Just finished at the Hacking Imagination event in County Durham. My role was to help mentor and encourage the students from Universities and Colleges in the North East of England to help them to develop their ideas for their Imagine Cup entries. The event was held in a secret location in county Durham and the students …

I promised a number of links during the SQL Azure talk at the London Windows Azure boot camp today & here they are: Migration wizard http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/ SQL Azure Federations http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh597452.aspx Unsupported SQL Azure T-SQL …

Costing a system for running on Windows Azure seems complex at times and sometimes it is easy to calculate and other times it is not. However there have been a number of times in recent months where I have experienced higher than expected costs for Windows Azure. The first thing to check is the actual bill. The bills …

If you attended the [Black Marble Architecture Event](http://www.blackmarble.co.uk/events.aspx?event=Architecture Forum in the North 4) yesterday you would have seen a number of talks around Azure and the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit was mentioned a number of times. The latest update to the training kit is here: …

If you have installed the Window Azure Toolkit For Windows 8 you may want to deploy it to a real live environment so that you can try out the notification service and start wiring useful Windows 8 applications. I assumed this was going to be a quick task, but it took me a little longer than expected. Firstly when you …

We recently moved a web application into Windows Azure that was using session state. As it was running on a single webserver the session state was set to InProc but this is not useful when in a multi-server environment as the session is stored on the specific machine and is therefore not accessible to other machines. …

This week we had a very useful side effect of using the Window Azure Service bus. We have an Azure hosted website that connects to a CRM backend using the service bus in relay mode to communicate between the two systems. We had a test system that worked fine but when we moved to a Live system we had a configuration …

A new release of the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010 is available here The release adds the following features: Profile applications running in Windows Azure. Create ASP.Net MVC3 Web Roles. Manage multiple service configurations in one cloud project. Improved validation of Windows Azure packages. The Windows …

When trying to access the Azure Storage SDK in a non-Azure application I kept getting the following error: “The type or namespace name 'WindowsAzure' does not exist in the namespace 'Microsoft' (are you missing an assembly reference?) “ References to Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime and …

For those trying to workout how much an Azure deployment will cost there is a new tool provided by Microsoft to help. The tool nicely swaps between currencies and also show the offers that are available.