Battlefield 3 Beta is looking beautiful – Caspian 64 player

Posted on September 29, 2011 by ericnel

My game for the next six months (at least) will be

Beautiful…

10 Great Questions to ask about the Windows Azure Platform

Posted on September 28, 2011 by ericnel

On Friday David and I are delivering an new session as part of a great agenda for the BizSpark Azure Camp (places still available – details and how to register).

Our session is on “10 Great Questions to ask about the Windows Azure Platform”.

First problem – David and I came up with 20+ questions to choose from, all based on the most frequent stuff we get asked in our roles. We currently have it down to 9. I know, I know…

I will share the questions and answers in glorious techno-colour post the event – but for now, how do these look?

Where is Windows Azure?
Will my code just work?
How big/small a solution can it handle?
Can you deploy on-premise OR cloud?
What are the differences between SQL Azure and SQL Server?
How fast is it?
Will it Autoscale?
How secure is it?
How much will it cost?
?

Related Links:

October 4th to 6th–FREE Online Conferences on Phone, Azure and IE

Posted on September 28, 2011 by ericnel

Three days of FREE conferences on the latest technologies from Microsoft – without even needing to get out of your pjs 🙂

Windows Azure Online Conference / Tuesday 4 October, 3-5pm

If you are just getting started with cloud computing with Windows Azure, this is the perfect starting point for you This online conference will help you get over any initial stumbling blocks, so you can quickly be productive in this new environment.

Windows Phone Online Conference / Wednesday 5 October, 3-5pm

We’ll help you familiarise yourself with different aspects of designing for Windows Phone, including the philosophy behind Metro and Application design. You don’t need any experience of Windows Phone development, you just need an interest in developing phone apps.

Internet Explorer Online Conference / Thursday 6 October, 3-5pm

In this conference we’ll discuss the difference between a website and a web application. You’ll also learn about HTML5 features that allow applications to do more than is currently possible with just AJAX and HTML 4. In-depth web development experience isn’t necessary you just need to be keen to build your knowledge of the different aspects of IE9.

Related Links:

Hilarious – BF3 comparison of PC vs PlayStation 3

Posted on September 26, 2011 by ericnel

This made me smile so much 🙂

Do you remember when games looked this good? 🙂

Windows Azure sessions from the BUILD conference

Posted on September 23, 2011 by ericnel

Although the BUILD conference was primarily about Windows 8, there was still a lot of great sessions on Windows Azure. Now… how do we collectively find the time to watch them 🙂

Overview

Windows 8 and Windows Azure

Data

Devices

Operations

Monitoring and troubleshooting Windows Azure apps by Michael Washam

Development/Other

Related Links:

Roger Jennings has a more comprehensive post which also covers related cloud technologies such as skydrive

Cloud computing is full – you will be connected as soon as possible

Posted on September 22, 2011 by ericnel

One interesting example of cloud computing is the OnLive (http://onlive.co.uk) gaming service which went live in the UK today.

And… must have proved to be very popular…

And alas, not as elastic as one might have hoped Sad smile

Followed by:

Working with Windows Azure on the Windows Developer Preview of Windows 8

Posted on September 22, 2011 by ericnel

There is a new Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8. Which is cool. The kit includes templates and samples to start using some of the new features of Windows 8 in your Windows Azure applications – and from a Windows Metro Style App. And there are several blog posts showing you how to use the kit:

Nick Harris’s Blog: Delivering Notifications with Windows Azure and the Windows Notification Service
Vittorio Bertocci’s Blog: Using ACS in Metro Style Applications
Wade Wegner’s Blog: Metro Style Apps with Windows Azure

So far so good.

But read on before you try any of the above…

You may run into a few issues getting an Azure development up and running on the Developer Preview. Which is where Wade Wegner can help with his post on running Azure tools and the SDK on the Windows Developer Preview. The three issues he addresses are:

The current Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio do not yet support Dev11
There are a few quirks getting dependencies for IIS installed on Windows 8 using the Web Platform Installer.
After Visual Studio 2010 and the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio are installed on a machine with Dev11, the Windows Azure tools will grab an environmental path variable that points to 11.0 instead of 10.0

Related Links:

Early Windows 8 Resources to sift through

Posted on September 21, 2011 by ericnel

Last week while I was on holiday in Seville, sipping sangria and enjoying full sun and 37 degrees (actually I was hiding in the shadows), we made a few small announcements at the BUILD conference. Actually we made lots of big announcements 🙂

I’m just working through the announcements (and some of the details behind them) myself and came up with the following starting points – some reflect the buzz/conversation from last week and others will increasingly be a great place to find more detail in the future.

Conference: