Brian H. Prince

I just found out that I will be speaking at the Windows Azure Connections event, which is held in Las Vegas in March. I will be on a cloud discussion panel one of the evenings. We did that at the Fall Connections and it was a lot of fun.

I will also be delivering my “Making Crazy Money with Games in the Cloud” talk, which is always a lot of fun to give.

If you are going to be there, let me know, so we can grab dinner or something.

Many of you have an MSDN subscription. Frankly, I don’t think I would take a development job if it didn’t come with MSDN, it simply provides all the tools you need to be a developer in the Microsoft world.

Along with that subscription comes a hefty amount of free Windows Azure resources. This makes it really easy to get into cloud computing, do some trial work, and even use that time during your project development.

We have worked hard to make it easier than ever to activate your MSDN benefits. If you tried before, and bailed out because you didn’t have the subscription id, or didn’t want charges to your credit card, then now is your time!

You don’t need to know your MSDN Subscription ID. Just use the Live ID your MSDN account is tied to.

To get started, go to Windows Azure membership offers page.

Why do I need to give credit card?

Yes, you still need a credit card, but you don’t need to worry. We use it to verify you are over 18 (to accept the terms of service) as well as to prove you are a human.

We will never charge to the card because when you activate your MSDN account a spending cap will be placed on your account. This will limit the resources you consume in Windows Azure to those that you get for free from your MSDN subscription. If you hit that limit, we shut down your app until the next month.

You can remove the spending cap if you want. In this case, when you go over your free allocation of resources we will charge any overage to your credit card. Once removed the spending cap cannot be re-activated.

With an MSDN subscription, I can’t think of a reason why you would remove the spending cap. In most instances you will have the amount of time you need for dev/test. Your free utilization resets every month. If you really are going over this cap, maybe you need a different type of subscription.

What do I get?

You will get a generous allocation of free Windows Azure resources. How many you get depends on your MSDN subscription level. I have copied those allocations here, but you should always check WindowsAzure.com for the latest details.

What are compute hours?

When you deploy an application to Windows Azure we allocated hardware to you. We charge based on how many hours of CPUs (across all of your servers, or as we say instances) that are allocated to you. We do not charge based on how busy the CPU is. Meaning, an app that is used heavily is charged the same as one that is stagnant and not in use.

Why do we charge this way? Think of it like a hotel room. You are renting the room by the day. When you leave the hotel room to go have fun, or go to a business meeting, you have left your stuff in the room. No one else is going to use that room, at least until you check out.

So even if there isn’t any load on your servers, if your app is deployed to them, you are being charged. This means you need to look at what you have deployed, and for how long. What this also means is that if you don’t need a server up GET RID OF IT. You will be charged for those servers until you tear them down. Just like in a hotel, you will be charged until you check out. The only difference is we charge by the hour, and most hotels charge by the day.

This is the age of disposable servers. Why have all your QA servers up and running all night long when the test team has gone home? That’s a waste of money. Shut them down at night, and restart them in the morning when you are ready to run some more tests. Same thing with your development environment. This is a great way to get the most out of your hours.

To make this even easier, write a simple PowerShell script to do it for you. You could even schedule the script to run everyday at 6am to start up the servers, and at 8pm to shut them down.

What do they mean by ‘Small Instance’?

An instance is a virtual server that we have deployed on your behalf. There are different sizes of instances. You will choose how big the instances are when you deploy, to meet the needs of your app. The typical web app will use a flock of small instances.

Each size of instance (small->medium->large->x-large) basically doubles the amount of CPU and RAM available to your app. Since we charge by the number of CPUs in total, the size does not really affect your bill, only the resources you have per virtual server. As an example, an app that is deployed with 8 small instances (eight servers that have a single CPU each) will cost the same as a single x-large instance (a single server with 8 CPU’s). These instances are running on hardware that is dedicated to you. You won’t have to worry about the noisy-neighbor problem.

You are billed for CPU run time, not CPU load utilization.

When you have 1,500 hours of free small instance hours, we mean 1,500 hours of small instance EQUIVELANT hours. If you run 10 x-large instances, that counts as 80 small hours per running hour. In this configuration you would run for 18.75 hours for free per month.

There is one exception to this setup. We also have extra-small instances. These are still independent virtual servers, but they are running on some shared hardware. You are basically getting a third of a CPU instead of a whole one. Because of this you are charged the equivalent of 1/3 of a small instance hour . If you deploy 10 extra-small instances (which is 10/3 small instance hours per running hour) you could run for about 450 hours per month.

