Download ASP.NET MVC 2 using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer
Download ASP.NET MVC 2 from the Download Center

The final release of VS 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 will have ASP.NET MVC 2 built-in – so you won’t need an additional install in order to use ASP.NET MVC 2 with them.

ASP.NET MVC 2 is the next significant update of ASP.NET MVC. It is a compatible update to ASP.NET MVC 1 – so all the knowledge, skills, code, and extensions you already have with ASP.NET MVC continue to work and apply going forward. You can also get the source code for ASP.NET MVC 2 under an OSI-compliant open-source license.

ASP.NET MVC 2 can be installed side-by-side with ASP.NET MVC 1 (meaning you can have some apps built with V1 and others built with V2 on the same machine).  There are instructions on how to update your existing ASP.NET MVC 1 apps to use ASP.NET MVC 2 using VS 2008 here.  Note that VS 2010 has an automated upgrade wizard that can automatically migrate your existing ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 for you.

ASP.NET MVC 2 Features

ASP.NET MVC 2 adds a bunch of new capabilities and features. Some of the new features and capabilities include:

• New Strongly Typed HTML Helpers
• Enhanced Model Validation support across both server and client
• Auto-Scaffold UI Helpers with Template Customization
• Support for splitting up large applications into ‘Areas’
• Asynchronous Controllers support that enables long running tasks in parallel
• Support for rendering sub-sections of a page/site using Html.RenderAction
• Lots of new helper functions, utilities, and API enhancements
• Improved Visual Studio tooling support

You can learn more about these features in the ‘What’s New in ASP.NET MVC 2’ document on the http://www.asp.net/mvc/ web-site.

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select
sum(reserved_page_count) * 8.0 / 1024
from
sys.dm_db_partition_stats
GO

select
sys.objects.name, sum(reserved_page_count) * 8.0 / 1024
from
sys.dm_db_partition_stats, sys.objects
where
sys.dm_db_partition_stats.object_id = sys.objects.object_id

group by sys.objects.name

The first one will give you the size of your database in MB and the second one will do the same, but break it out for each object in your database.

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C – Connection

T – Time is seconds during 5 min interval for which connection is active. Value cannot exceed 300 ( 5*60=300seconds)

C1*T1+…+Cn*Tn

TWC = ———————

T1+…+Tn

Cost = max (TWC1,…, TWCn)/no.of days in month * 3.99

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New for version 1.1:

• Windows Azure Drive: Enable a Windows Azure application to use existing NTFS APIs to access a durable drive. This allows the Windows Azure application to mount a page blob as a drive letter, such as X:, and enables easy migration of existing NTFS applications to the cloud.
• OS Version Support: Allows a Windows Azure application to choose the appropriate Guest OS to run on in the cloud.
• Bug Fixes
  • StorageClient: Expose account key from storage credentials, expose continuation tokens for pagination, and reduce maximum buffer size for parallel uploads.
  • Windows Azure Diagnostics: Fix path corruption for crash dumps, OnDemandTransfer now respects LogLevelFilter.
  • VS 2010: Improved packaging performance.
  • VS 2010: Support for linked files in Web projects.
  • VS 2010: Support for ASP.NET web project web.config transformations.
  • Certificate selection lists certificates from LocalMachine\My instead of CurrentUser\My.
  • Right click on Role under Roles folder to select whether to launch the browser against HTTP, HTTPS or not at all.

Updated and additional samples are available at: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuresamples

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Microsoft will provide cloud computing research projects identified by NSF with access to Windows Azure for a three-year period, along with a support team to help researchers quickly integrate cloud technology into their research. Windows Azure provides on-demand compute and storage to host, scale and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers. Microsoft researchers and developers will work with grant recipients to equip them with a set of common tools, applications and data collections that can be shared with the broad academic community, and also provide its expertise in research, science and cloud computing.

‘Cloud computing can transform how research is conducted, accelerating scientific exploration, discovery and results,’ said Dan Reed, corporate vice president, Technology Strategy and Policy and eXtreme Computing at Microsoft. ‘These grants will also help researchers explore rich and diverse multidisciplinary data on a large scale.’

Today, scientists are operating in a world dominated by data, thanks to increasingly inexpensive sensors and a growing trend toward collaborative data projects. Analyzing and synthesizing this mass of data remain a challenge. The goal of the new program is to make simple yet powerful tools available that any researcher can use to extract insights by mining and combining diverse data sets.

