Friday, February 15, 2013

combing through one's browser cache

I have managed to screw up and destroy the blog posting I wrote on Casey Watson speaking on Azure at Monday's Austin .NET User Group. In my frustration I found tools for combing through one's browser cache for Chrome and IE.

Addendum on 2/16/2013: I have decided that I am now mad enough about losing my notes on Casey Watson's Azure talk to try to recreate some of them. Alright, here we go. Azure is Microsoft's cloud stuff. (Think of Amazon or Heroku for Ruby or Rackspace cloud.) This is the front door and this is a calculator for pricing. Anyways...

  • IaaS is Infrastructure as a Service. This allows one to spin up VMs (virtual machines) in the cloud. The VMs cannot be copied about and one has to run all of one's updates one's self. This approach to cloudlife offers the most control, but also comes with the delicate-little-snowflake problem.
  • PaaS is Platform as a Service. PaaS is built on IaaS. Here one makes canned copies of VMs. An app straddling the VMs can scale up, in terms of platform, to use other copies and thus the canning is crucial. Software updates for the operating systems are automatic and the operating systems do not strictly have to be Windows-flavored. There are options for Linux and Ubuntu. There are also options for spinning up MSSQL and mySQL databases in the cloud. When developing an app for an Azure environment that straddles numerous VMs, one should not use Session. It is better to either go stateless or use Azure's goofy way of emulating Session.
  • SaaS is Software as a Service. SaaS is built on PaaS. To make a really terrible analogy, this is akin to having a shared hosting environment in which one may shove up an app to a holding place and get it running there while one does not have any control over the operating system's settings or that of the web server within the operating system. There are some canned starting points for apps. There is an ASP.NET Web API template and there is also a Drupal template. These are examples of "web roles" while "worker roles" in contrast are processes that may live in SaaS environments that kick off scheduled jobs or watch for activities to happen before kicking off scheduled jobs.

CSUpload is a tool for pushing a VM up to Azure from one's laptop. At Azure, one may monkey with the VM and pull it back down via another tool called Capture. VMs come down as VHD (virtual hard disk) files and then they have to somehow be cast back to VMs. From C# one may interact with Azure ServiceBus and also Azure Storage Services (get Azure Storage Libraries from NuGet).

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