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Some good videos came out today about Windows Azure.  I’m linking them here as a good single-page way to get a quick (haha… ok, several hours) understanding of what Azure is all about.

Program Manager Steve Marx gives a great 35 minute overview of what Windows Azure means for developers Steve Marx: Windows Azure for Developers

Next on the list, is a 40-minute video of Manuvir Das, Director in the Windows Azure team introducing Windows Azure.  Lots of good architecture stuff in this video. Manuvir Das: Introducing Windows Azure

Diving a bit into more of the individual Azure services, Technical Fellow John Shewchuk More >

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past 27 hours notifying clients about the emergency Windows patch released yesterday afternoon, and also installing that patch on servers and workstations.  So I’m just now getting a chance to post the information here, to my blog.  (Isn’t that a great diagram to the right?  No, I didn’t make that.)

The gist

• This is a major vulnerability affecting the “Server” service that is part of Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008.
• The problem is not as critical in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, as those operating systems have better built in protections in place.  These systems should still More >

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been getting my new development machine configured.  It’s running the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 Standard.  I also have a Windows Home Server (I love it!).  I was pretty sure that the two wouldn’t play nicely together.  That is, I was pretty sure that I’d try to install the Windows Home Server connector on my development machine and it would yell at me and say I couldn’t do that.

To my surprise, though, the connector installed just fine.  Better yet, the backup feature in Windows Home Server works just fine.  WOW!  So More >

At Info et Cetera, we have a really nice content management system that we developed a number of years ago, which we have in place at several clients.  While there are lots of content management systems commercially available today that probably have much more advanced features than our system, we like our CMS because it lets us build lots of custom database functionality to integrate into our clients’ sites.  Additionally, our system provides complete separation between the back end management system and the front end templating system in a very convenient and flexible manner.  But enough about that…

This week, I More >

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague today who insisted that when you create a foreign key in Microsoft SQL Server, it automatically adds an index on the foreign key.  Guess what — it doesn’t!!  I think this is one of the most common mistakes made in SQL Server.  I’ve seen wonderfully normalized databases where the developer did not create any indexes on the foreign keys.  With today’s fast hardware speeds, this problem is often masked because when you’re working with a new database, everything usually runs smoothly anyway.  It is after time that the problem manifests itself, as More >