A lot of exciting things were announced at today’s Meet Windows Azure event, and one of the things I wanted to share with you is how you can now use our cross-platform Windows Azure Command Line Interface (CLI), part of our Node SDK, to administer your hosted services,...
How to Build a Real-Time Chat Service with Socket.IO, Express, and the Azure SDK–Part 2: Setting Up Express and Session-Handling
So if you read part 1 of this series, then you’ve had a chance to grok the requirements for our little chat service and see all of the NPM packages and front-end tools we’re going to use for building it. In this portion I’m going to explain how to...
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How to Build a Real-Time Chat Service with Socket.IO, Express, and the Azure SDK–Part 1: Setting Up
This past weekend I ran a Node Bootcamp on behalf of Microsoft and in partnership with the fine folks at Cloud9 IDE – the goal of these camps is to help teach newbies Node.JS and to get some Node.JS-on-Azure business from attendees who have a good experience.
So...
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Building a Node + MongoDB Powered Blog on Windows Azure
This is a simple blog engine that I wrote in about three days time. I wanted to show off the power of Node.JS on Windows Azure, and also take advantage of our recent support for MongoDB in Replica Sets on Windows Azure.
Here are some of the tools I...
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How to Do Business with Extremely Busy People
Big Picture
The bottom line when working with busy people is to preempt as much of the mental overhead of working with you as possible; all it really takes is some brevity and thoughtfulness on your part. If you form the eight behaviors I list below (and others I may...
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How to Use the Azure npm Package Locally without the Azure Compute Emulator
One thing that is a little dicey about the Windows Azure SDK for Node [footnote:“azure” is the name of the associated npm package] is that it by default it depends on being run inside of Azure itself or the compute emulator.
The Azure npm package looks for environment variables...
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Code Camp Talks: Intro to Node.JS and Building Web Apps with Express
This past weekend at SoCal Code Camp I gave two presentations back-to-back on Node.JS: “Intro to Node.JS” and “Building Web Apps with Express.”
I don’t have much to add on what I did at the sessions other than to mention just how surprised I was at how enthusiastic people...
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How to Automatically Utilize Multicore Servers with Node on Windows Azure
One major advantage of developing Node applications for Windows Azure is the ability to have your Node apps managed directly by IIS via iisnode.
You can read more about the benefits of iisnode here, but I want to call out these two points specifically from the iisnode wiki:
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Troubleshooting “500 Internal Server Errors” in the Windows Azure Emulator when Working with Node.JS
On my primary development machine, where I have tweaked and prodded IIS multiple times for many projects over the past couple of years, I get the following 500 – Internal Server Error message when I try to fire up even the simplest “Hello World” Node.JS project included in the default...
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Node.JS on Windows Azure Part 1: Setting Up Your Environment
Following Microsoft’s announcements regarding first-class Node.JS support on Windows Azure, I thought it would be helpful to walk newbie Node.JS and Windows Azure developers through the process of getting their Node.JS development environment set up, building their first simple Node.JS application, and then learning how to take advantage of...