Category Archives: .net

.net, azure, cloud computing, microsoft

Microsoft’s Azure outage: a troubling account of what went wrong

Microsoft’s Jason Zander has published an account of what went wrong yesterday, causing failure of many Azure services for a number of hours. The incident is described as running from 0.51 AM to 11.45 AM on November 19th though the actual length of the outage varied; an Azure application which I developed was offline for 3.5 hours.

Customers are not happy. From the comments:

So much for traffic manager for our VM’s running SQL server in a high availability SQL cluster $6k per month if every data center goes down. We were off for 3 hrs during the worst time of day for us; invoicing and loading for 10,000 deliveries. CEO is wanting to pull us out of the cloud.

So what went wrong? It was a bug in an update to the Storage Service, which impacts other services such as VMs and web sites since they have a dependency on the Storage Service. The update was already in production but only for Azure Tables; this seems to have given the team the confidence to deploy the update generally but a bug in the Blob service caused it to loop and stop responding.

Here is the most troubling line in Zander’s report:

Unfortunately the issue was wide spread, since the update was made across most regions in a short period of time due to operational error, instead of following the standard protocol of applying production changes in incremental batches.

In other words, this was not just a programming error, it was an operational error that meant the usual safeguards whereby a service in one datacenter takes over when another fails did not work.

Then there is the issue of communication. This is critical since while customers understand that sometimes things go wrong, they feel happier if they know what is going on. It is partly human nature, and partly a matter of knowing what mitigating action you need to take.

In this case Azure’s Service Health Dashboard failed:

There was an Azure infrastructure issue that impacted our ability to provide timely updates via the Service Health Dashboard. As a mitigation, we leveraged Twitter and other social media forums.

This is an issue I see often; online status dashboards are great for telling you all is well, but when something goes wrong they are the first thing to fall over, or else fail to report the problem. In consequence users all pick up the phone simultaneously and cannot get through. Twitter is no substitute; frankly if my business were paying thousands every month to Microsoft for Azure services I would find it laughable to be referred to Twitter in the event of a major service interruption.

Zander also says that customers were unable to create support cases. Hmm, it does seem to me that Microsoft should isolate its support services from its production services in some way so that both do not fail at once.

Still, of the above it is the operational error that is of most concern.

What are the wider implications? There are two takes on this. One is to say that since Azure is not reliable try another public cloud, probably Amazon Web Services. My sense is that the number and severity of AWS outages has reduced over the years. Inherently though, it is always possible that human error or a hardware failure can have a cascading effect; there is no guarantee that AWS will not have its own equally severe outage in future.

The other take is to give up on the cloud, or at least build in a plan B in the event of failure. Hybrid cloud has its merits in this respect.

My view in general though is that cloud reliability will get better and that its benefits exceed the risk – though when I heard last week, at Amazon Re:Invent, of large companies moving their entire datacenter infrastructure to AWS I did think to myself, “that’s brave”.

Finally, for the most critical services it does make sense to spread them across multiple public clouds (if you cannot fallback to on-premises). It should not be necessary, but it is.

.net, android, development, ios, microsoft, mobile, mono, professional, software development, visual studio, web authoring

Microsoft takes its .NET runtime open source and cross-platform, announces new C++ compilers for iOS and Android: unpacking today’s news

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Microsoft announced today that the .NET runtime will be open source and cross-platform for Linux and Mac. There are a several announcements and it is potentially confusing, so here is a quick summary.

The .NET runtime, also known as the CLR (Common Language Runtime) is the virtual machine that runs Microsoft’s C#, F# and Visual Basic .NET languages, performing just –in-time compilation to native code and providing interop between the application code and the operating system APIs. It is distinct from the .NET Framework, which is the library of mostly C# code that underlies application platforms like ASP.NET, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms, Windows Communication Foundation and more.

There is is already a cross-platform version of .NET, an open source project called Mono founded by Miguel de Icaza in 2001, not long after the first preview release of C# in 2000. Mono runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. In addition, de Icaza is co-founder of Xamarin, which uses Mono together with its own technology to compile C# for iOS, Android and Mac OS X.

Further, some of .NET is already open source. At Microsoft’s Build conference earlier this year, Anders Hejlsberg made the Roslyn project, the compiler for the next generation of the .NET Runtime, open source under the Apache 2.0 license. I spoke to Hejlsberg about the announcement and wrote it up on the Register here. Note the key point:

Since Roslyn is the compiler for the forthcoming C# 6.0, does that mean C# itself is now an open source language? “Yes, absolutely,” says Hejlsberg.

What then is today’s news? Blow by blow, here are what seems to me the main pieces:

  • The CLR itself will be open source. This is the C++ code from which the CLR is compiled.
  • Microsoft will provide a full open source server stack for Mac and Linux including the CLR. This will not include the frameworks for client applications; no Windows Forms or WPF. Rather, it is the “.NET Core Runtime” and “.NET Core Framework”. However Microsoft is working with the Mono team which does support client applications so there could be some interesting permutations (bear in mind that Mono also has its own runtime). However Microsoft is focused on the server stack.
  • Microsoft will release C++ frameworks and compilers for iOS and Android, using the open source Clang (C and C++ compiler front-end) and LVVM (code generation back end), but with Visual Studio as the IDE. If you are targeting iOS you will need a Mac with a build agent, or you can use a cloud build service (see below). The Android compiler is available now in preview, the iOS compiler is coming soon. “You can edit and debug a single set of C++ source code, and build it for iOS, Android and Windows,” says Microsoft’s Soma Somasegar, corporate VP of the developer division.
  • Microsoft has a new Android emulator for Windows based on Hyper-V. This will assist with Android development using Cordova (the HTML and JavaScript approach also used by PhoneGap) as well as the new C++ option.

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  • The next Visual Studio will be called Visual Studio 2015 and is now available in preview; download it here.
  • There will be a thing called Connected Services to make it easier to code against Office 365, Salesforce and Azure
  • A new edition of Visual Studio 2013, called the Community Edition, is now available for free, download it here. The big difference between this and the current Express editions is first that the Community Edition supports multiple target types, whereas you needed a different Express edition for Web applications, Windows Store and Phone apps, and Windows desktop apps.  Second, the Community Edition is extensible so that third parties can create plug-ins; today Xamarin was among the first to announce support. There may be some license restrictions; I am clarifying and will update later.
  • New Cloud Deployment Projects for Azure enable the cloud infrastructure associated with a project to be captured as code.
  • Release Management is being added to Visual Studio Online, Microsoft’s cloud-hosted Team Foundation Server.
  • Enhancements to the Visual Studio Online build service will support builds for iOS and OS X
  • Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 is complete. This is not a big update but adds fixes for TFS and Visual C++ as well as some new features in TFS and in GPU performance diagnostics.

The process by which these new .NET projects will interact with the open source community will be handled by the .NET Foundation.

What is Microsoft up to?

Today’s announcements are extensive, but with two overall themes.

The first is about open sourcing .NET,  a process that was already under way, and the second is about cross-platform.

It is the cross-platform announcements that are more notable, though they go hand in hand with the open source process, partly because of Microsoft’s increasingly close relationship with Mono and Xamarin. Note that Microsoft is doing its own C++ compilers for iOS and Android, but leaving the mobile C# and .NET space open for Xamarin.

By adding native code iOS and Android mobile into Visual Studio, Microsoft is signalling real commitment to these platforms. You could interpret this as an admission that Windows Phone and Windows tablets will never reach parity with their rivals, but it is more a consequence of the company’s focus on cloud, and in particular Office 365 and Azure. The company is prioritising the promotion of its cloud services by providing strong tooling for all major client platforms.

The provision of new Microsoft server-side .NET runtimes for Mac and Linux is a surprise to me. The Mac is not much used as a server but very widely used for development. Linux is an increasingly important operating system within the Azure cloud platform.

A side effect of all this is that the .NET Framework may finally fulfil its cross-platform promise, something Microsoft suppressed for years by only supporting it on Windows. That is good news for those who like programming in C#.

The .NET Framework is changing substantially in its next version. This is partly because of the Roslyn compiler, which is itself written in C# and opens up new possibilities for rich refactoring and code transformation; and partly because of .NET Core and major changes in the forthcoming version of ASP.NET.

Is Microsoft concerned that by supporting Linux it might reduce the usage of Windows Server? “In Azure, Windows and Linux are a core part of our platform,” Somesegar told me. “Helping developers by providing a good set of tools and letting them decide what server they run on, we feel is all goodness. If you want a complete open source platform, we have the tools for them.”

How big are these announcements? “I would say huge,”  Somasegar told me, “What is shows is that we are not being constrained by any one platform. We are doing more open source, more cross-platform, delivering Visual Studio free to a broader set of people. It’s all about having a great developer offering irrespective of what platform they are targeting or what kind of app they are building.”

That’s Microsoft’s perspective then. In the end, whether you interpret these moves as a sign of strength or weakness for Microsoft, developers will gain from these enhancements to Visual Studio and the .NET platform.

.net, azure, cloud computing, microsoft

An Azure Web Site is a VM which supports multiple applications

This will be unnecessary for Azure experts, but I have seen some misunderstanding on this point, hence this post.

A “web site” is a unit of service on the Azure cloud platform which represents a web application hosted on IIS, Microsoft’s web server (but see below). You write a standard ASP.NET application and deploy it. Azure takes care of configuring the host VM, the server operating system, and IIS.

Using a web site is preferable to creating your own VM and installing IIS on it, for several reasons. One is that you do not have to worry about patching and maintaining the operating system. Another is that web sites can be scaled, manually or automatically, with an option for scheduling so that you can scale down the site for periods of low demand.

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The main reason for using a VM rather than a web site is if the app has dependencies that fall outside what a web site can handle.

Another thing to know about Azure web sites is that they have four “plan modes,” but only two are worth considering for production. The Free and Shared modes host your application on a shared VM, and quotas are applied. If Azure decides your site is out of quota, it will stop responding. Fine for a prototype, but not something you want customers or users to see. This feature is not shown clearly on the table of features but it is in note 2:

Shared Instance: Free and Shared (Preview) tiers include 60 minutes and 240 minutes of CPU capacity per day, respectively. The Shared (Preview) Website rates are applied per website instance.

The Basic tier on the other hand is decent. It is a dedicated VM, and you can scale it (manually) to 3 instances. It costs around 25% less than a Standard tier site.

Why go Standard? You get 50B storage thrown in (a Basic tier site has 10GB), auto-backup, auto-scale up to 10 instances, and a fixed IP address for SSL. If you have to buy a fixed IP address for a single instance Basic tier site, the price goes above a Standard tier site, except for a Large instance.

Currently a Basic tier web site costs from £35.64 to £141.92 per month, and a Standard tier from £47.10 to £189.65, depending on the size of the VM.

It is a significant cost, but what may not be obvious is that you can deploy multiple applications to a single web site, which makes my statement above, “A ‘web site’ is a unit of service on the Azure cloud platform which represents a web application hosted on IIS”, not quite correct.

When you create a new web site, if you have one already, you can choose a “web hosting plan”. Here is an example:

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In this case, there are two pre-existing web site VMs, one in East Asia and one in Europe. If you choose one of these two, the new web site will be added to that VM. If you choose “Create new web hosting plan”, you will create a new dedicated instance (or free, or Shared). Adding to an existing VM means no extra cost.

If you are a developer, it may well be better to run a single Basic VM for prototyping, and add multiple sites, rather than risking a free or shared instance which might be out of quota when you demonstrate it to your customer.

What is the limit to the number of web sites you can add? There is none, other than the overloading the VM and getting unresponsive applications.

Postscript: the Web Site service is interesting as an example which blurs the boundaries between IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (Platform as a service). It is more PaaS than IaaS, in that you do not have to worry about maintaining the OS, but more IaaS than PaaS, in that you are still having to think about individual VMs. It would be more purist if Microsoft abstracted away the VMs and simply guaranteed a certain level of service, or scaled up automatically and billed for what you use. On the other hand, the Web Site concept puts a lot of control in the hands of the developer/admin and help them to make best use of the resources, while still removing most of the maintenance burden. I think it is a good compromise.

.net, amazon, cloud computing, microsoft

How is Microsoft Azure doing? Some stats from Satya Nadella and Scott Guthrie

Microsoft financials are hard to parse these days, with figures broken down into broad categories that reveal little about what is succeeding and what is not.

