Christian Weyer's Blog

Erm, what’s happening? Updating Windows Azure role configuration

Sometimes the question shows up why the change of configuration of a Windows Azure deployment does not take effect immediately (whatever that means ).

If you change the configuration (via the portal or via the management API) of your Windows Azure deployment then the change will happen almost immediately.
Well, not exactly.

The change will be rolled out to the instances using upgrade domains.

Source: Ryan Dunn’s TechEd 2010 presentation “Deploying, Troubleshooting, Managing and Monitoring Applications on Windows Azure”

For each upgrade domain a status change event will be raised and the instance can decide whether it will handle the change or whether it needs to be restarted.
Once the instances in that upgrade domain have reported that they are ready (either by handling the change, or by coming back online after restarting) then the fabric controller will move to the next upgrade domain.

Hope this helps.

Pimp da UI! thinktecture UIAnnotations released

The master of the UIs, Jörg Neumann, did it again.

With thinktecture UIAnnotations you can extend your UI with additional functionality via Adorners and Behaviors. All parts are assignable via markup, which is helpful in MVVM scenarios and promotes the developer/designer interaction.

Using the library you can declaratively attach visual Adorners and Expression Blend Behaviors to your user interfaces, including smart tags, editor toolbars and visual state markers for required fields, edit states and more. It also can automatically attach adorners to elements while reflecting the Data Annotations of the associated data sources. For a better MVVM support it offers a generic command behavior that is assignable to every event of a given element.
thinktecture UIAnnotations is available for WPF and Silverlight (coming soon).

thinktecture UIAnnotations features in brief:

• 10+ useful adorners and 5+ Expression Blend Behaviors
• automatic assignment of adorners via Data Annotations
• a custom adorner model for silverlight (coming soon)
• GenericAdorner allows to attach every element as an adorner
• AdornerBehaviorFactory that can be used to wrap every adorner as an Expression Blend Behavior
• BehaviorFactory allows the assignment of Expression Blend Behaviors via styles
• with Command Behavior you can map every control event to a command.

 

Go grab it.