For more info see -
http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Compare/index.htm 

Red Gate has announced they now have an early access build of SQL Compare 8 that works with SQL Azure!  If you're interested in trying this out please complete the form at:

   http://www.red-gate.com/Azure

Please note that I' do not work for Microsoft or Red Gate Software – I’m just a very happy customer.

Below I have more information on how this support for SQL Azure came about.  Just like Microsoft has the “Windows 7 was my idea!” ads – I’m proud to say “Support for SQL Azure in SQL Compare was my idea!” – and this time it might just be true!

Basically we discuss how you can host your web roles in IIS and how you can create a keyboard shortcut to quickly attach the Visual Studio debugger to an IIS process – giving you your RAD (Rapid Application Development) process back!  I created two separate screencasts which you can access below:

  How to speed up Windows Azure Development (Part 1 of 2, 18 minutes)
  http://screencasts.ehuna.org/2010/01/how_to_speed_up_windows_azure.html

  How to speed up Windows Azure Development (Part 2 of 2, 9 minutes)
  http://screencasts.ehuna.org/2010/01/how_to_speed_up_windows_azure_1.html

Each article contains the screencast, additional notes and a sample Visual Studio 2008 project you can download.  Good Times!

Now at 11:15 PM (PST) it just says:

TechCrunch.com is hosted on Rackspace.com and some have reported this might be a security issue with Rackspace.com and that the attack could be server based (and not DNS related).  Inquisitr.com reports that TechCrunch.com was hacked around 10 PM as well.  These are interesting times we live in. 

We have deployed a few web roles to Windows Azure and every once in a while we get the following exception when connecting to SQL Azure:

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: A transport-level error has occurred when sending the request to the server. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - An established connection was aborted by the software in your host machine.)

This does not happen on every call, but it happened over 70 times a few weeks ago as our QA team was testing our web role.  Both the web roles and the SQL Azure database were in the same Windows Azure Data Center.  We did set the maxconnection to 96 for connection pooling.  We use .netTiers (http://nettiers.com/) for our ORM, it's similar to nHibernate.

I asked this question on the Windows Azure Forums
We finally figured out how to solve the issue when using .netTiers

Below I show you how you can avoid these exceptions – with a specific fix if you are using .netTiers (http://nettiers.com/) as your ORM.  See below for the exciting details.

Here’s our family enjoying burgers and shakes in a relaxing environment at a restaurant called the Pilot Butte (www.pilotbutte.com), in Bend, OR:

Turn up your sound and enjoy the relaxing Bossa Nova, Brazilian jazz from Antonio Carlos Jobim.  Below I copy the original stitched picture used in the video and a few other stitched pictures from the same trip.

Our niece Emma is shown in the second part of the video throwing the ball to Bingo.  The background music is “Winter Wonderland” by Harry Connick Jr. and his daughter Kate. 

  Windows Azure Monitoring, Logging, and Management APIs 
  http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/SVC15 (I also embed the video below)

We followed some of the principles defined in the above session and turned on monitoring on our currently cloud deployed web and worker roles.   Lanh, my co-worker, just finished the first version of our “Windows Azure Monitoring” application and we can now visualize this data – check out an example of our graphs:

  Visualizing Windows Azure web and worker roles performance counters
Click on image to zoom in

We can see CPU and RAM usage by hour, by day and for the last week.  Our system collects the data automatically from Azure storage or on demand.  We keep one week of raw data, but the aggregate data (e.g. the graph data) we don’t delete.  I think the graphs above are awesome – it’s like art! 

I believe Microsoft will eventually have some cool tools for us in the Windows Azure portal , but having this custom Windows Azure diagnostics application will be useful regardless.  For example, right now we will manually increase or decrease the number of web and worker role instances based on the performance counters above.  But eventually we may use the Windows Azure Management APIs and allow this application to do it for us. 

See below for more information on how we designed and implemented the above graphs.

Using rinetd and ServiceEx to access local Azure web roles

A couple of days ago I published an article with instructions to bypass this localhost restriction:

  Accessing the Windows Azure local development fabric from another computer
  http://blog.ehuna.org/2009/10/accessing_the_windows_azure_lo.html

The solution above uses SSH tunnels and involves two computers, a server and client and an authentication model. 

I found a new way to bypass this localhost restriction, which is a bit simpler.  See the details below.

  Can the development fabric bind to the real IP address? (not 127.0.0.1)
  http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazure/thread/9b8957e6-7983-47a7-9d75-954dee70dbf0

One developer, JuanSueroNYC, found a way to make this work for WCF services.  But I want to access ASP.NET Sites as well as WCF Services running on my Azure web roles – and I’d like to make it as simple as possible (one time configuration).

