Archive for the ‘Cloud’ Category

Meeting the SQL Azure Development Team

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Last week I was at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, WA, USA. I was invited by the SQL Azure Development Team to look at some of the new unreleased features and comment on features in their roadmap.

Unfortunately most of the content was confidential, meaning that I was under NDA, so I may not disclose any details. Sorry :-/

During the week with the SQL Azure Development Team I was fortunate to be engaged in technical detailed discussion about some of the upcoming feature releases – mainly discussing the SQL Server features not currently available in SQL Azure. It was interesting and enlightening at the same time to discuss their technical challenges and why they have build SQL Azure the way they have.

All in all, my conclusion after this event is that Microsoft takes SQL Azure seriously and it will become a major player in the RDBMS world. It will not just be a SQL Server in the cloud, but a separate product with different market segments and different features. I am looking forward to a bright future with SQL Azure :-)

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Announcement, SQL Azure, SQL Server | No Comments »

Initial slow WCF request

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

SnailIf working with any of the HTTP Bindings you might experience that the first WCF request takes a long time to complete.

This is because the initial HTTP connection tries to get the proxy settings automatically. This is done by requesting the configuration via a HTTP GET http://wpad/wpad.dat. If proxy server automatic configuration is not configured, the request times out and the initial WCF can send the request directly to the destination address. This may add 30 seconds to the initial WCF request!

You can disable this behavior by specifying UseDefaultWebProxy = false on the binding.

You can read more about Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol ( WPAD ) at Wikipedia.

This applies to basicHttpBinding, wsHttpBinding, wsDualHttpBinding, webHttpBinding, ws2007FederationHttpBinding, wsFederationHttpBinding, basicHttpContextBinding, wsHttpContextBinding and the new Azure ServiceBus bindings basicHttpRelayBinding, wsHttpRelayBinding, webHttpRelayBinding

Posted in .Net, Cloud, WCF | No Comments »

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Amazon AWS logo

If you are interested in cloud computing, but you never known how to adopt this new paradigm in your shop due to ignorance ;-) I encourage you to look at the Amazon EC2 and related services.

One of the things that have kept me and properly many others from migrating our applications and services to the cloud has been due to the nature of most software requiring integration to legacy systems behind a company firewall.

Amazon’s new service – Amazon Virtual Private Cloud enables you to extend the company’s network to Amazon’s cloud via a secure VPN connection.

Read more about this new service from Amazon on Werner Vogels’ article Seamlessly Extending the Data Center – Introducing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.

Tags: ,
Posted in Cloud | No Comments »