Christian Weyer's Blog

Windows Azure VM Role is still PaaS - if you want IaaS choose Amazon EC2, seriously

‘Nuff said?

Maybe we could blame Microsoft to name the new VM role feature (Windows Server 2008 R2 is supported as guest OS, 2011 should show broader OS support) introduced at PDC10 in a confusing way – but the fact remains:
it is based on the Azure service model & the Windows Azure Fabric Controller (FC) is still in charge of everything. Although you uploaded your own prepared VM the FC may and will decide to take your VM instances offline, start new instances, reprogram the load balancers etc.

Yes, Windows Azure Compute is about PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), also with the VM role now in place. Don’t get confused by the new role feature name. Your applications (and thus roles!) need to be state-agnostic.

BTW: What is not possible with the VM role today is automatic OS updates/patching.
This means that you have no feasible option to have an up-to-date OS. When you try to run Windows Update this might work (actually it should). But then two things can happen:

• your VM needs to reboot due to the Windows Update patches
• FC decides to reboot your VM, or take it offline and hook up an new instance

In either case you end up with your original VM – bingo (and in the first case you will feel like in Groundhog Day… “Hey babe –dududu – I got you babe…”). Therefore, the official hands-on lab illustrates to disable WU entirely.

Think about the Windows Azure VM role, twice.

No, I am not kidding: COA (Cost-Oriented Architecture)

You care about success in the Cloud? The embrace COA.

While architects (and partly developers) up-to-date did not (and did not have to) care about costs – when thinking about, using and moving to the Cloud you need to be aware of costs.

Yes, the architect becomes a controller (kind of).
People need to understand that and not blindly believe in ‘cool’ conference demos This is going to be interesting times…

Update: Or maybe we should coin it COCA (Cost-Oriented Cloud Architecture)

Flame away.

.NET Framework 4 migration issues: What you may stumble across

Just in case you wonder what may go wrong when moving to the .NET Framework 4: .NET Framework 4 Migration Issues

A storm blowing through .NET land: Oliver Sturm joins thinktecture

What a joy! Our good old friend Oliver Sturm, .NET and programming languages guru par excellence, is joining thinktecture as an associate consultant. Even more fun ahead with all the thinktects.
Meet Oliver.

.NET Rocks! Ingo and Christian muse about mobile distributed application development with .NET – focusing on the iPhone & MonoTouch

thinktecture talks about designing and developing distributed applications with .NET and C# for mobile platforms. With a big focus on the iPhone and MonoTouch.
Enjoy. (don’t look at the bios – especially Ingo’s… some outdated database over there at Carl’s and Richard’s     fixed by Carl, thanks!)

Thanks.

Free PDF Book Download: A Guide to Claims-Based Identity and Access Control – powered by thinktecture

Get it now.

thinktecture’s Dominick Baier has spent quite a lot of time helping to build this fantastic official Microsoft guide. If you need to grok the concepts and technical details about how to do claims-based identity and access control on the Windows and .NET platform, that is the PDF you should carry around all day.

Dominick put all his vast and deep experience into this project. Thanks Dom.

 
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=4c09ffe4-43dd-4fcc-be35-c897c9bc4386

WIF-based applications in the wild - Dominick Baier and Christian Weyer on .NET Rocks!

In part three of .NET Rocks' virtual three part series on all things identity, claims and WIF, Dominick and I are talking about using and applying the Windows Identity Foundation and ADFSv2 in the wild, beyond the Hello Claim levels being covered elsewhere.
This interview contains a number a small tidbits gathered from several customer projects.

Hope you enjoy it - and feel free to get in touch with us when you need help in this new but exciting world.
Weyer and Baier on WIF

Creating a database in SQL Azure (aka 'provisioning')

People do not always want to rely on UIs to do database jobs.
At a command prompt with SQLCMD in the path type the following:

SQLCMD –U [MyUsername]@[MyServername] –P [MyPassword] –S [MyServername].database.windows.net –d master
CREATE DATABASE [MyDatabaseName]
GO

So, nothing spectacular - just for the records.

Hilfreich für alle, komplex für viele, verständlich erklärt: Claims-basierte Sicherheit mit WIF

thinktecture's Sicherheits-Guru Dominick Baier versteht es immer wieder, komplexe Sachverhalte im Security-Umfeld einfach aber effektiv darzulegen.
So auch wieder geschehen im Channel9-Video, welches Dariusz Parys von Microsoft Deutschland mit ihm gedreht hat. Dominick erklärt die Sachverhalte im Umfeld von Claims-basierter Sicherheit und wie man damit Probleme rund um Authentifizierung, Autorisierung und auch Personalisierung in der Praxis lösen kann.
Neben all der Theorie wird auch unser StarterSTS erwähnt, der den Eintieg in die Claims-Welt erleichtern und den scheinbaren Schrecken vor Identity Providern und Relying Parties nehmen soll. Und alles auf Basis der Windows Identity Foundation (WIF).

Auf zum Video!

Writing T4 templates? Ease your pain with Tangible's T4 Editor

The more I play around with T4 templates in Visual Studio, the more I like them ('like' as an: they help me to solve problems, but I do not love them).
But yes, they are kind of awkward, like classic ASP programming the other day... and Microsoft doesn't help us a lot in not providing any explicit VS development experience for T4. There is no syntax coloring/highlighting, no intellisense - nothing. Just a plain text view - this makes Visual Studio equal to... well, Notepad :)

This is the reason why there are some commercially available T4 editors. The one I am using since a few months is tangible's T4 Editor.

These guys over at tangible are quite bright and - even more important - quite community-oriented guys. They have a super-fast response time when you have questions, problems, bug reports.
This is basically why I chose them. I like the editor and it makes my T4 life much easier, and they help me immediately when something doesn't work.