The extra-small instance is meant for either lightweight needs (a small administrator app) or for running your development environment.

What other free stuff do I get?

You will get free storage (blobs, queues, and tables), a SQL Azure database, a cache, bandwidth, lots of other stuff.

I work for a large company, how do I know if I have an MSDN subscription?

You have to figure out who your MSDN administrator is. This is usually someone in IT management or purchasing. I would recommend you start with whoever actually gives you access to downloads, or ISO’s internally. You don’t need to know this person if you already have access to your MSDN subscription with your Live account. If you don’t yet, this person can link your MSDN subscription to your Live Id.

I have billing issue, who do I contact and what information do I need while contacting?

The easiest way is to start a ticket online, and then call in. It saves having to relay all of the technical information over the phone. When you do open a ticket, you will need your basic contact information.

You will be asked several questions to rank the severity of the issue so that we respond with the proper amount of hair on fire.

You may be asked for your subscription id. This is a GUID, and can be found on your management portal. Log in to the portal at windows.azure.com with your Live Id used for the subscription. When the subscription in question. You will find your subscription id in the right hand portal is loaded, click on the “Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN” tab. Then click on subscriptions. Choose the properties panel.

If your issue is causing a critical business impact, please dial 1-866-MSONLINE ([866] 676-6546) for support in English, or click here for a local number within your region. Currently, there is no charge for Windows Azure platform and service support.

You can verify the health of the Windows Azure Platform on the Service Dashboard.

Resources:

• Review your MSDN cloud computing benefits
• Understand how the spending limits work
• Use the MSDN forums to get benefits questions answered.
• Let the “how to” guides connect between your needs and the cloud, such as How to Create a .NET App With SQL Azure
• Learn about Windows Azure via online training assets from the Azure DevCamp series.

The Microsoft Visual Studio Design Research Team is looking for participants to give us direct feedback on our development tools, languages and libraries! Opportunities include usability studies of upcoming features, focus groups where we explore new ideas, as well as 1:1 interviews.

Is this just about Visual Studio users?

You do NOT need to be a Visual Studio user! We are looking for all kinds of developers using a variety of tools and technologies.

What do you get out of it?

When you are selected to participate in one of our research studies, benefits include a combination of the following:

· A chance to see and use upcoming tools, features, and language/library enhancements

· Interact directly with members of our development teams to discuss your requirements for efficient and effective tools,

· Directly influence future design decisions, and

· Receive a choice of a Microsoft product from our gratuity list - ranging from Visual Studio Pro thru Xbox games!  

We have a brief enrollment form that will ask you a few questions about your company, your job, and the software and languages you actively use. We will contact you as soon as we have a research study that matches your specific background and/or interests.

Enrollment Form

This enrollment should only take 3-5 minutes to complete.  Please note that the Enrollment link originates from Microsoft User Research and is hosted by our survey software provider.   Visit http://www.microsoft.com/userresearch/studies.aspx if you have any concerns. Please note that regrettably government employees and non-U.S. residents are not eligible for a Microsoft gratuity – but we would still welcome your feedback.  

Part of the recent December release for Windows Azure included an overhaul of the billing portal. You now see a visual representation of your resource allocation (for trials and MSDN), and how much you have used for the month towards that allocation.

In this screen shot, I am showing some of the bars for compute, storage, and database.

The portal also lets you now download your billing data as a CSV file. This is important for those customers that need to break up their charges, and do some pass through billing. Or maybe they want to run a cost model to predict costs with usage curves.

You can also change how you are billed, and even cancel your subscription.

I have created a short video to show you how the billing portal works.

In November we released version 1.6 of the Windows Azure SDK. Along with that we released an upgrade to the Visual Studio tooling. You can download them both here. Of course you can see my prior post on how to sign up for a free trial.

The new tooling makes publishing to Windows Azure super easy. VS lets you download a settings file from your subscription. This file includes all the information VS needs to push out bits to your cloud. No more alt-tabbing like a tango dancer back and forth from VS and the dev portal to copy certificates, upload stuff, get your subscription id, etc. Very, very easy.

This was really the first little glimpse at how the new focus on making developing for Windows Azure easier is fruitful.

Enjoy this light snack of a video. Fairly informal.

It hasn’t been a secret that signing up for a Windows Azure account was not a trivial task. It involved more than 12 steps, several web sites, and the collection of three dusty relics.

With the focus on simplification, the sign up process has been boiled down to three steps.

