Ozzie.eu

Link: MariaDB Enterprise Cluster in Microsoft Azure Marketplace

MariaDB Enterprise Cluster with Galera technology is a multi-master cluster that achieves high availability and scalability through features such as synchronous replication, read and write to any cluster nodes without slave lag, automatic membership control of new nodes joining the cluster and failed nodes dropping from the cluster.

Link: SQL Server Row Level Security | Official Pythian Blog

So I’ve read the article above and thought:

• Will managers realize they have to document a formal data security policy?
  
• Will DBA staff be accountable for wrong permissions: granting too much or too little access to data?
  

Overall, I think it’s definitely a good security enhancement but security lies on the weakest link, right?

Link: Azure PowerShell Tools version 0.8.6 is available

The Azure PowerShell Tools are updated very often. But, this 0.8.6 release, is special and has many features that I was looking forward to. This release has the new Azure VM DSC extension cmdlets, …

Finally: Non-interactive login support for Microsoft Organizational account with Add-AzureAccount -Credential.

For achieving daily full script automation, the login pop-up window every 24h wasn’t very nice.

Having a personal Windows Azure account all setup, I began developing a blank site for the purpose of being a “test tube” for my self taught dabblings on Razor, Twitter Bootstrap and other subjects of interest to me.

The initial setup was:

• Provisioning the Azure Web Site;
• Getting the Bootstrap starter page and its custom stylesheet;
• Adding the files to a new Project on the TFS default collection.

Afterwards, I submitted a first check-in to TFS service just for the sake of testing the whole of the development tools. I got the error: “No files were checked-in”.

After a few exploitations, I realized the Webmatrix development tool failed to create the TFS project. I had to create the project manually on the TFS Web console and afterwards it worked fine.

Still, it’s kind of a let down to find this bug on such an early stage of development. 

After having the setup needed to start developing code, keep track of it’s changes and deploy the resulting application, all resorting to Microsoft Cloud resources, it’s time to start building the proof of concept.
So, open up Web Matrix and from the startup screen choose “New > Template Gallery”:

On the template selection, choose “Personal Site” and give it a name of your liking:

You can create a site on Windows Azure where you’ll later deploy the web site on, if you skip this you can do it later at deploy time:

After the template has completed the installation and configuration steps, you can start by adding it to source control, using the “Use TFS” on the source control section of the ribbon:

Insert your Team Foundation Service URL and press connect. Afterwards choose the project where you’d like to keep version control of you web application:

Check in all the files of the initial version of your site (basically as-is from the template installation):

Afterwards, you might want to check on the TFS Web portal if the changeset has been successfully checked in:

Continue to edit the personal site, following Microsoft’s instructions on how to place your personal data into to web pages. Test it on the local machine, here’s how mine looks like:

If all is well, check in your changes to TFS once again. Next, let’s publish the site onto Windows Azure:

Pick the site you created upon starting, or create one now:

Confirm the publishing operation, if all goes well you’re done:

The site is live on Microsoft’s cloud platform. The URL of my testing site is: http://ozziepersonalsite.azurewebsites.net/
Happy coding!

Microsoft has been very persuasive pushing Windows Azure as a cloud hosting alternative. It’s a broad range of services that one can use to support many kinds of scenarios: web applications, mobile apps, databases, content distribution networks and more.

I will finally get around to test drive Windows Azure for Web application development. I’ll be using the following tools and services from Microsoft:

• Web Matrix 3 (still in beta at the time of this post): a free, lightweight, cloud-connected web development tool.
• Team Foundation Service: Your source code and work items are stored in the cloud. Plan projects, collaborate with your team, and manage your code online from anywhere.
• Windows Azure: Microsoft’s cloud platform.

To use the free TFS service you have to register your Microsoft account here. This free service includes:

• Up to 5 users
• Unlimited number of projects
• Version control (TFVC or Git)
• Work item tracking
• Agile planning tools
• Feedback management
• Build (still in preview)
• Test management (still in preview)

For a free trial of Windows Azure services, you also have to register your Microsoft account here. Your free trial contains:

• virtual machines & cloud services / 750 compute hours per month
• SQL server / 750 hours of web, standard, or enterprise
• web sites / 10 web sites
• mobile services / 10 mobile services
• relational database / 1 SQL database
• SQL reporting / 100 hours per month
• storage / 70 GB with 50,000,000 storage transactions
• backup / 20 GB
• data transfer / unlimited inbound & 25GB outbound
• media services encoding / 50 GB (input & output combined)
• cdn / 20 GB outbound with 500,000 transactions
• cache / 128 MB
• service bus / 1,500 relay hours and 500,000 messages

To download and install Web Matrix you don’t need any extra registration. Be aware that version 3 is the one used here to take advantage of the Azure and TFS integration.

In conclusion, the working setup for the Azure test-drive will be:

• Team Foundation Service for source code version control;
• windows Azure account to deploy applications and services on;
• Downloaded and installed Web Matrix to build a Web application, add it to Source Control and deploy it from there.

A free guide is available on MSDN patterns & practices section, demonstrating how you can create from scratch a multi-tenant, software as a service (SaaS) application to run in the cloud.
This guide is the third release of the second volume in a series about Windows Azure. It demonstrates how you can create from scratch a multitenant, Software as a Service (SaaS) application to run in the cloud by using the latest versions of the Windows Azure tools and the increasing range of capabilities of Windows Azure.

The guide is intended for any architect, developer, or information technology (IT) professional who designs, builds, or operates applications and services that are appropriate for the cloud. It is primarily written for people who work with Windows-based systems. You should be familiar with the Microsoft .NET Framework, Microsoft Visual Studio, ASP.NET, SQL Server and Microsoft Visual C#.
You can check ou the guide at this MSDN page.

Microsoft has released in it’s download center a free e-book about how you can use the powerful infrastructure services that are part of Windows Azure to simplify development; integrate the component parts of a hybrid application across the cloud, on-premises, and third-party boundaries; and maximize security, performance scalability, and availability.
This guide is intended for architects, developers, and information technology (IT) professionals
who design, build, or operate applications and services that run on or interact with the cloud. Although applications do not need to be based on the Microsoft® Windows® operating system to operate in Windows Azure, this book is written for people who work with Windows-based systems. You should be familiar with the Microsoft .NET Framework, the Microsoft Visual Studio® development system, ASP.NET MVC, and the Microsoft Visual C#® development language.
This content was already available on MSDN as part of the patterns and practices series. You can now download the full e-book here.