 
We create SSH tunnels using freeSSHd and PuTTY

Whenever I’m working on a project I like to use CruiseControl.NET (http://ccnet.thoughtworks.com/) and create a continuous integration system.  Every night at 2:00 AM , this system is responsible for getting the latest code from source control, compiling, running unit tests, deploying and more.  This allows our business folks to get an earlier look at our product and makes sure no single developer or designer has broken the build.

We also work on WPF smart clients and I didn’t want to force the client teams to run the Azure web roles on their machines just because Microsoft only allows the local development fabric to bind to 127.0.0.1.

I was bummed out when I realized that Microsoft has placed this dumb restriction on Windows Azure web roles.  I’ve seen a response from Microsoft where they mumble something about the local development fabric running with admin rights and that not being secure – but I could always run IIS with admin rights – should we only allow IIS to bind to 127.0.0.1? 

My guess is that this dumb decision was made by some pointy head guy who doesn’t understand technology and was afraid that from a business perspective developers would use the local development fabric as a cheap Production load balancer.  Ridiculous – but don’t underestimate the stupidity of business folks.

Ok, enough ranting – see below for a full tutorial on how to access web roles running on a Windows Azure local development fabric from any other computer and not only on http://127.0.0.1 on the local host.  Thanks to my co-worker Lanh for coming up with this solution – great work!

 
The slide-show: http://slideshow.ehuna.org/home/200908-endlesspool/

The slideshow gives you an idea of how houses are built in northern California.  With the insulation and the double pane windows this is the best room in the house!

The song is “New Soul” by the French/Israeli singer Yael Naim.  This song was featured in one of Apple’s recent ads for the MacBook Air.  The slideshow runs for about 10 minutes and the song is about 3 minutes long – so it will repeat.

Yesterday the cover was installed and the work is almost done!  In the video below I give an overview of the Endless Pool and take it out for a first swim:

Thanks to Yury Guzman and the whole crew from Grand Land Masters – they did an amazing job with the room and the Endless Pool installation.  If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area and you want one of these installed give Yury a call - http://glmlandscapes.com/ – you won’t regret it.

Update 10/21: for Jon and other iPhone users, I also uploaded the video to YouTube – you can view it here.

The background music is a Brazilian Bossa Nova song named “Agua de Beber” sung by Astrid Gilberto and written by Antonio Carlos Jobim.  Below I have more information on the Endless Pool and how it works.

The .netTiers Application Framework: http://nettiers.com/

.netTiers uses a connection string to connect to a SQL Server database at runtime – it works with an on-premise SQL Server (e.g. SQL Server Express 2008) or a SQL Azure database in the cloud.  Out of the box, .netTiers reads this connection string from a Web.config (or app.config) file.

Since Windows Azure has its configuration in ServiceConfiguration.cscfg, I modified the .netTiers 2.3 templates so at runtime our DAL reads the connection string from the correct place.

Thanks to SuperJeffe who gave me the pointer in this thread on what changes were needed.  Below you can find my notes on what changes were made to the .netTiers templates and you can download the modified templates as well.

I thought it would be a good idea to publish these videos here and share them with the community – all of the content below is free.

Windows Azure: Microsoft's new "Cloud Operating System"

We also covered the new SQL Server in the cloud, SQL Azure, and ways to make calls to SQL Azure using the .netTiers ORM and ADO.NET. 

We ended up with 7 videos, over 4 hours of content and over 90 items covered!  You can access all of the videos using the links below.

If you’d like to follow along and copy/paste code as you watch the videos, I have posted the source code to all samples seen in the video on Codeplex:

CloudService1 - Windows Azure and SQL Azure samples
http://cloudservice1.codeplex.com/

You'll also need a the Windows Azure SDK v1.0 (September CTP) installed – you can get it from the Windows Azure Developer Center on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN).  You can also download the Web Platform Installer 2.0 – which will setup everything you need to start coding on Windows Azure. 

Update 11/24/2009: Microsoft released a new version of the Windows Azure SDK – the “November 2009” CTP – and changed many of the APIs we were using in earlier versions of the Azure SDK.  Much of the Azure specific APIs covered in the videos below apply to the October 2009 Windows Azure SDK (or earlier versions).

See below for links and descriptions to all videos.

A few weeks back I had started a thread on .netTiers and Azure:

  .netTiers and Windows Azure?
  http://community.codesmithtools.com/forums/p/9327/37238.aspx

At the time only "Azure Storage" was available - Azure storage has support for Blobs, queues and "Tables".  Tables are not the tables we are used to in our relational databases and it would have been very difficult to have .netTiers work out of the box.

Well, now that the SQL Azure CTP is out, I tried to create a project that used .netTiers and its BLL and DAL to work with data in SQL Azure.  It works!

