elastacloud = azurecoder + bareweb

Firstly a new welcome. Andy and I are the co-owners of Elastacloud, a wholly Microsoft Windows Azure consultancy with Mitch, who runs the Serbian office. We took our love of Azure, expertise in Service Management and Lifecycle and put it to good work with our understanding and interest in HPC and Azure and are alpha testing our first product which is a managed grid for all of the above. So the blog has changed a bit azurecoder (me) + bareweb (Andy) = Elastacloud. Remember because we’ll test you later on!

Just a post about the Azure bootcamp in London yesterday. Running the Bootcamp under the 6-weeks of Azure program was Steve Plank and Eric Nelson who have been tirelessly putting content together for the program and to help developers make a smooth transition to the cloud. Yesterday was lots of fun and very well attended. It was clear to us that many of the developers will be making Azure part of their new development lifestyle. Heaven help them!

We did a short pitch about the user group towards the end of the day which went down incredibly well and I think we’ll be seeing some of those faces at the group in the future. Now it looks like we need a bigger room – we’re probably going to be way oversubscribed on Feb 7th for the meeting. We were expecting 70 but it looks like there will be a lot more. Need a bigger room and sponsor.

Also in attendance was Steve Spencer from Black Marble, like Elastacloud, a partner in the 6 weeks programme. Steve is a great all-round guy with a broad base of knowledge in some cool gadgets such as Surface and Kinect. He was going through some of his adventures in touch screen stuff to do with seamless movements of windows between screens and systems. Cool stuff!

Andy fixed a problem yesterday so I thought I’d blog about this …

Two of the delegates had problems with running their example code for the day. It all focussed around hitting  points in the code where config was needed to be access from the cscfg file. As in:

var somecode = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString");

The result of this was a SEHException. Those familiar with this kind of exception will know that there is an underlying P/Invoke issue. Andy followed through the problem and inspected the logs and found a BadImageFormatException. I’ve written about these exceptions in previous blog posts on msshrtmi. It’s a 32-64 bit conflict and it’s horrible! You get a whole load of confusion here because the site appears that it can run in the devfabric container and you can inspect the output on the compute emulator UI but when you check IsInRoleEnvironment you get a big fat no. Underlying this issue is a cascade of 64-bit loader exceptions.

Andy’s solution was to update the Default Application Pool in IIS and remove the 32-bit compatibility flag which fixed the problem. Yay! So there’s a another note for the trench!

Okay, the other thing to say is that yesterday confirmed that we (the UK Windows Azure Users Group) would be putting on a conference by the end of May with a whole heap of speakers, some from the US and Europe as well as the UK. We’ll be holding this in Central London prior to the Queen’s Jubilee and trying to make the cost under £40/delegate – they’ll be two free books given out – one an Enterprise Guide to Windows Azure written by Andy, myself, Simon Hart, Rebecca Martin, Mark Rendle, Steve Spencer, Shiju Varghese and Carlos Olveira. It will be a real “notes from the trenches” book with a lot of information. This will be a printed book. The other is a free O’Reilly eBook. We’re going to have a main auditorium, and second room containing break session on real Azure apps and how they have been developed by software companies and consultancies and a third room where the speakers will hold a code surgery – so bring your laptop along if you need help.

Can we have some comments from people if they would want to attend this  or email us directly and we’ll add you to a list for when the tickets go live (via Eventbrite probably).