms than just .NET on Windows Azure. Azure now has an interoperability page where they show some of the options.

SDKs’ for

• PHP
• Java
• Ruby

Tools for

• Eclipse
• Java
• Ruby
• PHP

This really broadens the potential customer base. Pair the Eclipse Tools for Windows Azure with the newly acquired TeamPrise offering and Java developers can start developing for Windows Azure today. Welcome into this cloud Javas!

More fun stuff from PDC09

Don Box and Chris Anderson showed an example where they used CGI, C and Assembler to write a Windows Azure application. Assembler on Azure?!

Bob Muglia showed Project Sydney – a way to connect applications running in the cloud to servers running in your local datacenters. Sydney will come out as beta early next year.

Virtual Machine Role for Azure: Enables admin mode and remote desktop access to virtual servers running on Azure.

Intellitrace in Visual Studio 2010 looked very nice.

Note to self: download Tailspin sample

 

Technorati Tags: pdc09

News from PDC09

Unfortunately I’m not at this years PDC. Would really have liked to go there..

Right now I’m looking for the keynote video, but it’s not available yet. Found some interesting information about what was covered on the keynote at Microsoft PressPass: Microsoft Cloud Services Vision Becomes Reality With Launch of Windows Azure Platform.

Especially three new things peeked my interest.

• AppFabric
  “..Microsoft is delivering Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1, a set of integrated, high-level application services that enable developers to more easily deploy and manage applications spanning both server and cloud.”
  Could this be a way to make “private Azure” available eventually? Or at least use the same programming paradigm for both Azure and local datacenters?
• Windows Server virtual machine support on Windows Azure. Is this something like Amazons EC2?
• RTM of Windows Identity Foundation – aka “Geneva”. I think this piece will be very important in the future.

It will be interesting to watch the Keynotes, probably available tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: pdc09

My idea just sunk…

I had an idea for the Windows Azure Developer Challenge (Swedish). One of the major parts of the idea was to read files from Live Mesh. I just forgot one very important thing..  As of September 8th, the Live Framework CTP will be unavailable. My idea just sunk. If I can’t read files from Live Mesh from my Azure Worker Process the whole idea falls apart.

Don’t think I’ll be able to come up with a new idea for the contest, the contest closes on Friday.

On the bright side: It’s been fun poking around with Azure and .NET and I’ve learned a lot. I’ve spent to much time in Word, PPT and Visio. The only coding I could get my hands on lately has been some Java JAAS stuff.

 

Technorati Tags: azure

Memory Lane: Too much RAM!

Once upon a time …… Or at least 20+ years ago my friend Johan and I struggled with the delightful dilemma of having to much RAM in our shared computer. Johan, which at the time worked for IBM could by a blazingly fast IBM PS/2 50z at about 50% off the market price. If I remember correctly it costed 25.000 SEK with the discount. A lot of money now, even more then. So Johan asked if I would pay half and we could share the computer. We used time slicing, one would have it for one week, then bring it to the other. At that time we lived in the same building and my mother managed to get hold of a “computer desktop” with wheels which we placed the PC (sorry PS/2) on. We would go down the elevator, run through the long corridor and up the other elevator, how’s that for timesharing ?

Johan was also able to buy extra RAM (which was very expensive then) cheap from work. If I remember correctly we had 4M RAM (yep, Megabytes, not Gigabytes) which was a lot then. DOS could only use 640K directly, the rest was fixed with extended memory stuff which I have mostly blissfully forgotten today.

We never succeeded in using all that RAM so we had to find another use for it.

Enter Virtual Disk!

Since we had an excess of RAM we could use a good program called Virtual Disk (or something similar) to create a volatile disk from some of the RAM. We created a virtual disk of 2M from our total of 4M. We could then copy programs, mostly games, onto this superfast volatile disk and run them much faster.