Here's the process:

1. Work on an on-premise SQL Server - create your schema, indexes, foreign keys and custom stored procs, etc... just like you do today. 
2. At design time, use CodeSmith and generate your .netTiers DAL and BLL based on your on-premise SQL Server schema, like you do today.
3. At run-time, in development: use your on premise SQL Server or your SQL Azure SQL server - they both work by simply changing your connection string!
4. At run-time, in the Azure Cloud (Staging/Production): use SQL Azure

Your web and worker roles must run in full trust for the .netTiers DAL/BLL to work.  In your Azure service definition, make sure you set enableNativeCodeExecution to "true" - something like:

  <WebRole name="MYPROJECT_WebRole" enableNativeCodeExecution="true">

Also, currently when creating your database, indexes, stored procs, etc... in SQL Azure, you'll need to manually generate a script in SSMS and then clean it up before running it in SQL Azure - I blogged about it here:

  Cleaning up scripts for SQL Azure
  http://blog.ehuna.org/2009/08/cleaning_up_scripts_for_sql_az.html

Here's what I've tried so far:

• Using .netTiers inside the Azure "Development Fabric" and connecting to a local on-premise SQL Server.
• Using .netTiers inside the Azure "Development Fabric" and connecting to a SQL Azure database in the cloud.
• Using .netTiers in a web role in the Azure Cloud connecting to a SQL Azure database in the cloud.

All I had to do to make the above work is to change my connection string - no need to change code!  Good times!  Below I copy my Windows Azure configuration file and give you an example on how to change your .netTiers connections string dynamically when it’s deployed to the Azure cloud.

Note: I originally posted these good news at the .netTiers forums – I thought it would be a good idea to cross post it here as well.

  SQL Azure Migration Wizard – Information and Screencast
  http://blog.wadewegner.com/index.php/2009/09/01/sql-azure-migration-wizard/

  SQL Azure Migration Wizard – Source Code and Binaries
  http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/

Good times!

A couple of days ago, I published my notes on what steps need to be taken to clean up a SQL script generated on an on-premise SQL Server 2008 so it can run on SQL Azure.

As I started creating a real schema with primary keys, indexes, foreign keys, Stored Procedures, etc…  I realized it was a pain to manually have to clean up these scripts each time I wanted to update my SQL Azure database.

I thought of a few solutions and decided to go with a fast and easy way to clean up the SQL scripts using Windows PowerShell.  Here’s the content of my CleanUpScriptForSQLAzure.ps1 script:

function Replace-String($find, $replace, $path) 
{ 
    echo "Replacing string `"$find`" with string `"$replace`" in file contents and file names of path: $path" 
    ls $path | select-string $find -list |% { echo "Processing contents of $($_.Path)"; (get-content $_.Path) |% { $_ -replace $find, $replace } | set-content $_.Path -Force } 
    ls $path\*$find* |% { echo "Renaming $($_.FullName) to $($_.FullName.Replace($find, $replace))";mv $_.FullName $_.FullName.Replace($find, $replace) } 
} 

# After generating a script with SSMS we need to clean it up before running it on SQL Azure 
Replace-String "SET ANSI_NULLS ON" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String "SET ANSI_NULLS OFF" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String "SET ANSI_PADDING ON" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String "SET ANSI_PADDING OFF" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String "ON \[PRIMARY\]" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String "\(PAD_INDEX  = OFF," "(" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String ",PAD_INDEX  = OFF" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String ", PAD_INDEX  = OFF" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String "PAD_INDEX  = OFF" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String ",SORT_IN_TEMPDB = OFF" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String ", SORT_IN_TEMPDB = OFF" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String "SORT_IN_TEMPDB = OFF" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String ",ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS  = ON" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String ", ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS  = ON" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String "ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS  = ON" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String ",ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS  = ON" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts" 
Replace-String ", ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS  = ON" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts"
Replace-String "ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS  = ON" "" "c:\data\sqlazurescripts"

To use the above script, generate the SQL scripts using SQL Server Management Studio pointing to an on-premise SQL Server and save the scripts in the “c:\data\sqlazurescripts” folder (or any other folder you prefer).

Then run CleanUpScriptForSQLAzure.ps1 and you should see something like this:

I have found that this PowerShell script cleans up all of the scripts I’ve generated so far – including both scripts to generate schema and data, and scripts to create the stored procedures.  But there are some commands not yet included in the above script (see my published notes for more details).

Until Microsoft gives us a better tool we can use these PowerShell commands to clean up the SQL scripts.  You may also want to check out the SQL Azure Manager CTP on hanssens.org.

Final note: if you get errors executing the CleanUpScriptForSQLAzure.ps1 script in Powershell, you will need to update your execution policy.  Here’s a good page with pointers on how to do that:

  Introduction to Windows PowerShell Cmdlets
  http://computerperformance.co.uk/powershell/powershell_cmdlet.htm

Setting “ExecutionPolicy = RemoteSigned” in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell worked for me.