‘We’ve entered a new era of science — one based on data-driven exploration — and each new generation of computing technology, such as cloud computing, creates unprecedented opportunities for discovery,’ said Jeannette M. Wing, assistant director for the NSF Computer and Information Science directorate. ‘We are working with Microsoft to provide the academic community a novel cloud computing service with which to experiment and explore, with the grander goal of advancing the frontiers of science and engineering as we tackle societal grand challenges.’

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Governments and businesses alike are looking at cloud services as a way to consolidate IT infrastructure, scale their IT systems for the future, and enable innovative services and activities that were not possible before.

To help organizations realize the benefits of cloud services, technology vendors are investing in the hard work of identifying and solving the challenges presented by operating in mixed IT environments, and are collaborating to ensure that their products work well together.

In fact, although the industry is still in the early stages of collaborating on cloud interoperability issues, there has already been considerable progress. But what does ‘cloud interoperability’ mean, and how is it benefiting people today?

Cloud interoperability is specifically about one cloud solution, such as Windows Azure, being able to work with other platforms and other applications, not just other clouds. Customers also want the flexibility to run applications either locally or in the cloud, or on a combination of the two. Microsoft is collaborating with others in the industry and working hard to ensure that the promise of cloud interoperability becomes a reality.

Leading Microsoft’s interoperability efforts are general managers Craig Shank and Jean Paoli. Shank spearheads the company’s interoperability work on global standards and public policy, while Paoli collaborates with Microsoft’s product teams as they map product strategies to customers’ needs.

Shank says one of the main attractions of the cloud is the degree of flexibility and control it gives customers: ‘There’s a tremendous level of creative energy around cloud services right now — and the industry is exploring new ideas and scenarios together all the time. Our goal is to preserve that flexibility through an open approach to cloud interoperability.’

Adds Paoli, ‘This means continuing to create software that’s more open from the ground up, building products that support the existing standards, helping customers use Microsoft cloud services together with open source technologies such as PHP and Java, and ensuring that our existing products work with the cloud.’

Shank and Paoli firmly believe that welcoming competition and choice will make Microsoft more successful in the future. ‘This may seem surprising,’ notes Paoli, ‘but it creates more opportunities for its customers, partners and developers.’

With all the excitement around the cloud, Shank says it’s easy to lose sight of the payoff. ‘To be clear, cloud computing has enormous potential to stimulate economic growth and enable governments to reduce costs and expand services to citizens.’

The public sector provides a great example of the real-world benefits of cloud interoperability, and Microsoft is already delivering results in this area through solutions such as the Eye on Earth project. Working with the European Environment Agency, Microsoft is helping the agency simplify the collection and processing of environmental information for use by government officials and the general public. Using a combination of Windows Azure, Microsoft SQL Azure and pre-existing Linux technologies, Eye on Earth pulls data from 22,000 water monitoring points and 1,000 stations that monitor air quality. It then helps synthesize this information and makes it available for people to access in real time in 24 languages.

This level of openness and interoperability doesn’t happen by accident. ‘The technical work of interoperability is challenging, and it requires a commitment to our customers’ needs as well as a concerted effort on multiple fronts and a measured, pragmatic approach in how technology is developed,’ Paoli says. Microsoft’s efforts in this area include designing its cloud services to be interoperable. The Windows Azure platform, for example, supports a variety of standards and protocols. Developers can write applications to Windows Azure using PHP, Java, Ruby or the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Many of these product developments are the result of diverse feedback channels that Microsoft has developed with its partners, customers and other vendors.

For example, in 2006 Microsoft created the Interoperability Executive Customer (IEC) Council, a group of 35 chief technology officers and chief information officers from organizations around the world. They meet twice a year in Redmond to discuss their interoperability issues and provide feedback to Microsoft executives such as Microsoft Server and Tools President Bob Muglia.

In addition, last week Microsoft published a progress report, sharing for the first time operational details and results achieved by the Council across six work streams, or priority areas. And the Council recently commissioned the creation of a seventh work stream for cloud interoperability, aimed at developing various standards related to the cloud, working through business scenarios and priorities such as data portability, and establishing privacy, security, and service policies around cloud computing.

Microsoft also participates in the Open Cloud Standards Incubator, a working group formed by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), a consortium through which more than 200 technology vendors and customers develop new standards for systems management. AMD, Cisco, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware are among a handful of IT vendors that lead the Open Cloud Standards Incubator, creating technical specifications and conducting research to expedite adoption of new cloud interoperability standards.

Developers also play a critical role. Microsoft is part of Simple Cloud, an effort it co-founded with Zend Technologies, IBM and Rackspace designed to help developers write basic cloud applications that work on all of the major cloud platforms.

