Windows Azure SDK 2.0 and Tools

Posted on 05/05/2013 by Marcel Meijer

Last week is version 2.0 of the Windows Azure SDK and Visual Studio tools released. And this time not just a few bug fixes, but really good additions.

Ok, version number is updated and Windows Server 2012 is the default osFamily of a Role.

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Also the new VM sizes are added to the tools.

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Beside the known Web and Worker Roles there is also a Role specific for the Windows Azure Servicebus added.

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But the real news are in the Diagnostics and the Windows Azure Storage in the Server Explorer. The diagnostics is now much better to setup.

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And the Windows Azure Storage in the Server explorer has more functionalities besides a read function. We missed a really simple editor for example Windows Azure Storage tables. A separate tool was needed for that, but know we do not have to leave the Visual studio environment. Also selecting from Storage Table is possible.

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Publishing to Windows Azure Websites can also be done by importing data from the Windows Azure website itself.

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The deployment of a Cloud Service can be setup far easier. One of the great advantages of Windows Azure is your app is always up, even during a new deployment. The deployment will be split, first server A and then Server B. Sometimes this is not really wanted and now it is possible to bypass this.

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More info on my blog when I use it, but ofcourse also on the blog of Scott Guthrie

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/04/30/announcing-the-release-of-windows-azure-sdk-2-0-for-net.aspx

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IISConfigurator Error

Posted on 02/05/2013 by Marcel Meijer

During the Global Windows Azure Bootcamp we saw an IISConfigurator error a few times. The attendees had everything installed according to the Windows Azure prerequisite. But after starting a ‘clean’ Windows Azure Cloud Service the following appeared.

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The solution in our cases was setting up the IIS feature on the machine. It is not completely clear if the IIS management Console alone is enough.

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Windows Azure Free Trail

Posted on 30/04/2013 by Marcel Meijer

Because I wanted to connect a Windows Azure account with my Office 365 account, so I started a new Windows Azure subscription. In this blogpost I will show you the steps needed in the process of creating a new subsciption. You can start with Windows Azure without any risks, when the free usage is done it will stop without any costs.

The first step is going to: https://www.windowsazure.com/nl-nl/pricing/free-trial/.

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When choosing for “Buy now”, you get a screen like this.

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I assume a private use, meaning we want to use what we really use and we do not want to buy capacity upfront. Buying upfront capacity can be great for companies or startups, this way they get a steady bill. This also gives you a discount. Which is the same as the Telecom providers do.

You have to connect with your Microsoft Account. I wanted to connect the Windows Azure Free Trial with my Office 365 account. The following steps will be the same for both accounts.

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So I got the inlog windows of Office 365.

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When connected to the Office 365 account, you will see the following. Indeed no subscriptions yet ;-) If you already got a Free Trail , you are not allowed to start a new. Then it is only possible to buy a subscription.

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After clicking the “Sign up” link, we go on.

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We need a mobile number. Just for checking a real person is getting the trails.

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You get a text message with a code. This one should be entered during the sign up process.

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Then we need a Credit card and your address. There are also other ways of paying but that will be possible with the upfront capacity buy in.

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After clicking Next the subscription get provided.

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And you are the proud owner of a new Windows Azure subscription. Said otherwise you have unlimited compute power and storage!

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When you go to the Portal, by clicking on the button at the upper right. There will be a Welcome wizard, which makes you familiar with the new things on the portal.

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We get the Management portal!

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By connecting to the Office 365, the Active Directory is added to your newly made subscription. With all the users of the Office 365 account.

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In the Billing menu, click on your e-mail address at the top and chose for “Show my bill”. You see your subscription with the strange name, luckily we can change it.

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Click on the white row with (in this case0 “Gratis proefversie van 3 maanden”. There is a overview of your usages and there a number of options. One of which is “change your subscription”.

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If you don’t want to get rid of the subscription (which is perfectly understandable ;-) ), click the yellow row.

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Have lots of fun with your Windows Azure subscription. And create great and superb applications on the Windows Azure platform. Have fun!

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Global Windows Azure Bootcamp NL

Posted on 29/04/2013 by Marcel Meijer

Last Saturday there was the Worldwide Global Windows Azure Bootcamp. In The Netherlands this was organized by WAZUG and SDN. The program contained a Windows Azure introduction by Marcel Meijer and after the lunch a session about HD Insight by Dennis Mulder. In the meantime there was the possibility to work on the Hands-on labs of the Windows Azure trainings kit. Patriek van Dorp, Dennis Mulder, Edwin van Wijk and Marcel Meijer were available for questions and helping with solving problems.

