We’ve just come back from the Imagine Cup NE hackathon in Newcastle. We had a great time with all the students from Universities and Colleges around the NE of England. Rik has written a good blog post about it. As always I am impressed by the young talent there and there was a number of good ideas. This year the …

I was having problems getting my Gadgeteer ethernet card initialised and running. I wanted to set it up to use DHCP but I never got an IP address assigned. I am using a GHI Electronics J11D ethernet card and browsing for examples seemed to pull up a lot of code but none of it seemed to work or the code didn’t seem to …

I’ve had a number of people ask me about adding a custom domain to a Windows Azure Website and it is a straight forward task providing you have access to edit your DNS records. the first thing to note is that custom domains can’t be configured on the Free instances but on Share and Reserved you get an option to …

One of our projects involves a web service that implements both SignalR and Web API and we were looking at the quickest and most cost effective way to get it deployed so that one of our customers could run a Windows 8 application as a demo away from the office. The application works well internally as we have the …

If you have been wondering why you would use Windows Azure Queues that are part of the Storage Service or the queues that are part of the service bus then the following MSDN article will give you full details. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh767287(VS.103).aspx Recent changes in pricing make the choice even …

The Windows Azure Training Kit June 2012 release is out now with the following features: 12 new hands-on labs for Windows Azure Virtual Machines 11 new hands-on labs for Windows Azure Web Sites 2 new hands-on labs demonstrating Windows Azure with Windows 8 Metro-style applications Several new hands-on labs for Node.js …

The latest tools for windows Azure are located here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29988 This version is supported in both Visual Studio 2010 & 2012 and will run on Windows 7 & 8 Server 2008 & 2012

This is a follow on post from my introduction to Windows Azure Websites and shows you how you can synchronise your website in TFS with Windows Azure. One of the biggest problems with the way you deploy applications to Windows Azure is that minor changes (e.g .markup, content and styling) require a redeploy to publish …

After the announcement about the new Windows Azure Services to Deliver a Hybrid Cloud and on Scott Guthrie’s blog, this blog post shows a little of what the Windows Azure Websites will bring. These are additional services that allow quick and easy creation and deployment of websites to the Windows Azure environment. …

Diagnostics in any application is a necessity and Windows Azure applications are no different. You could remote desktop onto the instance and check the event logs and even run up debug view so that you can see your system diagnostic messages. There is however a mechanism provided to retrieve a whole load of diagnostic …