1. Login with Live ID

2. Confirm you are a human with a text/sms message to your phone.

3. Provide billing/credit card details.

Your account will be created with a spending cap if you choose to use the 3 month free trial, or your MSDN account benefits. These spending caps will turn off your services if you reach the ‘free’ level of you resource allocation. This means that your credit card will only be charged if you choose to remove the spending caps. Now you are play with the cloud, for free, without any risk or fear of being charged!

It is so easy to create an account now that you can do it in a quick few moments. I made a small snack sized video to show you how quickly it is. Forgive the ugly ‘blurring’ of the credit card data. It may be the giving season, but I am not that giving.

CodeMash v2.0.1.2 tickets went on sale this morning, 10/24/2011 at 10:24am. Over the weekend I made my usual CodeMash bet: If we sell out by Friday, Twitter can pick my hair color.

Why Friday? I thought last time we sold 900 tickets in 3.5 days. This year we were going to sell 1200 tickets (not counting speakers, staff, volunteers, and sponsors). So I scaled up the time.

Boy. Was I wrong.

The 1200 CodeMash tickets sold out in 20 minutes. So fast, that we brought Eventbrite (our ticket SaaS to their knees). I have received plenty of email from people that are concerned about their money or ticket.

So what happened?

0. EB lets you start checking out. They use a greedy allocation algorithm, locking those tickets for you for 15 minutes. This is normally enough time for most people to check out. This is a time challenge for people that are buying more than 10 tickets at a time however.

1. During checkout, backend messages are sent to PayPal to process the credit card. Once that is done, PP sends a message back to EB.

2. You receive your PP receipt.

3. Normally, EB receives the response from PP and commits the tickets to you. In this case, EB was swamped and couldn’t respond to the response from PP. Because of this….

4. Failing a response from PP in the 15 minute window EB releases your tickets, and marks your order as ‘abandoned’.

5. The ticket buyer does NOT receive an email from EB.

6. Ticket buyer gets confused and emails me.

7. Tickets are re-allocated to someone else trying to buy their tickets, which perpetuates the problem.

If you fell into this crack, HAVE NO FEAR. The PP messages are queued, and EB is working through them, assigning tickets to people as they go. Everyone who paid, WILL GET A TICKET. Do NOT worry. If you haven’t received an email from EB in a few days, please let me know through the CodeMash EB registration page. That goes direct to me.

We sold 1,200 in 20 minutes. There are about 175 tickets backlogged.

Wow. Can’t wait for CodeMash this year.

My super awesome team member, Rangy Pagels, has rebuilt his Team System Café web site from the ground up using some of our latest technologies. If you are interested in, or want to get more out of TFS, then this is the web site for you. I will Randy share the love in his own words.

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What is Team System Café?

Team System Cafe was developed specifically as an information portal to service customers, teammates, partners, and community.

What does Team System Café do?

The Team System Café aggregates and showcases the latest information concerning Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server, product information resources.  This is accomplished through Freshly brewed news, Slides & Articles, Help & How To’s, FAQs, Online Training links, Upcoming event links, Practical tips, and a What’s Brewing blog area.

When do I use Team System Café?

· If you’re looking for answers to common questions, spend a minute and look here first.

· If you’re looking for updates to common customer problems, spend a minute and look here first.

· If you’re looking for news and information on our dev tools, spend a minute and look here first.

· If you’re looking for the newest presentations on product features, spend a minute and look here first.

Please consider the Team System Café as your “first line” resource of information. I’m committed to keeping this site updated and would welcome any material/suggestions you have for posting.  Please forward the URL to anyone who you think would benefit from this information.

How was Team System Café built?

This site has been designed using Asp.Net MVC 3, the Razor view engine, scaffolding, NuGet, Entity Framework 4.1, C# 4.0, and .Net Framework 4. The backend is SQL Server 2008 R2. ASP.NET MVC gives you a powerful, patterns-based way to build dynamic websites that enables a clean separation of concerns and that gives you full control over markup for enjoyable, agile development. ASP.NET MVC includes many features that enable fast, TDD-friendly development for creating sophisticated applications that use the latest web standards.  It was a wonderful experience designing and coding this site using MVC.  A special thanks to Brandon Satrom for being there in a few sticky spots.

While I was at Casual Connect in Seattle (no, it’s not like that, it’s a casual game developer conference) the Windows Azure Evangelism team (Nate, Wade, etc.) soft released the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games. Today they have officially released version 1.0.

