Here are some resources and blog posts from my fellow Technical Evangelists here in East Region:
Tag: Windows Azure
Weekly East Region Roundup: Vol. 8
Here are some resources and blog posts from my fellow Technical Evangelists here in East Region:
Weekly East Region Roundup: Vol. 7
Here are some resources and blog posts from my fellow Technical Evangelists here in East Region:
Weekly East Region Roundup: Vol. 4
Here are some resources and blog posts from my fellow Technical Evangelists here in East Region:
Developer
Lots of activity from my developer-focused peers…read the whole list…you won’t regret it.
Weekly East Region Roundup: Vol. 3
Here are some resources and blog posts from my fellow Technical Evangelists here in East Region:
Developer
- Brian Hitney and I both wrote about moving a blog to Windows Azure Websites last week. This week, Steve Maier adds a unique perspective…helping a non-techie relative with a small business get their website set up on the free tier of Windows Azure Websites to save money and simplify their lives.
My Site’s Fallen, and it Can’t Get Up!
TL:DR
Short version…some extra traffic crashed my blog last week, thanks to my decision to use cheap shared hosting. In response, I moved my blog to Windows Azure Web Sites, where I can easily scale to meet any traffic spikes. Read on for the background, or skip to “Making the Move” for the technical details.
The Background
Cheap hosting. It lures you in with the siren song of saving lots of money. And for a while, perhaps even a long while, it may give you everything you need. But sooner or later, you find out that you get what you pay for.
East Region Roundup
Wanted to share a few posts from my fellow Microsoft Technical evangelists here in East Region, hopefully you’ll find them as interesting and useful as I did:
- New Digs, Windows Azure and Orchard – Michael Cummings talks about the reasons he chose Windows Azure and Orchard CMS for his new blog. Given that I run my blog on Orchard (and just moved to Windows Azure), I thought it was interesting to compare his reasons to mine. Also interested to hear more about his idea for a Bing search module.
- From Steve Maier comes The Puppy Eat, a somewhat sick and twisted casual game for Windows 8, but quite well-executed, and fun, if you don’t take it too seriously.
- Jim O’Neil has a good post on using Fiddler to test an APIMASH app. Of course, the technique can be used on any Windows Store app you happen to be developing.
- Jesse Freeman is starting a new event series for game developers looking for focused coding time, called Game Developer Studio Time. If you’re in the NYC area, you should definitely check it out!
- Maria Naggaga reminds us that Unity is offering $100,000 in prizes, including a $30,000 grand prize, for the best apps and games built with Unity 3d, and as a bonus, she’s got a dancing elephant!
- Planning to attend Visual Studio LIVE! this fall in Orlando? Be sure to catch Dave Isbitski’s talks on Windows Phone and Windows Azure.
- Want to get a better handle on building a site or app on Windows Azure, and keep costs in line? Check out part 2 of Brian Hitney‘s “Building for Cost” series. Part 1 is available here.
- Joe Healy, aka DevFish, is looking for Florida devs who’ve published Windows Phone or Windows Store apps. Hit him up on his MSDN blog for more.
- Want to learn how to build games with Construct 2? Diego Lizarazo Rivera has a 5-part series that shows you how (link is to part 5, which has links to the rest).
- If you’re looking for info on Virtualization, Hybrid Cloud, or SharePoint, or if you’re an IT pro focused group in Mid-Atlantic looking for a good speaker, you should check out my IT evangelist peer Yung Chou.
- Do you already know VMWare, but want to learn more about using Hyper-V? Tommy Patterson shares a webcast you might be interested in.
That’s all I’ve got for today…I’ll post more links from my peers in future roundups. Let me know if you find these valuable!
Pardon my Dust
The Other Shoe…
OK, so I mentioned a few days ago that I updated my blog theme, and as a part of the process of revamping the blog, I also thought it might be a good time to add some better analytics, since the analytics suite used by default at my web host (who shall remain nameless, despite my temptation to call them out publicly) had started throwing 502 errors pretty much all the time.
I decided on the Piwik analytics platform, which was suggested by one of my peers. The good news is that Piwik is pretty straightforward to install, and despite my lack of familiarity with PHP and MySQL (ASP.NET is more my speed, given that I’ve written a few books about it), I was able to get it up and running reasonably quickly.
Microsoft DevRadio: (Part 7) Using Windows Azure to Build Back-End Services for Windows 8 Apps – Authentication Tips and Tricks
Wrapping up their “Using Windows Azure to Build Back-End Services for Windows 8 apps” series Brian Hitney , Andrew Duthie and Peter Laudati, as they showoff some useful tips and tricks around authentication for your Windows Azure Mobile Server based apps.
Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: Authentication Tips and Tricks
In previous installments of this series, I’ve shown how you can quickly create REST-based services accessible via HTTP that allow you to easily store and retrieve data in a Windows Store app, using several different approaches including WCF Data Services, ASP.NET Web API, and the new Windows Azure Mobile Services. You can read all of the previous parts of the series here. I recommend reading the intro post and the post on Windows Azure Mobile Services, as well as the most recent installment covering the basics of authentication with mobile services at a minimum, so you’re familiar with the games I’m using to demonstrate the concepts in the series, and with the basics of mobile services.