windows azure
Windows Azure Storage Emulator 2.2.1 Preview Release with support for “2013-08-15” version!!!!!
This is a preview release and requires that Windows Azure SDK 2.2 be already installed. The installer does not replace the Windows Azure Storage Emulator 2.2 binaries automatically.Instead, it will drop the binaries under a temporary folder “%ProgramFiles%\Windows Azure Storage Emulator 2.2.1\devstore” for 32-bit OS or “%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Windows Azure Storage Emulator 2.2.1\devstore” for 64-bit OS.
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Windows Azure Storage: Introducing CORS!!!!!!!!!
We recently released CORS(Cross Origin Resource Sharing) for Windows Azure Storage. CORS is supported for Blob, Table and Queue services and can be enabled for each service through the Windows Azure Storage Client Library 3.0.
In this blog, we will explain CORS and how Windows Azure Storage supports CORS with an example. The complete sample code can be found in here.
What is CORS
Web Browsers, also referred to as User Agents, commonly apply same origin restriction policy to network requests. These restrictions prevent client-side web applications running from a specific domain to issue requests to another domain for security reasons. As an example, a piece of JavaScript code loaded as part ofhttp://www.contoso.com cannot issue requests at will to any other domain like http://www.northwindtraders.com since the Web Browser will prevent such requests from executing.
CORS is a mechanism that would relax such restriction and allows domains to give each other permissions for accessing each other’s resources. The User Agent in this case would send extra headers in order to ensure that the JavaScript code loaded from a certain domain say www.contoso.com is allowed to access resources located at www.northwindtraders.com. In this case the latter domain could either reply back with extra headers allowing or denyingwww.contoso.com access to its resources.
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Windows Azure Websites online tools you should know about!!!!!!!!!
If you like getting up-close and personal with managing your computing resources, you’ll be happy to know that your Windows Azure Web Sites comes with some useful online tools that let you do some really cool things with it.
These tools are part of your site’s Kudu dashboard, also known as the SCM (Site Control Management) dashboard, and today we’ll see what these tools are.
To get to the Kudu dashboard, simply browse using your favorite internet browser to https://{site name}.scm.azurewebsites.net (in other words, add .scm in front of the site name). Upon entry, you will be asked for credentials and those will be the same as your deployment credentials. If you have never set up your deployment credentials, you can open your site’s dashboard in the Azure Portal and click Set up deployment credentials. If you already have deployment credentials but do not remember them, you can use the dashboard to reset them as well:
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Using Claims in your Web App is Easier with the new OWIN Security Components!!!!
In the last few months the ASP.NET and Active Directory teams have been busy collaborating on a new OWIN-based programming model for securing modern ASP.NET applications. Today I have the privilege to announce the first developer preview of the OWIN components that will allow you to secure your ASP.NET applications with Windows Azure AD, ADFS and any other identity provider supporting WS-Federation.
Claims Based Identity and the .NET Framework
Claims based identity made its debut in the developer’s toolbox back in 2009, with the first release of Windows Identity Foundation (WIF). At that time the only people working with claims based identity were individuals with both development and administration background, often leaning on the latter, with deep understanding of the underlying security protocols. The introduction of classes that took care of the low level details and Visual Studio tools to facilitate app configuration helped more and more developers to take advantage of claims’ ability to cross boundaries between platforms and between on-premises and cloud. With the release of .NET 4.5 in 2012 all the WIF classes migrated in the .NET Framework, with System.Security.Claims moving into mscorlib itself. Starting with the release of Visual Studio 2013, support for claims based identity is available directly in the project templates out of the box. And all the while, we’ve been updating the out of the box functionalities by releasing NuGet libraries implementing the latest industry advancements (such as support for new lightweight token formats).
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Azure Media Services
Windows Azure Media Services supports encoding, management, and streaming of media from Windows Azure, in a completely hosted solution.The client requested a proof-of-concept end-to-end solution that involves uploading existing media assets to Windows Azure, encoding them to smooth streaming formats, and delivering them to an audience using Windows computers, iOS devices, and Android devices.
Architecture
The architecture I ended up implementing on top of Windows Azure is the following:
From the client’s perspective, the only on-premise component is the uploader application, which uploads H264 MP4 files to an ASP.NET web application hosted in Windows Azure Web Sites (1). The web application creates a Windows Azure Media Services asset and streams the client’s upload to Windows Azure Blob Storage (2). Metadata about the upload, such as the file name, description, thumbnail URL, and other information is stored in Windows Azure Table Storage (3). When the upload completes, the ASP.NET application puts a message in Windows Azure Queue Storage (4), which a Worker Role dequeues and initiates an encoding job with Windows Azure Media Services (5). When the encoding job completes (6), the Worker Role generates streaming URLs with the Windows Azure Media Services origin servers, and stores these URLs for the web application to consume (8).
This end-to-end process can potentially replace the client’s current solution for media encoding and delivery. Although full pricing information for Windows Azure Media Services has not yet been disclosed (for example, the cost of on-demand streaming units), our estimates indicate a considerable cost savings when moving the whole solution to Windows Azure.
Windows Azure Services Bus
Windows Azure Service Bus
Service Bus is messaging infrastructure that sits between applications allowing them to exchange messages in a loosely coupled way for improved scale and resiliency. Service Bus is managed and operated by Microsoft with a 99.9% monthly SLA.
Use Service Bus to:
Manage message delivery in the cloud
Service Bus Queues offer simple first in, first out guaranteed message delivery and supports a range of standard protocols (REST, AMQP, WS*) and API’s to put/pull messages on/off a queue. Service Bus Topics deliver messages to multiple subscriptions and easily fan out message delivery at scale to downstream systems.
Connect on-premises applications to the cloud
Service Bus Relay solves the challenges of communicating between on-premises applications and the outside world by allowing on-premises web services to project public endpoints. Systems can then access these web services, which continue to run on-premises from anywhere on the planet.
Push notifications at scale to mobile devices
Notification Hubs provide a simple, scalable way to send out push notifications to apps on popular mobile platforms without needing to understand or directly interface with the many notification mechanisms for each platform.
Queues
Windows Azure Queue service is used for reliable, persistent messaging between applications. You can use Queues to transfer messages between applications or services in Windows Azure. Queues store messages that may be read by any client who has access to the storage account. A queue can contain an unlimited number of messages, each of which can be up to 64KB in size. Queues are assessable via REST services from anywhere via the internet, and supports .NET, Java and Node.JS client libraries.
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