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At the end of the event there was Worldwide experiment. All countries run the Kinect and Windows Azure WorkerRoles of Alan Smith. The Netherlands did a nice job! In 21 Countries in a timespan of 24 hours the Render Farm rendered 724059 frames by 9793 WorkerRole instances. Normally this should have taken 4.5 year. Which would cost $249.955,- but now it cost allmost nothing! Almost everyone used his/hers MSDN free compute hours or used a free Windows Azure trail.

Again a great event! We thank our local sponsors for their support.

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Organised by:

SDN_Logo_603 wazug5

Local sponsor:

ineta2 infosupport2prodware4

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WAAD – Integrate with Web App

Posted on 23/04/2013 by Marcel Meijer

I showed the following screenshot already in my previous blogpost about Windows Azure Active Directory. I told you I would show you more of it.

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If you follow the Wizard, the site will go humming for a moment and the following appears. Your Website is connected to your Active directory.

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The Federation Metadata document URL will be needed in a moment in Visual Studio.

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It is a quick demo which the naming is showing ;-) I started Visual Studio and I did File –> New Project. Afterwards I choose my personal favorite a MVC 4 website. On the Web application portal right mouse click. You chose for ‘Identity and Access’.

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Then take option 2 and copy the Federation Metadata URL from the portal in it.

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Then F5 in Visual Studio. Your web application runt and shows the login window. I did not do anything.

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If you use a user from your AD, that user will gain access to your amazing web application.

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How cool is that! This opens a lot of superb possibilities for many companies and their private applications. This makes an Office 365 subscription even more interesting!

Ok, I tweaked it a little. Running it out of the box will give this error message. Some complaining about the Antiforgery token.

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The solution is relative simple.

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To revoke the Office 365 users access to the application. Click the following menu.

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Choose the ‘Remove app’ choice.

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And the users will get this fine error ;-)

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Anyway, how cool is this. And I did not show you how you can access the AD User data via the WAAD Graph API. This will even extend the possibilities even more!  But more about that in a future blogpost ;-)

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VCards and QRCodes

Posted on 19/04/2013 by Marcel Meijer

For my employer we have developed the QRCode on our business cards. This QRCode contains a link to a website where the VCard of the employee can be downloaded. A VCard is a standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard for electronic Business Cards.

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The idea of the QRCode was to download the VCard of the employee and so add the data to your address book. The VCard could also be added to the QRCode, but then the QRCode changes with a function change or mobile number change. To us this looked not quite handy. That is why we choose to make the VCard available on a website.

For the creation of the QRCode we used the standard ZXING barcode library (http://code.google.com/p/zxing/downloads/list). But Prodware is a Microsoft oriented company, so we needed a C# variant of this lib. No problem there is a Nuget package (https://nuget.org/packages/ZXing).

To create the code you need this code snippet.

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By the way this library can also be used as QRCode/Barcode scanner in your WP8 or Windows 8 app. I have done that twice now, but more about that later.

The VCard standard is handy, but there is a problem. Internet browsers handle the different on the different devices. On a normal Windows 8/Windows 7 computer the VCard can be downloaded without trouble and the data can be added to the address book of Windows or Outlook. Also on a Windows Phone 7.x. But Windows Phone 8, Android and iPhone don’t, there is no default application connected to the extension etc.

To solve this, the VCard should be mailed. So we are changing the website so the VCard can be mailed. But of course we want it dependent of the device.

Mobile:

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Desktop:

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With C# and MVC 4 it is simple. MVC 4 is already handling mobile browser much better. In the view you have to add this code.

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Problem solved. Now we need to deploy it to our on-premise servers. The test environment runs on Windows Azure ;-)

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Windows Azure Global Bootcamp

Posted on 18/04/2013 by Marcel Meijer

On April 27th, 2013, you’ll have the ability to join a Windows Azure Bootcamp on a location close to you. Why? We’re organizing bootcamps globally, that’s why! Learn about locations, install the necessary prerequisites and get excited!

This one day deep dive class will get you up to speed on developing for Windows Azure. The class includes a trainer with deep real world experience with Windows Azure, as well as a series of labs so you can practice what you just learned.

Awesome. How much does it cost? This event is FREE to the attendees. Gratis! Gratuite! Libero!

Even more awesome! What’s the catch? There’s no catch. Even the pro’s recommend this event.

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How do I attend one? Find a location close to where you live. Click through to see the details for that class and then register. Keep in mind you will need to bring your own laptop to do the labs.

