aWorkBlogByGus

The BPT team is hiring...

Gus Perez (MS) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:59:00 GMT

If you want to make a difference to a lot of people—users and developers alike—working on a product with many millions of users is a great place to start. The Browser Programmability and Tools team is building a new, faster, more scalable, modern JavaScript runtime for Internet Explorer. We’re also responsible for defining and shipping the entirety of the HTML5/JavaScript toolset and developer experience. With the rise of HTML5, the importance of these tools and the JavaScript runtime will only increase.

Our team’s charter includes:

Developing a fast, standards-compliant JavaScript runtime
Creating great HTML5 and JavaScript development tools for Visual Studio
Building the “F12” developer tools that ship in Internet Explorer

We are seeking innovative and experienced developers, program managers, and testers. Feel free to look through the job descriptions linked to below and submit your resume for any you're interested in pursuing:

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Windows Azure Tools and Live Framework Tools Refreshed

Gus Perez (MS) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 22:41:00 GMT

We’ve just refreshed the MIX releases of the Windows Azure Tools and the Live Framework Tools. The updated versions address an issue that would cause Visual Studio to close unexpectedly if run on specific language editions of Windows (e.g., German). In addition, the Windows Azure Tools refresh includes a fix that allows targeting a different instance of SQL Server other than SQL Server Express.

There’s no reason to upgrade to the new versions if you’re not affected by these issues but we felt they were worth addressing for those who have encountered them.

These updates address the issues described in Jim’s post and Danny’s post.

Note that these were *just* posted to MSDN and sometimes take a few hours to propagate across all download servers. To make sure you're getting the latest bits, please make sure the "Date Published" on the download page is 3/20/2009.

Just updated my Windows Azure Links page

Gus Perez (MS) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 18:41:00 GMT

I've just posted an updated set of Windows Azure resources I've come across over time. While some of these sites are just getting started (and therefore don't have much content), I figured I'd include them since they seem to be targeting the Windows Azure space specifically. If I've missed any, feel free to contact me (via email or DM me on Twitter) and I'll consider them the next time I update the page.

Silverlight Debugging in Windows Azure Web Roles

Gus Perez (MS) — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:09:00 GMT

In the latest release of the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio, one of the new things you'll find is that we've added support for Silverlight debugging (i.e., hitting breakpoints in your Silverlight code). I originally posted some quick steps but have decided to just point everyone to a much more thorough post by Jim that has all the details one needs.

Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools Updated - Jan 2009 CTP

Gus Perez (MS) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:30:00 GMT

We've just released the latest version of the Windows Azure SDK and the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio. For the most part, we've concentrated on making things more robust, improving performance, and fixed plenty of bugs.

The areas you should mostly see improvements on are:

Code/Build/Run/Debug cycle
Support for Silverlight debugging on Web Roles
Improved Development Storage Service integration
Service definition and configuration file errors are now detailed in VS
Bug where publishing a package that was above a certain size would fail has been fixed as well

As always, the best place to post questions is on the Windows Azure Forum on MSDN as members from both the SDK and Tools teams monitor it.

Jim, has also posted about the release with some more details as well.

Created a Windows Azure Links page

Gus Perez (MS) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:19:00 GMT

After yesterday's post, I've decided to create a single page that I'll update whenever I get a chance with links to sites that are focusing on Windows Azure. It includes both Microsoft and Community sites. Here's a link to it and I'll be adding it to my sidebar in a few minutes. Feel free to contact me with any other sites you think are worth adding to the list and I'll check them out and get them on there if it seems like the right thing to do.

Windows Azure Links

Gus Perez (MS) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 11:54:00 GMT

I've decided it's probably best to have a single page I update with links to good info on Windows Azure from other peers at Microsoft as well as those coming from the community instead of posting individual entries every once in a while. If you know of some links for sites that are focusing on Windows Azure and would like me to add them to the list feel free to contact me via email (or Twitter) and I'll check them out and get them listed.

Microsoft

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio Team

Jim Nakashima - Program Manager
Gus Perez - Development Lead
Hani Atassi - Developer
Cloud Computing Tools - Team Blog

Windows Azure SDK Team

Steve Marx - Program Manager
Sriram Krishnan - Program Manager
Daniel Wang - Developer
David Aiken - Technical Evangelist

Other Microsoft Sites

Community

Azure community off to a great start...

Gus Perez (MS) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 12:26:00 GMT

While we're busy planning and working on the next release of the tools it seems a vibrant community has begun to rise around Windows Azure and other related services. It's been really fun to watch this happen as quickly as it has and with great quality. We had been working on all of this for some time eager for the PDC to arrive to see how customers and the community as a whole would respond once everything was announced and made available. It's been a couple of weeks now and there is plenty of goodness going on out there and I figured I'd give some link-lovin' to those that are clearly working pretty hard on getting content out there and helping people get started and go well beyond. Here's a list of links I've run across and will continue to check out going forward:

AzureCoding.net seems to be off to a great start run by Brownie and co.
Tanzim Saqib has been posting some great articles recently.
MyCloudApp.net is a wiki that covers Windows Azure as well as the rest of the stack.
AzureJournal.com is also worth visiting and subscribing to.

Of course, if you're not already doing so, definitely subscribe to our PM Jim Nakashima's blog who's clearly not sleeping more than a few minutes per day lately.

If there are any others out there that I missed (I'm sure I did), I apologize, but feel free to contact me and let me know as I'm sure I'll post again in the future in an effort to help folks starting out with Windows Azure find more resources online. Thanks all! Back to work now...

Install blocked on Visual Studio SP1?

Gus Perez (MS) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:48:00 GMT

The Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio runs on top of either Visual Studio 2008 Standard (or above) or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. However, it requires the SP1 version of these and the installer will block if either of these are not at SP1 level with the following message:

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio requires Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition SP1. If you installed pre-SP1 components after upgrading to SP1, please reinstall SP1 and try again.

We're finding that some users that have both of these installed on their machines are left wondering what's wrong when they see this error message for a variety of reasons: some installed the Express version a long time ago and didn't remember they still had it, some weren't aware that installing the SP1 update for Visual Studio doesn't actually update the Express versions on the machine (a separate SP1 update exists for each of those), and some are expecting that it would work if only one of them was updated.

In the end, we require any versions you have be at SP1 level to reduce confusion and problems in the future. That said, we'll work on improving the error message (more specific and more actionable) in our next release.

In the meantime, if you're seeing this error with our October CTP, make sure you've applied the SP1 update for whatever versions of Visual Studio 2008 you have on your machine. You can find the updates here:

Visual Studio SP1
Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition SP1 (read this before upgrading)

Also, if you're one of those folks that are using a non-Express version of Visual Studio full time now and no longer plan on using the Express Edition, uninstalling the Express Edition should also get you past the installer error.

User name with spaces?

Gus Perez (MS) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:52:00 GMT

Turns out there's a bug in the October CTP of the Windows Azure SDK having to do with user names that contain spaces. It looks like the right folks are on it at this point and it will hopefully get addressed in our next release (still figuring out our release frequency story). The best way to get around it and have everything work is to actually run under a user name without spaces. But if that's really not an option for you, you can try the following:

Open up an elevated command prompt.
Navigate to the directory where the Windows Azure SDK is installed (e.g., C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK).
CD your way into .\v1.0\bin\devfabric.
Start the dfservice.exe process as follows 'dfservice -sp ' where you replace the last argument with a directory that doesn't contain any spaces.

Next time the Development Fabric starts up (either from running your app from Visual Studio) or launching csrun.exe from the command-line, things will work reasonably but there will be problems around clean-up logic.