Moving Azure Mobile Services from Account A to B

We just got done publishing an application to the Windows store using Azure Mobile Services (more on the app later) and had to change Windows Store accounts mid stream.  Don’t take this as an official how-to but just in case you end up in this situation just know it is possible and not that much of a pain.

We started building the application under Account A, but for business reasons decided to publish it under Account B.  We had already setup to the application in the store, configured Azure Mobile Services including authentication within the application.  There might be a step by step somewhere but I sure didn’t find it, and I was a little worried just winging it so close to releasing the application.  Here’s roughly what we did to switch it over

• Setup the new Windows Store Account B, and went through verification
• Created the same application with slightly different name under Account B, it won’t let you use the same name because Account A is still using it, and I was afraid to delete from A prior to setting up Account B, it turned out we liked the name with “s” added better anyway
• In Visual Studio on the project right-click Store –> Associate and sign in to the new Account B, and choose the new application we just provisioned.  This part went much smoother than I thought, after a few seconds and files updated it finished.
• Removed the application from the system (just to be on the safe side so nothing was confused)
• Ran the application – it fails trying to authenticate because the package ID doesn’t match for the authentication
• In Live  developer center you must change the URL for the application – as it won’t let you use the URL on the new application.
• In Live Developer center update the application to have your Azure Mobile Services URL
• From Live Developer take the Client ID and Client Secret and update the Azure Mobile Services Authentication tab info with that info
• Run the application – all is good

Azure Continuous Build–Limit What Gets Built

I’m working on a Windows 8 application that also has a companion Azure Web site.  These happen to be in the same Team Foundation Service project.  So when I enabled the continuous builds and deploys it also tried to build the Windows 8 application and was failing because of other dependencies.  To keep things simple I really just wanted the auto build to build the Azure website and not the rest of the items in the solution.

When you setup the deploy on the Azure site and connect it to your TFS project it doesn’t tell you a lot about the magic that happens to cause the build to run.  Behind the scenes it creates a build definition for you.  If you edit the build definition from Team Explorer in Visual Studio you can specify which configuration the build should run on the solution when the build executes.  So if you want to limit what gets built, simply copy the Release configuration, uncheck Build/Deploy for the items that you don’t want built.  Then modify the TFS Build definition to specify that specific project configuration to build.

So in Configuration Manager for the Solution I added an AzureDeploy with only one web site project enabled

Then on Team Explorer, Builds, I edited the build template – selected the Process section and choose the AzureDeploy project configuration

First Look–Acer Monitor for Windows 8 (T232HL)

I’ve been waiting very impatiently for the next wave of touch monitors that would come out designed for Windows 8.  The Acer T232HL is one of the first to show up with the Windows 8 Compatible sticker on it.  It’s a 23 inch touch monitor with 10 touch point support and most importantly for Windows 8 has edge to edge glass without a bevel.  It supports 1920x1080 resolution, the same as its big brother the T272HL which is 27”.  I also looked at the 27” Planar touch which is also new for Windows 8 – but both neither of the 27” monitors increased the screen resolution and both almost doubled the price so I stuck with the 23”.

So far I’m impressed with the monitor – setup was pretty easy and it only took about 10 minutes.  So I don’t create yet another unboxing video, here’s one I found that looked pretty decent in case you want to see more about how it comes out of the box

I was impressed they give you all the cables for VGA, DVI and HDMI in addition to the expected power.  Like the other touch monitor I used this one has a USB cable that is required to activate touch.  The manual isn’t really that great about that being required but I know from my older Planar it was required.  As you can see in the video, the monitor has a kick stand that allows it to tilt back.  One challenge for me on my desk was this kickstand almost drops off the edge.  I also think the kickstand is a little more flimsily than I would like.  If you want you can also wall mount it. I’m pairing it with a couple of other 24” monitors so another small thing that I don’t like is it doesn’t have a vertical height adjustment so there isn’t a way to raise it up off the desk.  I could probably mount it on an arm to the wall and that would fix the height and the kickstand issues but I will give it a try for a few weeks as is.

A touch monitor certainly isn't required for Windows 8 but it does  work well with it.  I’m using this with my desktop along with two other monitors and it allows for good interaction with the new Windows 8 style applications.

If you are shopping for a Windows 8 touch monitor the most important thing is to look for one without a bevel.  Early on prior to release all you could find was with the bevel – These do work but you have to really work to swipe from the edge for certain actions.  I had a Planar PX 2230 Mw that I was using before I got this and it connected fine but just was a little smaller and clumsy due to the bevel.  The same is true of many of the older all in one computers that offered touch. 

If you are looking for a windows 8 touch monitor I would keep it on the short list.  I do imagine that more touch monitors will be announced and I suspect the price on them will keep dropping as well it just a matter of how patient you are!

It’s a Windows 8 Weekend

I did a few rebuilds this week of my Windows 8 RC machines to Windows 8 RTM.  All went well, I didn’t do any upgrades from Windows 7, and honestly not sure I would.  I generally like the clean break and don’t like to bring over any old stuff. 

Couple things I found useful when doing the installs – first for the //Build Samsung Slate, I used a USB stick to boot from and install the RTM Windows 8 – that didn’t work too well the first time because I didn’t build it with a FAT32 and didn’t disable the UEFI – so despite my effort to get it to boot from the USB it would just ignore it – reading this post http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/samsungpcgeneral/thread/e7ed293e-b565-44ee-a536-166dddf32205/ I was able to re-build my USB and it worked fine.

Another thing that isn’t real obvious if you install the Windows 8 Enterprise edition it’s a little challenging to activate because it’s expecting to find a volume license server.  For that  used “slmgr” to set the key and activate it. So basically you go to MSDN, grab your key, from an elevated command prompt do a slmgr /ipk <your key here> that sets the key, then do slmgr /ato to activate your copy – you should see a message box confirming.

Location and Bing Map Resources for Windows Phone

Just wrapped up presenting at a Windows Phone Camp in Denver and I wanted to post a few follow up links that we talked about during the session.

Location Programming Best Practices for Windows Phone

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff431814(v=VS.92).aspx

Bing Maps API Licensing Details

http://www.microsoft.com/maps/product/licensing.aspx

Bing Maps REST API docs

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff701722.aspx

Using the Bing Map Task

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh394026(v=vs.92).aspx

Using the Bing Maps Direction Task

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh394024(v=vs.92).aspx

As the cloud grows up…

Last week Windows Azure suffered an outage due to a leap year issue.  It’s not the outage I want to highlight, as much as the transparency in sharing what happened.

Outages happen, all the popular cloud providers have had them, its how they are handled that matters. Often times little details are shared on what caused the problem or plans to ensure it doesn’t happen again.  As we all try to get comfortable with trusting the cloud providers with our critical systems this often times leaves us in the dark.

Today Bill Laing a CVP at Microsoft posted this blog post explaining in great detail what happened, challenges they had during the outage and detail plans to improve the service.  It’s fairly long but it’s a good read and will help you understand some of the inner workings of the Azure service better.

One of the commitments in the post that I really appreciate is the commitment for more details in progress updates during an outage.  That’s one of the most important aspects that cloud providers don’t get is how they can replace the fact that if its hosted internally you can walk down the hallway and get a status.  If Azure can figure out how to be transparent like this with what happened and be proactive on providing more details during an outage they are raising the bar for all cloud providers and I think that is a really good thing!

Hyper-V from the Windows 8 Client

Now that I have Windows 8 running natively on a couple machines I figured I would give Hyper-V a try.  For the last several years I’ve had to run VMWare to be able to run 64bit virtual machines locally.  After enabling hyper-V (see below) I imported a pre-built Hyper-V virtual machine I had sitting around and fired it up.  If you have ever run Hyper-v on the server it has the same look and feel to manage.

Steps to enable

- Make sure Virtualization is Enabled in BIOS

- From Control Panel – Windows Features find Hyper-V and enable it

One thing, if you do need to change bios plan on shutting the machine all the way off.  I forgot about this little gotcha and I kept getting the error in Windows Features saying it couldn’t enable Hyper-V even though I had updated my bios.  Once I did a full shutdown all was good.