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CEO Satya Nadella speaks in San Francisco

At a cloud platform event yesterday in San Francisco, CEO Satya Nadella and VP of cloud and enterprise Scott Guthrie offered some figures. Here is what I gleaned:

  • Projected revenue of $4.4Bn if current trends continue (“run rate”)
  • Annual investment of $4.5Bn
  • Over 10,000 new customers per week
  • 1,200,000 SQL databases
  • Over 30 trillion storage objects
  • 350 million users in Azure Active Directory
  • 19 Azure datacentre regions, up to 600,000 servers in each region

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Now, one observation from the above is that Microsoft says it is spending more on Azure than it is earning – not unreasonable at a time of fast growth.

However, I do not know how complete the figures are. Nadella said Office 365 runs on Azure (though this may be only partially true; that certainly used to be the case); but I doubt that all Office 365 revenue is included in the above.

What about SQL Server licensing, for example, does Microsoft count it under SQL Server, or Azure, or both depending which marketing event it is?

If you know the answer to this, I would love to hear.

At the event, Guthrie (I think) made a bold statement. He said that there would only be three vendors in hyper-scale cloud computing, being Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

IBM for one would disagree; but there are huge barriers to entry even for industry giants.

I consider Microsoft’s progress extraordinary. Guthrie said that it was just two years ago that he announced the remaking of Azure – this is when things like Azure stateful VMs and the new portal arrived. Prior to that date, Azure stuttered.

Now, here is journalist and open source advocate Matt Asay:

Microsoft used to be evil. Then it was irrelevant. Now it looks like a winner.

He quotes Bill Bennett

Microsoft has created a cloud computing service that makes creating a server as simple as setting up a Word document

New features are coming apace to Azure, and Guthrie showed this slide of what has been added in the last 12 months:

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The synergy of Azure with Visual Studio, Windows Server and IIS is such that it is a natural choice for Microsoft-platform developers hosting web applications, and Azure VMs are useful for experimentation.

Does anything spoil this picture? Well, when I sat down to write what I thought would be a simple application, I ran into familiar problems. Half-baked samples, ever changing APIs and libraries, beta code evangelised by Microsoft folk with little indication of what to do if you would rather not use this in production, and so on.

There is also a risk that as Azure services multiply, working out what to use and when becomes harder, and complexity increases.

Azure also largely means Windows – and yes, I heard yesterday that 20% of Azure VMs run Linux – but if you have standardised on Linux servers and use a Mac or Linux for development, Azure looks to me less attractive than AWS which has more synergy with that approach.

Still, it is a bright spot in Microsoft’s product line and right now I expect its growth to continue.

.net, android, apple, microsoft, mobile, professional, software development, xamarin

Xamarin Evolve: developers enjoy the buzz around cross-platform coding with C#

“It’s like a Microsoft developer event back when they were good,” one exhibitor here at Xamarin Evolve in Atlanta told me, and I do see what he means. There is plenty of buzz, since Xamarin is just three years old as a company and growing fast; there is the sense of an emerging technology, and that developers are actually enjoying their exploration of what they can do on today’s mobile devices.

Microsoft is an engineering-led company and was more so in its early days. The same is true of Xamarin. It also also still small enough that everyone is approachable, including co-founders Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman. The session on what’s new in Xamarin.Mac and Xamarin.iOS was presented by de Icaza, and it is obvious that he is still hands-on with the technology and knows it inside out. Developers warm to this because they feel that the company will be responsive to their needs.

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Approachability is important, because this is a company that is delivering code at breakneck speed and bugs or known issues are not uncommon. A typical conversation with an attendee here goes like this:

“How do you find the tools?” “Oh, we like them, they are working well for us. Well, we did find some bugs, but we talked to Xamarin about them and they were fixed quickly.”

Xamarin’s tools let you write C# code and compile it for iOS, Android and Mac. If you are building for Windows Phone or Windows, you will probably use Microsoft’s tools and share non-visual C# code, though the recently introduced Xamarin Forms, a cross-platform XML language for defining a user interface, builds for Windows Phone as well as iOS and Android.

The relationship with Microsoft runs deep. The main appeal of the tools is to Microsoft platform developers who either want to use their existing C# (or now F#) skills to respond to the inevitable demand for iOS and Android clients, or to port existing C# code, or to make use of existing C# libraries to integrate with Windows applications on the server.