Microsoft is also engaging in the collaborative work of building technical ‘bridges’ between Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies, such as the recently released Windows Azure Software Development Kits (SDKs) for PHP and Java and tools for Eclipse version 1.0, the new Windows Azure platform AppFabric SDKs for Java, PHP and Ruby, the SQL CRUD Application Wizard for PHP, and the Bing 404 Web Page Error Toolkit for PHP. Each is an example of the Microsoft Interoperability team’s yearlong work with partners to bring core scenarios to life.

Though the industry is still in the early stages of collaborating on cloud interoperability issues, great progress has already been made. The average user may not realize it, but this progress has had a significant positive impact on the way in which we work and live today.

Cloud interoperability requires a broad perspective and creative, collaborative problem-solving. Looking ahead, Microsoft will continue to support an open dialogue among the different stakeholders in the industry and community to define cloud principles and incorporate all points of view to ensure that in this time of change, there is a world of choice.

(via Microsoft Presspass)

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This release is a redistributable, in-place update to the data services assemblies (System.Data.Services.*.dll) which shipped as part of the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. Since this is a .NET Framework update, this release does not include an updated Silverlight client libraryAn updated Silverlight client will be available soon.

What’s included in this release?

This final release includes all the features that were in the prior CTP1 release and CTP2 releases:

Projections: This ADO.NET Data Services URI format has been extended to express projections (i.e. you can now work with a subset of the properties of an entity).  This release includes both server and client library (including LINQ support) support for projections.

Data Binding:  The data services client library for the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 has been extended to support two-way data binding.

Row Count: The data services addressing scheme was extended to allow a client to to determine the total number of entities without having to download all the entities in a set.

Feed Customization (aka ‘Web Friendly Feeds’): The ability to customize how entities are mapped into the various elements of an AtomPub feed.  This feature does just that by providing a data service author declarative control over how the data service runtime maps the properties of an entity (e.g. a Customer, Order, etc) to the elements of a feed.

Server Driven Paging (SDP): This feature allows a service author to set per collection limits on the total number of entities returned for each request.

Enhanced BLOB Support: This feature enhances the BLOB support provided in V1 to enable data services to stream arbitrarily large BLOBs, store binary content separate from its metadata, easily defer the loading of BLOB content when its metadata is requested, etc.

Request Pipeline: The goal of exposing the processing pipeline is to allow services further transparency into a data service such that a service author can do things such as setting HTTP response cache headers, wrapping interceptor processing and data service request processing in a single transaction, etc.

New ‘Data Service Provider’ Interfaces for Custom Provider Writers: As the data services runtime has evolved, so has the number of ways people want to plug data into the data service framework.  In V1, two methods (Entity Framework and arbitrary .NET classes) were supported to enable a data service to interact with various diverse data sources.  To address another class of environments and data sources another way was introduced to write a ‘custom’ provider for those cases when the previous two provider models don’t meet your needs.

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Note that your existing service namespaces have already been deployed to United States (South/Central) and cannot be relocated to another region. If you like, you may delete a service namespace, and when recreating it, associate it with another region. However, if you do so, data associated with your deleted namespace will be lost.

Windows Azure platform AppFabric plans to deploy to more locations in the months ahead.

IP Ranges

United States (North/Central): 65.52.0.0/21, 65.52.8.0/21, 65.52.16.0/21, 65.52.24.0/21, 207.46.203.64/27, 207.46.203.96/27, 207.46.205.0/24

Europe (North): 94.245.88.0/21, 94.245.104.0/21, 65.52.64.0/21, 65.52.72.0/21, 94.245.114.0/27, 94.245.114.32/27, 94.245.122.0/24

Asia (Southeast): 111.221.80.0/21, 111.221.88.0/21, 207.46.59.64/27, 207.46.59.96/27

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If you are a software developer and didn’t read this paper you should. This paper is targeted towards cloud architects who are gearing up to move an enterprise-class application from a fixed physical environment to a virtualized cloud environment. The focus of this paper is to highlight concepts, principles and best practices in creating new cloud applications or migrating existing applications to the cloud. Most importantly, the paper discusses some specific strategies on how to architect your application to leverage the benefits of the cloud benefits. Although you’ll see some specific tactics on how to use different Amazon Web Services features and services (the paper is written by Jinesh Varia, Web Services Evangelist at Amazon), the principles can be applied using any cloud providers (Windows Azure).

This paper reinforces and reiterates some of traditional service-oriented architectural concepts and discusses how they may evolve in the context of cloud computing. It will also discuss some unprecedented concepts such as elasticity that have emerged due to the dynamic nature of the cloud.

You can download the paper here(pdf).

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Windows Azure Status Dashboard

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