Posts by Paul Mehner

This blog post assumes that the reader knows the basics of Identity Providers and Security Token Services. Its purpose is to illustrate how to programmatically add Google or Yahoo as an Identity Provider because there isn’t much information available on how to do this. For further information about using the ManagementServices proxy, I suggest downloading…

Be aware that installing the November 2010 Windows Azure SDK v1.3 will break support for cloud projects running under Visual Studio 2008. To the best of my knowledge this was not widely announced (in fact, I learned about this fact during installation of the SDK). If you have Visual Studio 2008 Windows Azure projects, you’ll…

The Windows Azure Worker Role is a perfect place to put code that you want to run continuously in the background to process work as it becomes available. The information presented here would also be useful in web roles as well. If you’re writing cloud applications, its likely you are targeting high levels of performance…

Microsoft published an updated FAQ (May 3, 2010) for SQL Azure, available here The FAQ is very thorough and is a “must read” for any organization planning a relational database migration or new cloud application “This paper provides an architectural overview of SQL Azure Database, and describes how you can use SQL Azure to augment…

Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) caches your Windows Azure Data Storage blobs at strategically placed locations around the world (18 at the time of this blog post). The purpose of the CDN is to provide maximum bandwidth for delivery of content to our applications and users. Building massively scalable applications requires squeezing every ounce…

I’ve assembled a short list of training materials and utilities that are helpful in learning the Windows Azure platform Windows Azure SDK v1.1 samples http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dba6a576-468d-4ef6-877e-b14e3c865d3a&displaylang=en Windows Azure Samples: C:Program FilesWindows Azure SDKv1.1Samples.zip Windows Azure platform AppFabric v1.0 Code Samples http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=39856A03-1490-4283-908F-C8BF0BFAD8A5&displaylang=en C:Program Files (x86)Windows Azure platform AppFabric SDKV1.0Samples Windows Azure Platform Training Kit http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=413e88f8-5966-4a83-b309-53b7b77edf78&displaylang=en Windows Azure…

Before we can begin using the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service (ACS) to decouple our applications from security concerns and enable claims-based identities we need to understand the Resources contained in the Service Namespace and what role they play in the authentication and authorization infrastructure. This brief blog entry is meant to provide you…

Before you begin your Windows Azure development experience in earnest, you should be aware that leaving development and test instances deployed and running in the cloud can be expensive. Be aware that you will be billed for deployed service instances, even if they are suspended, so it is important that you actually remove the instances…