That said, Xamarin is beginning to appeal to developers from outside the Microsoft ecosystem and I was told that there is now demand for Xamarin to run introductory C# classes. Key to its appeal is that you get deep native integration on each platform. The word “native” is abused by cross-platform tool vendors, all of whom claim to have it. In Xamarin’s case what it means is that the user interface is rendered using native controls on each platform. There are also extensive language bindings so that, for example, you can call the iOS API seamlessly from C# code. Of course this code is not cross-platform, so developers need to work out how to structure their solutions to isolate the platform-specific code so that the app builds correctly for each target. The developers of Wordament, a casual game which started out as a Windows Phone app, gave a nice session on this here at Evolve.

Wordament has an interesting history. It started out using Silverlight for Windows Phone and Google App Engine on the server. Following outages with Google App Engine, the server parts were moved to Azure. Then for Windows 8 the team ported the app to HTML and JavaScript. Then they did a port to Objective C for iOS and Java for Android. Then they found that managing all these codebases made it near-impossible to add features. Wordament is a network game where you compete simultaneously with players on all platforms, so all versions need to keep tightly in step. So they ported to Xamarin and now it is C# on all platforms.. 

I digress. The attendees here are mostly from a Microsoft platform background, and they like the fact that Xamarin works with Visual Studio. This also means that there are plenty of Microsoft partner companies here, such as the component vendors DevExpress, Syncfusion, Infragistics and ComponentOne. It is curious: according to one of the component companies I spoke to, Microsoft platform developers get the value of this approach where others do not. They have had only limited success with products for native iOS or Android development, but now that Xamarin Forms has come along, interest is high.

Another Microsoft connection is Charles Petzold – yes, the guy who wrote Programming Windows – who is here presenting on Xamarin Forms and signing preview copies of his book on the subject. Petzold now works for Xamarin; I interviewed him here and hope to post this soon. Microsoft itself is here as well; it is the biggest sponsor and promoting Microsoft Azure along with Visual Studio.

Xamarin is not Microsoft though, and that is also important. IBM is also a big sponsor, and announced a partnership with Xamarin, offering libraries and IDE add-ins to integrate with its Worklight mobile-oriented middleware. Amazon is here, promoting both its app platform and its cloud services. Google is a sponsor though not all that visible here; Peter Friese from the company gave a session on using Google Play Services, and Jon Skeet also from Google presented a session, but it was pure C# and not Google-specific. Salesforce is a sponsor because it wants developers to hook into its cloud services no matter what tool they use; so too is Dropbox.

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Most of the Xamarin folk use Macs, and either use Xamarin Studio (a customised version of the open source MonoDevelop IDE), or Visual Studio running in a virtual machine (given that the team mostly use Macs, this seems to me the preferred platform for Xamarin development, though Visual Studio is a more advanced IDE so you will probably end up dipping in and out of Windows/Mac however you approach it).

Xamarin announced several new products here at Evolve; I gave a quick summary in a Register post. To be specific:

  • A new fast Android emulator based on Virtual Box
  • Xamarin Sketches for trying out code with immediate analysis and execution
  • Xamarin Profiler
  • Xamarin Insights: analytics and troubleshooting for deployed apps

Of these, Sketches is the most interesting. You write snippets of code and the tool not only executes it but does magic like generating a graph from sequences of data. You can use it for UI code too, trying out different fonts, colours and shapes until you get something you like. It is great fun and would be good for teaching as well; maybe Xamarin could do a version for education at a modest price (or free)?

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I am looking forward to trying out Sketches though I have heard grumbles about the preview being hard to get working so it may have to wait until next week.

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.net, microsoft, software development

Is this why it is Windows 10 (not 9): avoiding Windows 95 detection?

Why did Microsoft call the Windows release after 8 version 10 rather than 9?

Windows boss Terry Myerson said it was because it was such a huge release – but then he would say that.

A more prosaic reason could be the old software problem of false version detection. After all, we have had Windows 9x before – that is, Windows 95 and Windows 98.

Former Windows chief Steven Sinofsky tweeted this a few hours ago:

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which if you follow the link gets this:

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The first of these throws an exception if the name of the OS starts with “Windows 9”; and there are plenty of others like it.

Now, Windows version numbers are complex (Windows 95 actually reported itself as version 4.0) and well-written applications would get this right. There is also a year or so before Windows 10 is released, which gives time for developers, and the suppliers of runtimes like Java, to fix their code if necessary.

