Questions

BCP and SQL Azure
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlazure/archive/2010/05/21/10014019.aspx
I Miss You SQL Server Agent: Part 1

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlazure/archive/2010/07/30/10044271.aspx

Improved Developer Experience, Interoperability, and Scalability on Windows Azure

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/12/12/improved-developer-experience-interoperability-and-scalability-on-windows-azure.aspx

Caching

output caching, session caching

 in-place upgrade
 development fabric 

 Configure Windows Azure Diagnostics to transfer directories.??

https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/common-tasks/diagnostics/

Diagnostic InfrastructureLogs, Directories, Logs, PerformanceCounters, and WindowsEventLogs.

 IntelliTrace??

 Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus. relay access token. message security,transport security

The Service Bus Relay service enables you to build hybrid applications that run across both a Windows Azure datacenter and your own on-premise enterprise environment.

 Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus message buffer and Simple Web Token (SWT) 

 ETags for Block

BLOB Storage updates are atomic.  Meaning, the file isn’t updated until the update is fully complete and the BLOB Storage will continue to serve the previous version until the new version is committed

If you happen to be reading the BLOB (either Block or Page) in ranges, or not all at once because of the size of the file, then each read is atomic.  If you read a part of a BLOB and then it changes before you read the next part, then you could get into a scenario where it has changed out from under you.  To avoid this issuemake sure to use the ETag values in the response to make sure it hasn’t changed since you started to get the file.

 leases for pages

http://blog.smarx.com/posts/managing-concurrency-in-windows-azure-with-leases

1. Blobs and tables use optimistic concurrency (via ETags) to ensure that two concurrent changes won’t clobber each other.
2. Queues help manage concurrency by distributing messages such that (under normal circumstances), each message is processed by only one consumer.
3. Blob leases allow a process to gain exclusive write access to a blob on a renewable basis. Windows Azure Drives use blob leases to ensure that only a single VM has a VHD mounted read/write.

// blob.Exists has the side effect of calling blob.FetchAttributes, which populates the metadata collection
while (!blob.Exists() || blob.Metadata["progress"] != "done")
{
    using (var arl = new AutoRenewLease(blob))
    {
        if (arl.HasLease)
        {
            // do our initialization here, and then
            blob.Metadata["progress"] = "done";
            blob.SetMetadata(arl.leaseId);
        }
        else
        {
            Thread.Sleep(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(5));
        }
    }
}Item puter operation