Azure | Applied Information Sciences Blog

Let’s face it: Technology is migrating toward the cloud. Unless you have sensitive or secret data you can’t share with third parties, then you have no reason not to embrace it. In short, the cloud is affordable, effective, 99.9% available anywhere, has almost unlimited storage, and allows you to focus on matters other than keeping your network up-to-date — and all you need is an internet connection. Industry experts say that cloud computing will only continue to grow and expand over the next few years, which means companies will need to keep up, or get left behind.

The “Mobile Worker” (like you, maybe), is growing more dependent on answering emails and working on the go with a smartphone, tablet and laptop both outside and inside the office. With so many efficient devices and capabilities allowing coworkers to touch base at once, it would only make sense to have all of your data stored in one centralized location. Additionally, most cloud services, such as Windows Azure, provide a web interface. This means you can access your data on any device or platform that has internet capabilities. Read More…

Arun Mudiraj

The recent announcement about the general availability of Windows Azure IaaS comes with the following key enhancements:

Remote PowerShell is enabled by default when deploying Virtual Machine using PowerShell.
Availability of trial images such as SharePoint in the image gallery.

These enhancements make it easy to deploy a SharePoint Farm in an automated manner using PowerShell scripts.

The goal of this blog post is to walk you through such a script. Read More…

Vishwas Lele

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@vlele

It was great fun presenting at Windows AzureConf 2013. I would like to thank the entire AzureConf team (Cory Fowler and Brady Gaster in particular) and my fellow speakers for their valuable feedback.

Click here to watch the video recording of my session on channel 9.

You can find recordings to all other sessions (including Scott Guthrie’s keynote) via this link.

Many of you asked me for a copy of the code I used during my session. You can find all my code snippets and slides here. (Of course this is just sample code so please treat it as such!)

Additionally, Pluralsight has graciously offered to make my newly-released Windows Azure IaaS Course for Developers available for FREE beginning Monday, April 29 at 9:00 a.m. MDT, and keep it freely available for 48 hours (ending 9:00 a.m. MDT on Wednesday, May 1). This is a three-hour course that goes in much more detail on the Windows Azure IaaS topics:

Windows Azure IaaS Course for Developers

Please feel free to send me additional questions via my Twitter account. Thanks!

Jack OConnell

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the general availability of its offering of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). They join an already-crowded market of IaaS providers, but this offering gives all companies the ability to offload workloads that have traditionally run in a company data center to the cloud. Welcome, Microsoft — the water is fine.

This announcement also represents a major chunk of Microsoft’s family of Azure offerings…and in my opinion, a stepping stone many companies simply must take in moving out of the traditional data center and into the cloud. The following diagram shows the stepping stones out of the traditional data center:

Vishwas Lele

Email
@vlele

We recently deployed a five-node CRM 2011 topology using Windows Azure IaaS with the following objectives:

Understand how a multiple node CRM setup can be provisioned using Windows Azure IaaS. Specifically, how the networking capabilities offered by the Windows Azure platform (i.e. stateless load balancing) map to the CRM requirements.
Develop an automated way to provision and de-provision a CRM setup. This is not only useful for dev and test scenarios, but also for production scenarios where it is notoriously difficult to conduct capacity planning before acquiring the necessary hardware. For example, it is hard to know upfront what CRM functional building blocks (aka CRM roles) the business stakeholders will want to focus on, such as async processes, sandbox, reports, etc. By dynamically scaling out the “needed” features on demand, we can enhance the business agility of the CRM.
Offer our customers an educated choice between CRM Online (no setup costs but less control) and CRM On-Premises (extensive setup costs but complete control).
Take advantage of hybrid apps that combine CRM capabilities with Windows Azure services, such as Windows Azure Active Directory, mobile services, etc.

Joseph Klein

Please be our guest at the next Azure ‘n’ Action Café online session on April 10th from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. This is a jump-start overview session, including demos and best practices focusing on Windows Azure Virtual Machines: IaaS “On Your Terms.” You will experience how easy it is to bring your own customized virtual machine images — or select from a gallery and retain full control of your images — and maintain them as your business requires. You’ll also be the first to see how to provision a brand-new SharePoint 2013 farm in Azure IaaS.

The Azure ‘n’ Action Café is a series of “lunch and learn” online sessions on a variety of topics related to the Windows Azure Platform. Please register for Windows Azure Virtual Machines: IaaS “On Your Terms” by clicking on the link below and adding the meeting to your calendar from the registration page.

Click here to register to secure your seat at the Café.

Tom McKearney

In a production Azure application, our Web roles were repeatedly running into an error in ELMAH that we found nearly impossible to reproduce. It never occurred running in local IIS, IIS Express or anything.

The exact error message was an ArgumentOutOfRangeException:

System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Specified argument was out of the range of valid values.
Parameter name: utcDate
     at System.Web.HttpCachePolicy.UtcSetLastModified(DateTime utcDate)
     at System.Web.HttpCachePolicy.SetLastModified(DateTime date)
     at System.Web.UI.Page.InitOutputCache(OutputCacheParameters cacheSettings)
     at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequest(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint)
     at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequest()
     at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
     at System.Web.Mvc.OutputCacheAttribute.OnResultExecuting(ResultExecutingContext filterContext)
     at System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionResultFilter(IResultFilter filter, ResultExecutingContext preContext, Func`1 continuation)
     at System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionResultFilter(IResultFilter filter, ResultExecutingContext preContext, Func`1 continuation)
     at System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionResultFilter(IResultFilter filter, ResultExecutingContext preContext, Func`1 continuation)
     at System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionResultWithFilters(ControllerContext controllerContext, IList`1 filters, ActionResult actionResult)
     at System.Web.Mvc.Async.AsyncControllerActionInvoker.<>c__DisplayClass27.b__24(IAsyncResult asyncResult)
     at System.Web.Mvc.AsyncController.<>c__DisplayClass19.b__14(IAsyncResult asyncResult)
     at System.Web.Mvc.Async.AsyncResultWrapper.<>c__DisplayClass4.b__3(IAsyncResult ar)
     at System.Web.Mvc.AsyncController.EndExecuteCore(IAsyncResult asyncResult)
     at System.Web.Mvc.Async.AsyncResultWrapper.<>c__DisplayClass4.b__3(IAsyncResult ar)
     at System.Web.Mvc.MvcHandler.<>c__DisplayClass6.<>c__DisplayClassb.b__4(IAsyncResult asyncResult)
     at System.Web.Mvc.Async.AsyncResultWrapper.<>c__DisplayClass4.b__3(IAsyncResult ar)
     at System.Web.HttpApplication.CallHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute()
     at System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously

Notice anything missing?

Everything is in the “System.Web” namespace, meaning that all of this is framework code and not application code. This begs the question: Why is this happening?

Apparently, something in the framework (which was indirectly affected by our app) was causing this.

After many, many weeks of on again, off again debugging, I finally discovered the problem:

Tom McKearney

When dealing with a web “farm” situation, there are various reasons a developer needs to identify which machine responded to a request, especially when dealing with particularly nefarious bugs.

Recently, an Azure production application I was monitoring was experiencing a problem with stale/old data showing up intermittently as users navigated the website. I began to suspect a single instance of the application did not have a properly updated cache on it. I needed to know which Web Role Instance was causing the problem so I could restart it. Obviously, there was a bug that would need to be tracked down in the future, but the immediate need was to stop the problem.

For lack of other information, I had to restart each instance of the web role individually, waiting for that one to come back up and move on to the next. I couldn’t trust the situation until every single instance was restarted.