Still, it seems to me plausible that avoiding a version headache was a factor behind the naming of Windows 10.

.net, development, microsoft, mobile, open source, professional, software development, web authoring

Microsoft releases WinJS cross-browser JavaScript library but why?

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Microsoft has announced WinJS 3.0:

The Windows Library for JavaScript (WinJS) project is pleased to announce the general availability of its first release – WinJS 3.0 – since the open source project began at //BUILD 2014.

Much of WinJS will run on any modern browser but the browser support matrix has a number of gaps:

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You can also see what runs where from this status table.

But what is WinJS? Note that it comes from the Windows apps team, not the web development team at Microsoft. WinJS was designed to enable app development for Windows 8 “Metro” (also known as the Windows Runtime) using JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Back in 2010, when Microsoft signalled the end of Silverlight and the rise of HTML 5 for browser-based applications, early versions of WinJS would already have been in preparation. Using WinJS you can share code across a Windows 8 app, web apps, and via an app packager like Apache Cordova, in apps for Android and iOS as well.

Note that Cordova is now integrated into Visual Studio, using the catchy name Multi-Device Hybrid App:

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If you want to know what kind of controls and components are on offer in WinJS, you can find out using the excellent demo site here. This is Firefox:

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Quick summary then: WinJS lets you build apps that look like Windows 8 Store apps, but which run cross-browser and cross-platform. But who wants to do that?

Maybe Microsoft does. The messaging from the company, especially since CEO Satya Nadella took over from Windows guy Steve Ballmer, is “any device”, provided of course that they hook up to Microsoft’s services. That messaging is intended for developers outside the company too. Check out the current campaign for Microsoft Azure, which says “consume on any device”.

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This could be a web application, or it could be a client app using Azure Mobile Services or an ASP.NET Web API application to connect to cloud data.

You do not have to use WinJS to consume Microsoft’s services of course. Why would developers want to use the look and feel of a rather unloved app platform, rather than the native look and feel of Android or iOS? That is an excellent question, and in most cases they will not. There could be cases though, for example for internal business apps where users care most about functionality. What is the current stock? What is the lead time? Show me this customer’s order history. A WinJS app might not look right for the platform, but the UI will be touch-friendly, and ease of rollout across the major mobile platforms could trump Apple’s design guidelines.

If you are writing a pure web application, users expectations concerning native look and feel are not so high. The touch-oriented design of WinJS is its main appeal, though other web frameworks like JQuery Mobile also offer this. The “Metro” design language is distinctive, and Microsoft will be making a renewed push for Windows Store apps, or Universal Apps, as part of the new wave of Windows called Windows 9 or “Threshold”. WinJS is the way to build apps for that platform using JavaScript and HTML, with the added bonus of easy porting to a broad range of devices.

This is a hard sell though. I am impressed by the effort Microsoft has put into making WinJS work cross-platform, but will be surprised to see much usage outside Windows Store apps (including Windows Phone). On the other hand, it does help to keep the code honest: this really is HTML and JavaScript, not just a wrapper for Windows Runtime APIs.

.net, microsoft, mobile, professional, software development

Lifetime registration as a Windows Store developer, now from £12

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Microsoft has removed some friction from developing for the Windows Store (whether phone or Windows 8) by removing the requirement to pay an annual subscription:

As we continue to execute on the vision to integrate the Windows and Windows Phone developer experiences, we have taken another step by moving to a one-time lifelong Dev Center registration fee.

says Microsoft’s Todd Brix in a post today. He adds that the 600,000 developers already registered are covered, with no additional fee required.

How much is the fee? Brix does not say, and I could not find it quickly, so I started the signup process. I was offered individual registration for just £12.00. A company registration is £65.00.

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Both fees are of course negligible for a developer, compared to the cost of developing an app that is worth installing. Considering that Microsoft has had problems with junk apps filling its store, you could argue that fees are justifiable as a means of restraining the flow of meaningless or malicious apps.

The counter-argument is that fees deter developers from getting started, and that today’s hobbyist may come up with the next Minecraft. It is better to control quality with a robust checking process before apps are admitted into the store.

I had a quick glance today, and have the impression that Microsoft has made progress in removing the worst offenders, following some agitation at the end of last month.

