In the last 12 months, virtualization and cloud computing has become one of the hottest issues in the hosting world.It started with companies offering Linux based cloud services for Windows, based on cloud servers and then it expanded to new companies going into elastic computing, such as Rackspace and Opsource. Yet it seems that when it comes to MS-Sql server support and .Net, all current solutions fall short. The major part of the management work ‘falls’ on the user and the cost is far higher compared to Linux solutions. The user is supposed to install anything above the basic OS and to take care of upgrades, monitoring and duplicating resources (servers) on his/her own, for scale out solutions. Some of the solution providers sell their offering as a testing environment platform or as for simulating production environment, reducing client operation costs, compared to purchasing hardware and hosting fees.

Then, a few months ago, a new major player entered the world of cloud computing: Microsoft with WindowsAzure.  Microsoft will officially launch their services in January 2010 as a production hosting platform, and new web server farms will be operational all over the world during 2010. They have currently invited every ISV or Bizspark client to use the WindowsAzure environment as part of their CTP, allocating them with a limited CPU and instances Tokens. We have were able to upload a partial solution (covering 70%) of our application in less than a day’s work.

To solve the versatility of OS configurations and provide an almost instantaneous scale up option, Microsoft Azure takes a different approach than other elastic .Net supporting solutions. Mainly, WindowsAzure solution limits the application working environment physical resources usage and configuration. The most trivial example is that you can’t write to files, writing and saving of local data is done to special blob objects (which by the way can resemble small DBs). The server instances are virtual, and I don’t mean VM or Hiper-V.  The application is running on an AppFabric environment. The Fabric has the ability to run worker-roles that are very close to services and web roles that are very close to web services. The actual code has to be compiled, especially for the AppFabric environment (a very simple process), but anything that was developed in .Net could be converted to Azure.

Microsoft has even taken its solution one step forward, and offers the WindowsAzure platform for private cloud implementation. Your organization can install the Azure platform as a virtualization solution for internal environments solution such as QA and staging (just think what can be done when it comes to load testing), or as part of your organization SaaS solution, providing a private application environment for different clients, installed on the same hardware.

What Azure is offering for SQL cloud solution- on my next post.

Coming soon …

How easy is it to embed Ads into a flash player?

If you have looked at our demo sites or our widgets site from a developer point of view, you have probably noticed that the Ads seem to be integrated as a part of the Flash layer.

It looks obvious, just call the ad jpeg or flash file and place them in the correct location. right? Correct , but...
And here comes a big BUT. The ad URL is not something given to you on a golden plate.

Big Advertisement companies and AdNetwors don't think about the possibility that some strange programmer would like to retrieve the ad URL from their server using client side code embedded in flash.

Their systems are built to support calls for ads URLs using iFrame URL or a JavaScript code.

Try and get the Ad URL from an iFrame URL while in flash. You just can't, since it's in a different domain the browser security infrastructure prevents you from reading the HTML DOM of an object residing in a different domain.

So you like to know how we did it?
You can’t .It's confidential. Believe me I like to say more (and I did post it until our panic team read about it and i had to remove the paragraph about our solution) I promise that once I'm able to disclose how it all works I will.

In the meantime if you are a JavaScript freak and like to talk more about the different format of JavaScript code the advertisers use on their systems place a comment or send me an email.