One of the key industries that are leveraging the cloud these days are gaming companies, especially social game companies. Most of these companies are small, with limited production budgets, and they hope to win it big with a game that goes viral through social networks. The cloud fits this business model pretty well, where you can launch your game with a small budget, and scale up the infrastructure as the game grows in popularity. Just imagine all of the games we will now see, that in years past would never see the light of day because the developer didn’t have the cash to buy a rack of silicon. Amazing!

So, what does this lengthy named and well built toolkit do for you? It includes code and services that you can use in your own games, for some very common features. It also includes three games built on that engine, including Tankster.net.

Tankster.net is a game built completely in HTML5 with a Widows Azure backend. It provides for inventory, purchasing, chatting, and multiplayer, because of the toolkit.

The toolkit specifically provides libraries to provide these functions:

Server APIs

• Authentication (Uses Windows Azure Access Control Servers)
• Game Management
• Eventing
• User Profiles
• Leaderboards
• Inventory
• Real-Time Communication (Chat, etc.)
• Notifications
• In-App Purchases

HTML5 Features

• Game Play
• Turn Management
• Animations
• Inventory
• Leaderboard
• Events
• Chat (Real-Time Communication)
• Social Sharing (Like, Tweet, etc.)
• Audio

This is just version 1.0, so if there is a feature you really want, you should let them know. I know the ream is eager to rapidly grow the toolkit and provide the features game developers are looking for.

You should download the toolkit here. If you want to read a series of blog posts on how to work with the toolkit, head on over to Nate’s blog. He knows ALL about it. Psst: I runs Node.JS to help with browser to server communications.

About a week ago we quietly released a new version of the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010 (can our product names get longer?).

The easiest way to get the tools is to use the Web Platform Installer. The WPI is THE best way to get tools, SDKs, and configure you servers for use with the web and the cloud. Download and install it, and then start it up. To install the new Windows Azure tools simply search for “Azure Tools” and it will come right up. Click the Add button, and then the Install button at the bottom. You can easily select multiple items, and install them all in one go.

The great thing about WPI is that it doesn’t just install the bits for you, which saves you time in finding, downloading, and installing stuff. It also knows what the prerequisite requirements are, and installs them as well. It can also set the proper configurations in place.

What does the new tool version include?

1. Profiler – You can now profiler your roles while they are running in Windows Azure. Once you have a role deployed, you can right click on an instance in the server explorer and choose ‘View Profiling Report.’ This will help you find performance issues in your applications.

2. MVC3 – In the older tools, MVC2 was a listed role template, and you could always hack MVC3 to work. Now MVC3 is listed as a role template as well. This will automatically include and ship the MVC3 assemblies with your project, so you don’t have to remember to mark them as copylocal.

3. Multiple Service Configurations – As ASP.NET developers we have been spoiled with the great configuration management tools in VS. You could have several web.configs (one each for debug, qa, staging, and production) and then have the right config deployed as needed when you published. In Windows Azure we had to manage service configurations by hand. If you wanted to change storage account connection strings between dev and prod (and who doesn’t) you had to REMEMBER to do this every time. This always leads to a disaster, embarrassment, and sometimes the donning of a dunce cap in the office.

Now you can have multiple service configuration files, each tagged to you own defined setup. Most people will have at least ‘local’ and ‘cloud’. But I would guess you might have also ‘QA Cloud’.

But, wait, that’s not all! We now have package validation. VS will now politely remind you if you make some of the more common mistakes that will cost you time. For example, if you try to publish a project that has local assemblies that AREN’T marked copylocal, you will be reminded so.

And lastly a few notes I copied straight from the web site because I didn’t think I could add anything by re-interpreting them, and I wouldn’t want mess anything up since they are sort of important. All of this progress doesn’t come at a cost. There is one breaking change:

Caution

Breaking Change: When you build your Windows Azure application the folder named csx is no longer created by the Version 1.4 (August 2011) release. The files in this folder enabled you to use csrun to run your application using the Windows Azure compute emulator. If you used the contents of this folder with Team Build to run your application locally and test the application before you deployed, you must now set the PackageForDevFabric property to true in your build template.

Important

With the release of the 1.4.1 Refresh of Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools Version 1.4 (March 2011), Web Deploy was enabled for the Windows Azure Visual Studio tools. When you are developing and testing a Windows Azure application, you can use Web Deploy to publish changes incrementally for your web roles. Web Deploy is not for use in a production environment. For more information about how to use Web Deploy, see Enable Web Deploy When You Publish Your Application.