There is a good chance you might have stumbled upon the new Windows Azure Release that we made on June 6th. Scott Guthrie’s Post quite summarizes the overall new features. One of my favorite features is the Windows Azure Websites and the ability to do publish files to Azure using your FTP Client. Windows Azure Websites offers low cost (free upto 10 websites) web hosting where you can deploy any website that can run on IIS 7.0, quickly. The earlier releases of Azure SDKs and the Azure platform support .NET 3.5 & above for running your applications. This was a constraint for many since there are/were a lot of ASP.NET 2.0 applications built over time and simply to put it on Azure, many of you were skeptical to migrate it to .NET 4. Windows...

It should be quite obvious: drawing requires constant visual feedback. Why is it then that we still draw with code in so many situations? Of course it’s because the low-level APIs always come first, and design tools are built after and on top of those. Existing design tools also don’t typically include complex UI elements such as buttons. When we launched our Touch Display module for Netduino Go! , we naturally built APIs that made it easy to draw on the screen from code, but very soon, we felt the limitations and tedium of drawing in code. In particular, any modification requires a modification of the code, followed by compilation and deployment. When trying to set-up buttons at pixel precision, the process is not optimal. On the other hand...

Create New Site & Enable Git Deployment As you know you use your Live ID sign into Azure portal .  Once you log into the Azure portal you can create a new Web Site by clicking on the “New” command bar at the bottom: Once your site is created then on the right side under Quick Glance there should see a way to “Set Git Publishing” which will setup your Git Repository and give you a Git URL to push to.  You will also be able to “Reset deployment credentials” from the Quick Glance section as highlighted below. Git/FTP Credentials in Azure Clicking on “Reset deployment credentials” should give you the below screen: We went back and forth on setting the text on this dialog to be as short and yet as meaningful as we could but I will try...

When you git push to Azure there is a lot of diagnostic log and trace information is created.  This information is extremely useful for troubleshooting.  So if I was ever to face git push Azure master fail then looking into these is the first place I typically start. What is also interesting is that since these log files belong to your site “only you (or your co-admin)” can access it. Below is quick way to get to these files from Azure portal : On your site dasboard on the right site you should notice “Quick Glance” section scrolling to the bottom of that you will see Deployment Deployment User and Diagnostics Logs. Click on the FTP link on the log and when you are asked for credentials enter fully qualified UserName i.e. SiteName...

I recently blogged about a big wave of improvements we recently released for Windows Azure.  I also delivered a keynote on June 7th that discussed and demoed the enhancements – you can watch a recorded version of it online . Over the next few weeks I’ll be doing several more speaking events about Windows Azure in North America and Europe.  Below are details on some of the upcoming the events and how you can sign-up to attend one in person: Scottsdale, Arizona on June 19th, 2012 Attend this FREE all-day event in Scottsdale, Arizona on Tuesday, June 19th to learn more about Windows Azure, ASP.NET, Web API and SignalR.  I’ll be doing a 2 hour presentation on Windows Azure, followed by Scott Hanselman on ASP.NET and Web API, and Brady...

In this blog we analyze the impact of bundling, minification , compression, and pipelining on HTTP performance and in particular the impact on traditional browser scenarios. First we look at the impact of bundling and minification on the content in terms of size. Then we look at the impact of bundling and minification on download and page layout times in a browser-style application. The purpose is to get a handle on what kind of performance gains can be achieved with a modern HTTP/1.1 implementation when combined with efficient organization of content. The results presented show that only when content and protocol work together is it possible to get significantly faster performance. Just looking at the protocol alone is not sufficient. The data...

Last week we rolled out some updates for our Visual Studio 2010 Web Publishing Experience. This post will give you an overview of the new features which we released. In the coming weeks there will be more posts getting into more details regarding individual features. You can get these updates in the Windows Azure SDK for Visual Studio 2010 . When you download that package there you will also get the latest tools for Azure development. The new high level features include the following. Updated Web Publish dialog Support to import publish profiles ( .publishSettings files ) Support to configure EF Code First migrations during publish Support to create web packages in the publish dialog Publish profiles now a part of the project and stored in version...

We have two sets of ASP.NET providers which currently exist; the ASP.NET SQL providers , and the ASP.NET Universal Providers . In VS 2010 the SQL providers were in only providers used for our project templates. In VS 2012 we have switched to using the Universal Providers. One of the drawbacks of the SQL providers is that it leverages DB objects of SQL server which are not available in SQL Azure. In our updated web publish experience we have an Update Database checkbox which can be used to incrementally publish the database to the destination database. In this case if the source connection string is used by the ASP.NET SQL providers and you are publishing to SQL Azure then you will see the following message on the dialog. Note: you may see the...

In Visual Studio 2010 we introduced a database publishing experience in the Package/Publish SQL (PP/SQL) properties page. This support relies on generating create scripts from the source database and then executing those scripts when you publish your web application. For more details regarding this feature take a look at Package/Publish SQL Tab, Project Properties . One of the negative aspects of the implementation that we have there is that the DB schema publishing is not incremental, it always executes create scripts. So in many cases you publish your app for the first time and things are great, but the next time you try to publish you receive errors because it tries to create DB objects which already exist. In our improved publish dialog...

If you have tried out our new Web Publish experience in Visual Studio you may have noticed that the Update Database checkbox is disabled. See the image below. The intended behavior of this checkbox is to enable you to incrementally publish your database schema from the source (the connection string in web.config) to the destination ( whatever connection string is in the text box ). The difference between an incremental publish and a typical publish is that for incremental publishes only changes are transferred from source to destination. With a full publish the first time that you publish your DB schema everything is created, and the next time that you try to publish you will receive an error because it tries to re-create existing DB objects...