What do I need to bring? You will need to bring your own laptop and have it preloaded with the software listed here. Please do the installation upfront as there will be no time to troubleshoot installations during the day.

Is this for beginners? Yes and no. The local trainers will use the Windows Azure Training Kit to guide you to the basics. We’ll also be running a massive scalability experiment that may bring one of the Windows Azure datacenters down!

More information for the Dutch version: http://www.wazug.nl/agenda/global-windows-azure.aspx

Organised by:

SDN_Logo_60 wazug

Local sponsor:

ineta infosupportprodware

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Windows Azure Endpoint monitoring

Posted on 17/04/2013 by Marcel Meijer

When going to the Windows Azure portal you can choose for the different services on the portal, one of the things you see is the Dashboard. The Dashboard is aggregation of a couple of performance counters.

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Now there is a new option: Web Endpoint Status. With this option you can automate the monitoring of the availability of your Windows Azure website from an other Windows Azure datacenter.

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The setup is relatively easy. Go to the Configure tab.

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Enter the URL and check the Windows Azure datacenters to test from. Ready.

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Besides the dashboard there is also logging.

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Again a super addition to the portal! And the best part it is not only available for Windows Azure websites, but also for Cloud services and for Windows Azure Mobile Services.

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Ok, from a monitoring perspective this is far from optimal, but it is a great first step! It shows the fact Microsoft is thinking about monitoring in addition to Windows Azure portal a lot. So this looks like a promise.

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Windows Azure IAAS Public Available

Posted on 17/04/2013 by Marcel Meijer

Yesterday Windows Azure IAAS was announced public available by Scott Guthrie via his blog http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/04/16/windows-azure-general-availability-of-infrastructure-as-a-service-iaas.aspx.

Besides the word Preview has dropped on the portal, there are more new things available.

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There are also new images added, like more versions of BizTalk 2013 and also a SharePoint 2013 image. The other images were already available during the preview.

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Besides new images there are also other sizes of VM’s available. VM size with the name A6 and A7 with 28 and 56 Gb memory and 4 or 8 cores. What’s in a name ;-)

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But the Windows Azure Virtual Network is now also released from preview and public available. Which even more cooler.

Windows Azure is  already a great platform, but now it is also a complete platform with PAAS, IAAS en SAAS altogether.

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Windows Azure Active Directory (WAAD)

Posted on 16/04/2013 by Marcel Meijer

One major drawback of Webapplications in the Cloud compared to Intranet applications is the availability of Active directory. One solution is the usage of social networks (like Google, FaceBook, Twitter, Yahoo, Windows Live) to validate users.

You know if the user is the one he tells you he is, but you still have to handle the authorization yourself. That is not always very handy, because your are not really in control for the authentication. Especially if the users are employees of your company, then you want them to login with your corporate account of course.

Modern companies nowadays use Office 365 (Microsoft’s SAAS solution for Office, Exchange en SharePoint in de Cloud). The employees have an account and it would be nice if they could use this account to access your application.

On the Windows Azure portal we had already an Active Directory menu item. Behind it is the familiar Windows Azure Access Control service. Via this mechanism people can be authenticated via the known social networks (Google, FaceBook, Yahoo and Windows Live). More info was already on this blog: http://blogs.msmvps.com/marcelmeijer/blog/2012/05/04/windows-azure-wif-access-control-acs/.

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My own test site http://cloudtest.marcelmeijer.net shows the usage.

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But this example also uses Office 365 as authentication provider. With my Office 365 account on the Joep-IT domain I can login on  the site.

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Via the Claims mechanism of ACS we get some data back. Which we can use in the application etc.

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This sounds great, but still no real Active directory. With Active directory we want to create/add users with data and roles.

Since some time now there is a on Office 365 based Active Directory available. We create a Directory, on this moment just a new <name>.onmicrosoft.com Office 365 account. It will be possible in the future to use my existing and own Joep-IT Office 365 account.

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Via the SDK you can create a graph and query the data of the Active directory and use it for real. Super!

Now I can add users.

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The new user gets an e-mail with a temporary password.

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But what if you already have an on-premise Active directory, does that mean you have to administrate things double? For ACS we had already AD-FS (Active Directory Federation Services). With this your locale AD users could be available in the Cloud. But again not completely optimal. The ‘new’ Active directory offers your better possibilities to sync your on-premise AD with the Cloud AD.

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To the Cloud AD applications can be added.

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Which is great. I will come back with more details later!

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