Advent Calendar for Windows Azure

While searching for a Advent Calendar for my girlfriend who resides in Austria for her studies, the idea of a cloud advent calendar came into my mind. Ten hours later http://adventcalendar.cloudapp.net was born: A scalable calendar using Windows Azure Blob Storage and Silverlight technologies.

This advent calendar is not only for my girlfriend but everyone can create his own one there. I admit usability and design suffered a little bit from the pressure of time (Dec 1st is tomorrow!") but it really works! Give it a try: Go to http://adventcalendar.cloudapp.net, click the “New Calendar” button and build your own windows azure cloud advent calendar.

Here is a screenshot:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Use the Management-Link to add images, music and text to the calendar and its items.
Give the Calendar-Link to those who should get the calendar.

I’ll post the code here, soon.

PDC 2010: Windows Azure Storage Deep Dive

The first session that caught my attention is a talk from Jai Haridas on Windows Azure Storage. He gives a great overview of the current state and functionality of Blob Storage, Table Storage, Queue Storage and Cloud Drives. This session has a focus on the scalability of Windows Azure Storage using partitioning and load balancing. A MUST for everyone who creates “real” applications for the cloud.

A nice give-away is the part on best practices with Windows Azure Storage. Jai shows how to

• support scalability by avoiding the common “append-only” pattern
• optimize queries to the Table Storage
• use continuation tokens
  (e.g. request more than 1000 rows from Table Storage)
• deal with poisoned queue messages

Check out his full speech at http://bit.ly/bfu1iw.