Microsoft is laying the foundation for another go at its app platform with the launch of Windows 9, about which we will hear more in a couple of weeks time.

.net, azure, cloud computing, microsoft, professional

Microsoft integrates Azure websites with hybrid cloud

Microsoft has announced the integration of Azure websites with Azure virtual networks, including access to on-premise resources if you have a site-to-site VPN.

The Virtual Network feature grants your website access to resources running your VNET that includes being able to access web services or databases running on your Azure Virtual Machines. If your VNET is connected to your on premise network with Site to Site VPN, then your Azure Website will now be able to access on premise systems through the Azure Websites Virtual Network feature.

Azure websites let you deploy web applications running on IIS (Microsoft’s web server) hosted in Microsoft’s cloud. The application platform can be framework can be ASP.NET, Java, PHP, Node.js or Python. There are Free, Shared and Basic tiers which are mainly for prototyping, and a Standard tier which has auto-scaling features, managed through Microsoft’s web portal:

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The development tool is Visual Studio, which now has strong integration with Azure.

Integration with virtual networks is a significant feature. You could now host what is in effect an intranet application on Azure if it is convenient. If it is only used in working hours, say, or mainly used in the first couple of hours in the morning, you could scale it accordingly.

Have a look at that web configuration page above, and compare it with the intricacies of System Center. It is a huge difference and shows that some parts of Microsoft have learned that usability matters, even for systems aimed at IT professionals.

.net, microsoft, software development, windows

Windows “9”: forget the Start menu, consider the apps

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This week has seen multiple leaks of early builds of the next version of Windows – sometimes called Windows 9 or “Threshold” – showing Microsoft’s continuing inability to persuade all of its partners to keep secrets.

It seems to me that the leaks are likely to be genuine, though the usual health warnings apply. I also expect that Microsoft is deliberately holding back from releasing final UI designs, in part because they are likely to leak, so you should not read too much into the appearance.

The headline new features are a revamped Start menu which appears in the old position on the desktop, rather than on a separate screen; and the ability to run several desktops at once, as a way of organising your work.

No doubt the new Start menu will feel more comfortable for Windows 7 users, though for myself I am now used to the full-screen version and it is no big deal.

I am more interested in what is happening with Windows Store apps (also known as Metro or Windows Runtime apps). These are significant because it is this kind of app that you can easily port to Windows Phone using a Visual Studio Universal App project.

We saw these apps running in desktop windows, in a preview at the Build developer conference earlier this year. The leaked build seems also to have this feature. Check out the video here. Here is Calculator running on the desktop:

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This is the Metro app, not the old desktop calculator. Here it is in Windows 8.1:

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Note a big difference though: in Windows 8.1 you can get a window bar to appear along the top, but in Windows 9 there is also a maximize widget at top right of the window (in Windows, this doubles as a “restore down” button when the windows is already maximized).

Later in the video, we see this in operation. The user starts the Xbox Video app full screen:

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and then hits the “restore down” button:

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This is therefore the bridge between the “Metro” and desktop environments. Hit that button, and the full-screen experience becomes a windowed app on the desktop.

In another leaked image, the Charms menu options (a right-edge menu in Windows 8.x) becomes a drop-down window menu, summoned by clicking in the right-hand upper corner. Users often find the Charms menu awkward with mouse and keyboard (I still do) so this will be a more convenient alternative.

Now, although Windows experts can easily see the difference between a Metro app and a desktop app, I doubt that the average user will care. All they will note is that this kind of app requires Windows 8 or 9 to run.

Although this is a diminished target for developers, who may still prefer to write desktop apps that target Windows 7 (or XP) and higher, my guess is that this new UI will make Windows Runtime apps more visible and acceptable for users who live primarily in the desktop – which is most Windows users.

If Microsoft can increase the momentum behind this style of apps, then their benefits will be more apparent too: easy install and uninstall via the Store, low malware risk, and a UI that works well on tablets as well as with mouse and keyboard. This in turn would make more sense of the small Windows tablets from the likes of Toshiba, HP and Lenovo which we recently saw at IFA in Berlin.

There would be a knock-on benefit for Windows Phone, too, thanks to relatively easy porting between the two platforms.

What do you think – is desktop integration enough to rescue the Windows 8 app platform?