Anith Gopal

I noticed that some of the Windows Azure end users were looking for the information about versions of Operating System with Internet Information Services [IIS] running under Windows Azure Datacenter.

The announcement that Spotify is transforming itself (at least in part) to an application platform has been grabbing some serious attention in recent days. For those who missed it, the basic idea is that developers will now be able to create HTML5 apps that integrate into the Spotify platform

One of the great features of Windows Phone is the natural feel of the left-to-right (or right-to-left) scrolling of apps and hubs.  There’s a good reason for this flow – the Windows Phone team looked into the behaviour of how users interact with the phone and figured out that the anatomy of the hand is such that its actually easier to scroll left and right vs. up and down (true story!).

As much as I’m fascinated with where HTML5 is going, most of my day to day work is all about what you can do right now (or at the very least, ways to hack something together that works until a more elegant solution comes along). But today, I want to briefly focus on a few things HTML5 can’t do just yet (but which I think it’ll be able to do pretty soon)

As you may know, the Microsoft TechDays Conference took place in Montreal last week and we have landed an interview with Louis-Philippe Pinsonneault, a local Montreal developer.  He is a really nice guy and a great developer.  I was very happy to finally meet him in person after chatting with him over email on several occasions.

One of the great value propositions of federations is the ability to represent all the data distribution on the server side for both your schema (for example which parts of your schema you want to scale out and using what keys etc) and your runtime layout (for example whether you need 30 or 300 federation members at any one time to handle your workload). The annotations you put in to express your design and runtime decisions are represented in a number of system views. In part 1, we will take a look at the basic views that represent federations itself and members.

Another great feature for Windows Phone Mango is the ability to set up reminders and alerts in your application (While it is not running).  You would be surprised how many applications want/need this.

A significant part of F# 3.0 support for F# Information Rich Programming is the F# Type Provider mechanism . An F# type provider is a component that provides types, properties, and methods for use in your program

I have had some interesting discussions with Wayne Ewington and others on what base template should you use for web templates. A little background to what this base template means to web templates: Web Templates depend on an existing site definition installed in the server. The general guideline is to always reference a site template that is always going to be present

I’ve just updated my August Tech Calendar post with this free, on-line event sponsored by the SQL Server Worldwide Users Group (SSWUG) .  Thanks to Rachel Appel to bringing it to my attention! On Friday, August 19th, from 12 noon to 6 p.m. ET, a number of Azure and SQL Azure experts will cover various aspects of developing and working with the Windows Azure platform.  If you haven’t yet had a chance to immerse yourself in Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, this is a convenient (and FREE) way to do so.

Today I’ll show you an example of how can use the pattern used in part 23 to make the utilities from part 1 look a little different and also work for any number of branches in a choice.

Very good article showing how to access SQL Azure from Ruby.