Comments on: Azure calendar aggregator: Part 1

By: G. Andrew Duthie

G. Andrew Duthie — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 01:45:00 +0000

I’m glad I happened upon this article. I’m a developer evangelist for Microsoft, and one of the things I’ve been working on lately is a web site (link above) for helping user groups and other folks in the community promote and discover events of interest to them. I’ve had an iCalendar feed for most of the life of the site, and also provide .ics attachments in the RSS feed for each event using enclosures, so I’m a fellow proponent of the use and availability of iCalendar.

I just gave a presentation on Azure services at the MSDN Developer Conference in Reston, VA, and after the event was discussing with some of the local community folks ways to improve the process of getting data into the Community Megaphone site, including the possibility of having a worker process in the Azure cloud that could monitor an Azure queue, waiting for messages passed in by other sites or applications. It hadn’t occurred to me to try parsing external iCalendar feeds, but that’s a great idea.

I’m curious, is your XML ‘intermediate’ format essentially an XML recreation of the iCalendar format, or are you using your own custom schema?

Looking forward to reading more as your project progresses. Do you envision sharing any of the code at some point?

By: Test-driven development in the Azure cloud « Jon Udell

Test-driven development in the Azure cloud « Jon Udell — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 19:02:21 +0000

[...] Test-driven development in the Azure cloud Posted by Jon Udell under Uncategorized In part one of this series I gave an overview of my current project to recreate the elmcity.info calendar [...]

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 12:53:44 +0000

“Either give me a machine in the cloud to work on our don’t (anything less is censorship)”

I’d rather have the opportunity to self-censor. And on Amazon EC2 I have that opportunity. That said, when I’ve used EC2 VMs I have been running as root. Why? No good reason, just path of least resistance.

Do you routinely run as root on your personal box, and on hosted boxes? If so, you can do that on EC2, and I suspect you’ll be able to on raw Azure VMs too. But setting the default to something less potent is…well, think about it. Have you ever condemned Microsoft for not being secure by default? How do you square that with condemning Microsoft for being secure by default?

More broadly, the cloud environment is going to challenge a lot of long-held assumptions in what I think will be useful ways. Less so for raw VM hosting a la Amazon, more so for the kinds of “fabrics” of which App Engine and Azure are examples.

By: David

David — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 08:37:26 +0000

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always respected your work and even didn’t mind seeing you go to work for Microsoft (it felt like one of us was infiltrating the tower). But hearing you say “The medium-trust policy is probably a good thing” is heart breaking. Either give me a machine in the cloud to work on our don’t (anything less is censorship), I’m not going to learn security stuff (and I don’t think you are going to really take the time too either: if so do please do tell, maybe it takes someone like you to convince us otherwise?). As always and with the utmost respect, still enjoying your blog/podcasts and thoughts on mixed dynamic/static languages for us died in the wool python/ruby zealots is appreciated. But please don’t say security is a good thing for the web: “the web is agreement”. Sincerely, Disgusted of Tumbridge Wells

By: Chip Childers

Chip Childers — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:06:47 +0000

Jon,

Please do keep us updated as your proof of concept progresses. I’ve joined the tech-preview for Azure, but have not had the time available to use it yet (which is why I’m interested in other’s opinions!). Thanks for sharing what you learn and experience.