There is an event on Tuesday, December 6th at the Microsoft Office in Mason, OH to give some insight into what’s coming in SQL Server 2012.

Check it out and register at http://www.thinksis.com/events_SQL2012cincy.php

I tweeted about this yesterday, but for those of you following the blog, Microsoft has released a new Windows Azure SDK along with a new HPC (High Performance Computing) Scheduler SDK and Windows Azure Platform Training Kit.

One of the great new features of this SDK and Visual Studio Tools is the simplified deployment.  Now there is a way to get a publishing settings file which will reduce the number of steps necessary to do deployments from Visual Studio.  These settings can then be shared across developers so that the same management certificate is used.  It will definitely make things a lot easier to get going with Windows Azure, just be careful that when you get a publisher setting from the management portal and allow the management certificate to be created for you it can add it to all of your hosted services across multiple subscriptions.  If you are a co-admin on several subscriptions, this may not be the desired effect. 

There are several new features other than just simplified deployments for Visual Studio.  For example, via Visual Studio you can now create Hosted Services and Storage accounts without going to the portal.  Check it out the official blog post for more information and get the update via the Web Platform Installer.

Several months back I posted about a change happening in my life.  I was changing jobs from a great local consulting company to a service company focusing on Windows Azure.  Prior to the change I had been working at the same client for over six years, a financial services company in Mason, OH. 

Have you ever really wanted something, only to get it and realize it wasn’t what you needed?  In my career that’s happened twice now.  Straight out of college I was in law enforcement (yeah, not computer science… my degree is actually in Police Administration).  I was a police officer for a city in Northern Kentucky for a very short time.  Long enough to go through the academy and get about a third of the way through my field training.  One day it just hit me that this career path wasn’t good for me.  Several weeks went by and nothing got better, so I resigned.  I left not knowing what I would do instead, until I got a job that was somewhat computer related for state University.

Back in June I went to work for a Cloud Computing services company focusing on Windows Azure, which is what I’d been playing with in my own time anyway.  I loved teaching Windows Azure technology to folks through the Windows Azure Boot Camps.  The job I was going to would let me focus completely on only Windows Azure projects.  Part of my role was going to be evangelizing the platform, which meant going to conferences to give presentations (which I also love doing).  It was everything I was looking for at the time, exactly what I wanted.  Sadly, it wasn’t what I needed.

So, for the second time in my career I found that I was doing something that wasn’t good for me for a variety of reasons.  The job was exactly as described for the most part and the projects were pretty interesting.  It just wasn’t what I needed to be doing.  This last Wednesday was my last day.

What am I going to do now?  Well, as the title of this post implies, the more things change the more they stay the same.  No, I’m not going to back to the consulting company (though I would if I wanted to get back to consulting).  I have instead signed on to the financial services company that was my client for many years.  I’ve been very happy to see them grow over that time and have been impressed with how passionately they’ve adopted agile methodologies.  They have complete buy in for agile from the top down.  The business is loving it and the developers are reaping the benefits of a great working environment.  I’m looking forward to getting started on Monday.

Will I be working on Windows Azure?  Likely, not in my day job.  There might be some good fits for the cloud for the company, but I’m not aware of any major projects on the platform yet.  But, prior to going to work for the cloud computing services company I was mostly investing my own time and effort into Windows Azure anyway.  I have a few side projects in mind that will keep me up to date with Windows Azure beyond helping keep the Windows Azure Boot Camp program running.

So, time for yet another chapter in my career.  As many people have said, “change is coming”.  Strangely enough, change is the one constant in our field.  I’m glad to have had the opportunity to work with some great people over the last few months.  I’m glad I realized what was important to my life and I’m glad to have found the courage to chase it.

Mike Benkovich (http://www.benkotips.com/ | @mbenko) hold an online event each week to talk about Windows Azure.  This week I’ll be joining him to talk about the Windows Azure Boot Camp program and more.  Come join us!  It will be tomorrow (Friday) at 2:00 PM Eastern.

Register to attend!

If you are out in the Northwest region of the United States in the beginning of November you may want to check out the Seattle Interactive Conference.  The conference is on November 2nd and 3rd.  Note that on November 2nd they plan on having a Cloud Experience Track.  The track is all about using the cloud as a back end for mobile platforms and other applications.  Windows Azure will be covered, but also it looks like they’ll have sessions for how to get some cloud love for your Android and iOS devices as well as Windows Phone 7.

You can find out more information on the Windows Azure Blog.

See the list of speakers.

and get registered ($350).

Today at the BUILD conference they announced a lot new things, but for Windows Azure developers you’ll want to check out the announcements on the Windows Azure Team Blog.

A couple of big things to take note of in my opinion are:

1. Better simulation of the cloud environment in the emulators.  It has been re-architected and updated.
2. Release of the SDK 1.5 for Windows Azure AppFabric which includes a slew of updated features for the Service Bus that have been in the labs for a while.  Things like the distributed eventing and intra-app messaging.
3. The management API got several new enhancements including rollback of in-progress updates and deployments.
4. Geo-replication is now enabled for BLOB and Table storage!

There a lot more involved as well.  I’ll hopefully be getting to some blog posts around the new features soon.

If you one of the MANY Windows Azure developers who weren’t able to make it to the Build Windows conference out in California this week then don’t worry too much.  Sure, you won’t get that spiffy new Samsung slate PC running Windows 8 Developer Preview, but you can get the same session information on Windows Azure. 

