Development Experience(s)

Today, I learned that - although supposedly more efficient - you cannot actually just copy the input stream from a Azure Service Bus BrokeredMessage into a block blob and have that blob be read by Stream Analytics. This is because stream-copy introduces some control characters into the event stream, which makes it so that stream analytics cannot read the events, thinking that maybe you configured your Path Prefix Pattern wrong. In the example above, notice how I pass CultureInfo.InvariantCulture into the path-generating DateTime expression. This is because DateTime has some magic built in, rending the expression as 2015-09-23-15 for the 23rd of September, 2015 at 15 o'clock on my machine, instead of what I (thought I) requested - 2015/09/23/15 . That aside, the resulting blob had control characters and serialization data in it, which was not something I expected: Extracting the JSON-encoded string itself and uploading that as a byte array, worked a lot better, eli

Here are some of my notes from Sweden Azure User Group's CloudBurst 2015 at Microsoft premises in Stockholm. The recordings have been made available  (courtesy of Live Arena ), and if you're interested in the agenda for the two days, it is here . The speakers had been invited and then got to decide for themselves, what they wanted to speak about (given the Azure context, of course). It turned out fairly varied, but with a certain emphasis on identity services / management and microservice characteristics. Azure Service Fabric Still in preview; not likely to be released this year. Is considered PaaS v2, superseding Microsoft's current Cloud Application platform (Web- and Worker Roles). Things like Azure Service Bus, Azure SQL database and Cortana runs on Service Fabric. Now, they are packaging it up for consumption, just like they did with Azure AD. Micro service is: Logic & state that is independently versioned, deployed and scaled. Today's cloud

If you're using Windows Azure ServiceBus behind a corporate firewall, and you just use the default settings the SDK provide you with, you might find yourself in a situation where the initial connection to the services takes forever  (21 seconds on average for me). This is because it, by default, uses TCP connectivity and tries to communicate on ports that we have blocked. To, instead, use HTTPS as transport, run this code in the startup of your application: Connection time down to near-instant. Yay! The ConnectivityMode also includes a HTTP mode.