Shiju Varghese's Blog

I just received an email from Microsoft which stating that I have been awarded as Microsoft MVP again for 2012!! Now I became a Microsoft MVP for the third time in a row.

Microsoft Windows Azure team has released a new version of Windows Azure which is providing many excellent features. The new Windows Azure provides Web Sites which allows you to deploy up to 10 web sites  for free in a multitenant shared environment and you can easily upgrade this web site to a private, dedicated virtual server when the traffic is grows. The Meet Windows Azure Fact Sheet provides the following information about a Windows Azure Web Site:

Get ready to MEET Windows Azure live on June the 7th. The Microsoft Windows Azure team is conducting an online event “Meet Windows Azure” on June 7th 2012 starting at 1 PM PDT. The event will be presented by Scott Guthrie. If you want to watch event  live, you can register here: http://register.meetwindowsazure.com/.

In my last post Beginner’s Guide to Node.js on Windows Azure, I have introduced Node.js and Windows Azure Tools for Node.js. In this post, I will demonstrate how to develop and deploy a Node.js web app using Windows Azure PowerShell for Node.js. In this demo web app, I will be using Node module Express as the web app framework and Jade as the view engine for the HTML view templates. We are using  Windows Azure PowerShell for Node.js for developing and deploying the app on Windows Azure. If you want to deploy Node.js apps on Windows Azure using Cloud9 IDE, check out my blog post from here.

In this post, I will provide an introduction to Node.js and Windows Azure tools for Node.js and will also provide few resources to start and develop Node.js apps on Windows Azure.

In this post, I will demonstrate how to build a simple HTTP API using Node.js with NoSQL database MongoDB. This demo app will be using MongoDB object modeling tool Mongoose to connecting with MongoDB from the Node app. This demo app is a very basic level JSON based HTTP API which is not following any better practices and mainly created this sample demo for demonstrating Node.js and MongoDB using with Mongoose Node package.

The Microsoft Windows Azure team has released the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js 0.5.4 which  will be using the Node.js 0.6.17 and iisnode 0.1.19. The Node.js 0.6.17 contains a security fix against the HTTP Server Security Vulnerability detected by recently. It would be recommended to upgrade to the new version of Azure SDK for Node.js if you have already deployed any Node.js app to Windows Azure which will provide better security. The iisnode 0.1.19 provides iisnode.yml file instead of XML based configurations which can be use for setting up all iisnode settings. You can download the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js 0.5.4 from here.

Windows Azure is now supports Telephony and SMS capabilities to the apps hosted in Windows Azure by using the Twilio API. Twilio is a third-party service that provides a cloud-based telephony service which allows to add scalable, reliable voice and text messaging capabilities into you apps. Using Twilio's native libraries for Java, PHP and .NET, developers can build telephony enabled web apps hosted on Windows Azure in which we can make and receive phone calls and SMS messages from  phones and web apps. Twillio is providing 1,000 free text messages or 1,000 voice minutes for Windows Azure developers and you can get the free offerings for Windows Azure from here .