The focus of the BUILD conference is not the cloud, but they do have just under two dozen sessions dealing with Windows Azure.  Check out the Azure session online (they will be available online after they are recorded live):

Azure Sessions Page 1

Azure Sessions Page 2

Brian H. Prince will even be out giving an intro level Windows Azure talk called “Getting Started with Windows Azure” on Thursday.  If you aren’t familiar with Windows Azure then take an hour and watch his presentation after it’s available online.  Brian’s a great speaker and will give you the high level overview of what Windows Azure is and what its moving parts are.

At a CINNUG meeting quite a while ago I was talking about the Windows Azure Storage subsystems: Queues, BLOBs and Tables.  While I was talking about Queues a question came up about using the Clear method on the CloudQueue object.  The MSDN Docs state: “The Clear method clears all messages from the queue”.   The question was, Does this also delete messages that are currently invisible (meaning a process has them taken them off the queue using GetMessage or GetMessages but has not deleted them yet)?  At the time I didn’t know the answer and said I would find out.  I even wrote a note to figure it out… which somehow ended up in the front of my notebook and completely forgotten. 

While I was sitting down at my laptop tonight this note slipped out of my notebook and reminded me that I still owe an answer to this.  I loaded up LINQPad and quickly set up some code to test this.  I created two queries in LINQPad.  One connected to a storage account, created a queue if it didn’t exist and added a message to the queue.  It also pulled the message from the queue with a timeout of about a minute then put the Thread to sleep for about a minute and a half.

Query One:

StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey credentials = new StorageCredentialsAccountAndKey(
	"somestorageAccountName",
	@"SomeStorageAccountKey"	);
CloudStorageAccount account = new CloudStorageAccount(credentials, true);
CloudQueueClient qClient = account.CreateCloudQueueClient();

CloudQueue q = qClient.GetQueueReference("sample");
q.CreateIfNotExist();

CloudQueueMessage msg = new CloudQueueMessage("Hello world");

q.AddMessage(msg);

CloudQueueMessage poppedMessage = q.GetMessage(TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1));

Thread.Sleep(TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1.5));

q.DeleteMessage(poppedMessage);

The second query connected to the same queue in the storage account and called Clear. 

Query Two:

//Same as above up to the creation of the queue reference.
CloudQueue q = qClient.GetQueueReference("sample");
q.CreateIfNotExist();

q.Clear();

I tested by executing the first query, which added a message and then pulled the message for processing, then immediately ran the second query.  At the end of the thread sleep in the first query the code attempted to delete the queue message which gave an error saying the queue message does not exist.

So yes, calling Clear does destroy ALL messages, even those hidden on the queue.  This does make sense as you are wanting to clear out the queue, but be aware that if you have code that has pulled a message for processing when Clear is called they will receive a StorageClientException (or a 404) when they go to delete that message from the queue.

The MSDN docs do mention that calling Clear on a queue that has a LOT of messages may timeout, in which case the client should retry to continue deleting the messages. 

On a side note, I was using http://myazurestorage.com to peek at the queue and contents as I was running this test and noticed that the ApproximateMessageCount property was returning 1 even after the message was grabbed off the queue, so it does take hidden messages into account.  Of course, as soon as I ran the second query this dropped to 0.   

A while back I did an interview with Dave Nielsen (from CloudCamp).  This has been up on YouTube for a while, but has recently been posted to the Bytes by MSDN series.  You can catch the interview on the Bytes by MSDN site.

The abstract for the interview is:

“Join this cloud discussion with Michael Wood, from Strategic Data Systems, and Dave Nielsen, Co-founder of CloudCamp. At Strategic Data Systems, they work on various projects including proof of concepts. As projects get backlogged, proof of concepts and small projects lose out. Dave and Mike discuss how Cloud Computing can alleviate the backlog and lower the barrier to innovation. Tune in to the end, to receive instructions on how to access your free 30-day pass to a Windows Azure account.”

This interview was taken back at the beginning of the year when I still worked at SDS.

I know I missed the original announcement of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games on the 20th, but I wanted to post a little about it and a few other resources.

Want to write a game?

The Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games includes some accelerators, code libraries and deployment tools to help you write some social based games.  There is even some guidance on how to make some money on the games you write.  You can read the full blog post intro from the Windows Azure team on their blog.  If you want to get an idea of the types of games you can create with this try checking out Tankster.  The whole goal of this toolkit is to get you started building these social games by giving you a “leg up”. 

More interested in Windows Phone 7 apps?

Wade Wegner released the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 several months ago.  If you are interested in getting a jump start with project templates and some code optimized for the phone check out this toolkit.  This toolkit inspired several folks from the community to create additional quick start kits for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure.  You can several quickstart templates at the Windows Phone 7 Azure Quickstarts project on codeplex.

More of a web developer?

Microsoft has also recently released the Windows Azure Accelerator for Web Roles.  This accelerator is geared to help provide a mechanism that will use web deploy to push your web site code changes out to your Windows Azure web roles without the necessity to do a deployment.  The templates provided pull the web code from storage and thus, new instances and healing instances always get the latest version of your application.  Really good stuff.

So what are you going to do with all these resources?

If you are using these toolkits, or have feedback about them, please join in the discussion online.  A thread has been started to let you share your creations using these toolkits on the MSDN Forums.  Join in, give feedback and have fun. 

Update:

I completely forgot the Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS.