Today the Photostynth team has released a major new feature and a slew of small improvements.   New Feature: Overhead View Have you ever wanted to look down on Mt Rushmore from directly above the Presidents? What about seeing the exact layout of Stonehenge from above? If you’ve used Photosynth you know that it automatically calculates a “cl.. more »

a few months ago he jumped right on it and within a few days built his Smugmug plug-in. If you’re a Photo Gallery user that also happens to use Smugmug to share photos AND videos, then this plug-in is for you! Check out the plug-ins download page (more plug-ins are coming soon). Anyway, enjoy Omar’s perspective. –Michael Palermiti Hi There! My nam.. more »

To prevent your Windows Azure applications from potentially experiencing a loss of availability during platform upgrades, we recommend deploying more than one instance of your web-facing roles. Doing so also enforces the Windows Azure Compute Service Level Agreement (SLA), which guarantees 99.95% external connectivity for Internet-facing roles when .. more »

Check out the new post, "Cloud Computing a Catalyst for Server Growth? to read a good commentary in response to yesterday's Cloud computing by the numbers: What do all the statistics mean?" asks the question "if virtualization is growing and cloud computing is growing, how can the market for private enterprise servers also be growing?" He describes .. more »

We are happy to announce that two additional nodes for the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network are now live in Seoul, Korea and Taipei, Taiwan. These two new nodes bring the total number of CDN physical nodes available globally to 22, with six of these nodes available in the Asia-Pacific region. These two new locations expand our service in the .. more »

This week in BPOS news is a recurring segment on the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog that covers news from all sectors of Cloud Computing and the Microsoft Online Services business suite known as the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). You can read all past This Week in BPOS News segments here. This week in BPOS news we cover two stories .. more »

0); } } } } } } For a comparison, the compression built into an on-premise SQL Server is transparent to the application and benefits much wider range of types like all the way to larger types because it scopes to the row to the page. In other words it can use the repetition dictionary in compression across all the columns in the page. You can read .. more »

As part of the Real World Windows Azure series, we talked to Melvin Greer, Chief Strategist of Cloud Computing, Information Systems, and Global Solutions at platform to develop the company's Thundercloud design pattern. Here's what he had to say: MSDN: Tell us about Lockheed Martin and the services you offer. Lockheed Martin is well known as a .. more »

Liam Cavanagh has posted a webcast to Channel 9 that shows you how to extend the capabilities of SQL Azure Data Sync by writing a custom sync applications to enable bi-directional data synchronization between SQL Server and SQL Azure.  This enables you to add customization to your synchronization process such as custom business logic or custom c.. more »

You may have seen a letter in this morning suggesting that customers evaluating a licensing agreement with VMWare talk to Microsoft to learn more about how products and services such as the platform can enable a complete cloud-computing environment. We posted this letter because we feel that cloud computing represents the biggest opportunity in .. more »

In this webcast, Brett Hill of Advaiya, Inc., talks about using the Admin account in the Microsoft Online Services Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). The admin account in BPOS takes on special characteristics and sometimes may not behave exactly as you expect. This webcast looks at some of these unexpected scenarios. You can learn more .. more »

I previously wrote a blog post that featured three . I am blogging about two more support videos today that demonstrate and teach new methods to troubleshoot issues that users might be having sending or receiving email. Problems Sending and Receiving E-mail Client In this first video you will learn new methods to troubleshoot issues that users .. more »

While you're waiting for the beta update to complete, The beta update is complete, but still: why not entertain yourself with the latest and greatest Live Mesh video content?  Posted fresh today: Ori Amiga's amazing Live MeshMobile (pronounced, Ori asks us to tell you, like 'BatMobile' :) demonstration:  Ori Amiga: MeshMobile Noah Edelstein gives a .. more »

I covered how to calculate the cost of a covered index, allowing you to evaluate if the performance of the covered index was worth its monthly cost. In this blog post I am going to use Transact-SQL to calculate the average cost of a row in a table. Imagine that you are running a web site that reviews restaurants and you sell advertising space on .. more »

State and local governments evaluating a move to the cloud should have a central location where they can find partners and solutions with the right cloud-based solutions to meet their business needs.  To meet this need, the Public Sector team just Microsoft Government Cloud Applications Center to provide government customers with a centralized p.. more »

Did you notice? We haven’t posted anything new here for awhile. We’ve officially stopped maintaining this blog. To get the inside story from the people who build Windows Live, check out the blog, where Windows Live engineers and executives blog about all the Windows Live services, how they’re built, and how we decide what to add or improve as we bui.. more »

Did you notice? We haven’t posted anything new here for awhile. We’ve officially stopped maintaining this blog. To get the inside story from the people who build Windows Live, check out the blog, where Windows Live engineers and executives blog about all the Windows Live services, how they’re built, and how we decide what to add or improve as we bui.. more »

Since rolling out the latest Live Mesh release this afternoon, a number of customers have reported trouble installing the Live Mesh for Mobile software. We have identified the problem and are currently working on a new build. We don’t yet have an estimated time of availability, but we will post updates here, on the blog, as we know more.   In the.. more »

Imagine that you are an Independent Software Vendor (ISV), have a purchaser for your Windows Azure application and you want to transfer a copy of the starter database to the customer. However, you don’t want to give them the Administrative login and password from the SQL Azure portal. Or perhaps you want the test team to be able to copy the pr.. more »

This week in BPOS news is a recurring segment on the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog that covers news from all sectors of Cloud Computing and the Microsoft Online Services business suite known as the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). You can read all past This Week in BPOS News segments here. This week we cover three stories that look .. more »