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.

Recently I was helping out at the Azure Bootcamp in London and during the labs a common theme kept occurring when the labs were deployed to a real Azure account. The roles failed to run and it appeared that the deployment was taking forever. This is something I experienced first hand when I was starting out with Azure. …

The Windows Azure SDK 1.4 refresh is available which adds in Web Deploy integration. This allows the developers to increase their productivity by using web deploy rather than having to repackage and redeploy the application. It is available for down load here and click the “Get Tools & SDK” button. Further …

If you are an MSDN subscriber (Ultimate or Premium) you now get more Windows Azure resources. Professional subscribers are now also included in the promotion. See here for more details. If you have already taken up this offer and you are an MSDN Premium subscriber then you will automatically be upgraded to the MSDN …

The first production version of the windows Azure caching service and a new production version of the Access Control service have been released. The following link provides the necessary information …