28. September 2011
ZeroKoll
Azure , WCF
For the last year, there have been few things in the development space I have heard as much about, as I have heard about Windows Azure. Microsoft has been pushing the Azure platform hard, we all know that, but not all of us have had the chance to try it out though.
Luckily I have had the fortune of being on a few projects that have been using it, but to be honest, I haven’t been really blown away yet. Yes…it does offer some awesome features that work extremely well in certain scenarios, but I would still claim that it isn’t for everyone. Having that said, I admit that I have only scratched the surface of the platform…
Lately however, more or less every time I hear Azure, it comes bundled with the term Service Bus. Either in “this would be such a great scenario for the service bus”, or in “wonder if we can get the service bus in there so that we can try it out”. Ok…so one of these are ok, the other isn’t to be honest… Playing with the service bus isn’t hard, as I will show you in future posts, and thus does not need to be added to a project to be tried. But before I start coding, I want to have a little rant about what it is. Or at least a rant about how I have understood it…
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Next Wednesday, October 20th, I will be presenting at the .NET user group here in Wellington again. This time the talk is all about smooth streaming (same talk as I presented at TechEd NZ). It covers everything from encoding your media, to publishing it on your server and of course also how to consume it from Silverlight. It will also be covering how to get your first live smooth streaming event going.
The talk does, as you can see, cover a wide array of things that has to do with smooth streaming. And to make it even broader, I will show off the Rough Cut Editor (an open source rough video editing tool built in Silverlight). And it would of course not be complete with out touching the cloud. So to finish it off, I will show you how you can deliver smooth streaming media out of Azure blob storage. A very cost effective and good way to share your media.
So if you are in Wellington, or close by, feel free to drop by if it sounds interesting. More information is available here: http://www.dot.net.nz/UserGroupPages/WellingtonNET.aspx
I have just come back to Wellington after having spent a week travelling around and speaking at TechEd Australia and TechEd New Zealand...and of course CodeCamp in Auckland before TechEd.
Both TechEds were full of interesting people and interesting sessions. Not that I actually attended that many. But I assume they were interesting…
At both the aussie and kiwi conferences, me and Chris Auld showed off how to build an Azure backed Windows Phone 7 application in 60 minutes. And at both conferences, we promised to put up some blog posts around it. So here is my first one…one that talks about some of the key pieces that were shown. As well as some that weren’t shown…
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I have recently worked on several projects that have been built to utilize the Microsoft cloud platform called Azure. Azure offers a lot of really interesting benefits, and especially when it comes to being elastic. You can basically throw however much data you want at it, and as long as you are willing to pay for it, it will handle it. It doesn’t matter if you throw data at it that needs to be computed, or if you throw vast amounts of data that needs to be stored. Azure will handle it for you.
On top of that, it is really easy to build for. There isn’t really a whole lot to learn before one can get up and running in the cloud. Microsoft even offers a sweet SDK that gives you access to the cloud based services locally on your machine. It offers you the ability to deploy your webroles (web applications) straight to a local “cloud” and debug it. So you don’t even need to have an Azure account to starting to work with it.
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