Are you a Windows Phone Developer?

How do you win the smart phone game? Provide a zillion of applications that the lazy user flips with his finger or gestures at.

How do you develop? You got to know XAML.
You can see another sample as well at the above link.

Microsoft is all out to win the phone game. The VS2010 Express for Windows Phone will motivate Microsoft Developers and Game developers to create applications.

Download the Download Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone here..The vm-web set up program (3,265KB) downloads fast but takes a while to install some 14 items.
I used a new notebook with Windows 7 Ultimate.

The interface is cool and initial templates are available for both Silverlight and Game enthusiasts.

I took the program for a test drive. The interface has the look and feel of VS 2010 RC with fewer menu items. It has a Windows 7 Phone Emulator and supports intellisense.

I tried the PhoneList application and modified a few items here and there. Looks like it worked but it ran very slow when I tried to run the basic program.
 Here are some opening screen shots of the interface.

Azure’s foray into Facebook Domain

Recently Facebook beat Google in searches, and now Microsoft plays host to Facebook on the Azure Cloud.
We live in interesting times.

A new toolkit was released for Facebook.
This toolkit enables Facebook apps to run in the Azure Cloud

Download toolkit here:

http://facebookazuretoolkit.codeplex.com/

The toll kit provides hook ups, but if you want to create a new application,
you better get to this page and learn how to create an IFRAMES CANVAS application!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ee695841.aspx



According to documentation you get all this stuff with the toolkit:

Facebook Developers Toolkit
Ninject 2.0 for Dependency Injection
Asp.Net MVC 2
Windows Azure Software Development Kit (February 2010)
AutoMapper Link
Azure Toolkit - Simplified library for accessing Message Queues, Table Storage and Sql Server
Automated build scripts for one-click deployment from TFS 2010 to Azure

This is good to know. You get a lot of related Azure stuff.


Other resources:

http://www.thuzi.com/

Microsoft Azure and Open Data Protocol(OData)

In an increasingly interconnected world interoperability finds the highest resonance. The Open Data Protcol (OData) provides developers from many progrmming background such as C#, Java, Javascript, PHP etc. an open protocol to produce and consume data.

Windows Azure Platfrom not only stands to gain from conforming to this protocol but also answers Google's GData with a rich data ecosystem. Microsoft Azure is not just Microsoft specific but opens its doors to everything under the sky.

Who produce OData?
The ones that expose data using OData protocol. There are a number of OData producers:

Applications exposing OData Services

Sharepoint 2010
IBM Web Sphere
Microsoft SQL Azure
Windows Azure Table Storage
SQL Server Reporting Services

Live OData Services

Netflix
Open Science Data Initiative
Open Government Data Initiatives
Northwind database exposed as OData Service
and many others


OData Consumers
Browsers
Silverlight built OData Explorer
Excel 2010
LinqPad
Client libraries (Javaacript, PHP,Java,.NET etc)

OData Protocol

Here is the main reference:
http://www.odata.org/developers/protocols/overview

It is built on robust and well known technologies such as:

AtomPub  [RFC 5023]
JSON       [RFC 4627]
HTTP(s)   [RFC 2616]
TCP         [RFC 793]
XML.

IP address range of Windows Azure (Microsoft Data Centers)

This may be of interest to you if you want to change your service namespace or your app in one region is accessing your SQL Azure in another region. Here are IP ranges copied over from this link. Review details there.

IP Ranges
United States (North/Central): 65.52.0.0/21, 65.52.8.0/21, 65.52.16.0/21, 65.52.24.0/21, 207.46.203.64/27, 207.46.203.96/27, 207.46.205.0/24

Europe (North): 94.245.88.0/21, 94.245.104.0/21, 65.52.64.0/21, 65.52.72.0/21, 94.245.114.0/27, 94.245.114.32/27, 94.245.122.0/24


Asia (Southeast): 111.221.80.0/21, 111.221.88.0/21, 207.46.59.64/27, 207.46.59.96/27

You can also ping or tracert your SQL Azure Server.

India marches into Azure Cloud

Amid questions that Cloud programming may hit the thriving outsourcing industry, it looks like India is marching right into the middle of the Cloud with Windows Azure becoming available recently in India for Indian businesses and developers. Planning for the long haul and dedication has paid off in past and surely it will happen again. Probably it will emerge stronger because of the cloud. Which of the cloud players will remain standing in India after the dust is cleared remains to be seen. May be, Indian entrepreneurs will come up with their own 'Swadeshi' cloud at a cost that will haul away users from overseas vendors.

*Swadeshi= indigenous

May 2010 target for SQL Server 2008 R2

Microsoft has made it public that this software will be available by May 2010. This is the product that works best with the Azure platform besides being feature rich otherwise.

The key benefits as advertised are,

A trusted and scalable platform

IT & Productivity- Improved virtualization support

Managed self-servie BI -Integration with Excel



It is still in Preview (SQL Server 2008 R2 Nov-CTP).

More resources here(including Books On Line-BOL)



Also read installation posts here:
http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2009/11/on-installingupgrading-sql-server-2008.html

http://www.packtpub.com/article/microsoft-sql-server-2008-installation-made-easy

http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2009/11/sql-server-2008-r2-nov-ctp-installs.html