I've just noticed that container names must be lower case in Azure Blob Storage.
In-fact it will blow up and exception if you try and create a container name with a capital letter.
Be aware of that if you use my Azure Blob Browser I do not handle the exception (infact there is no exception handling whatsoever. I will put a fix out later for it.
This was driving me batty for about 10 minutes.
If you click on the following link it will return a pretty picture of the Acropolis
http://maheshwar.blob.core.windows.net/livesearchimages/Acropolis1641358469.jpg
If you click on this link it will return a not so pretty 404
http://maheshwar.blob.core.windows.net/livesearchimages/acropolis1641358469.jpg
Please note the only difference is the capital letter in Acropolis
This came into my head last night when uploading a couple of blobs into the cloud.
Since I developed my blob browser, I've found myself using it to transfer files from one machine to another.
For the sake of efficiency I found myself with one remote desktop connection to one machine, and me being on my main machine. Since this was an update to an existing file that I was transferring, I copied over the existing zip file in the cloud. I was being particularly lazy, and I just used a public uri to get the file at the other side (rather than using a private uri, and my browser).
The interesting thing is that when I retrieved the file at the remote site, i didn't get the update version of the file, it served me up the previous version.
At first I thought there was something odd with the replication mechanism, session affinity with the posting machine, now I just think that I had some caching getting in the way, as I can't seem to reproduce what i saw last night.
If I post a file into blob storage services, I should be able to retrieve the file straight away. This is different to Amazon's model which is that the file might not be there when you attempt to access it (as it hasn't been replicated yet).
To be honest I'm not quite sure how this is achieved in Azure. I know that data must be replicated at least 3 times. I don't know if it has to replicate 3 times before a response is given, replicated to all participating machines or whether the replication is completely loosely coupled. (I will try and do some digging).
I guess my point here is that I need to look a bit more into the workings of replication with Azure
So I've just released version 0.1 of my Windows Azure Blob Browser / Viewer.
This is a little WPF application that allows you to browse / download blobs residing in Windows Azure Blob storage services. This works against the current CTP release.
You can download the application from here
This gives the following functionality
There is still a bunch of stuff that I want to include in future versions
All you need to get started is your Azure Storage account name + Shared Key (this should also work against your dev account)
So looking at the Sky Player a little closer, I am very disappointed to see that there is no adaptive streaming solution (like the olympics), but they have opted for the easier solution of offering high, medium, low quality dropdown instead.
So Sky Television have just launched their own Web Based TV Service developed with Silverlight 2 + PlayReady.
The following channels are available:
No existing Sky Connection / Dish necessary.
Supports up to 1.8Mb, which interestingly enough (if you watch the PDC Olympics and Silverlight session) is the optimal limit they found during Olympics + Democratic National Convention
I'm pretty excited about this as it should increase the Silverlight install base in the UK and it really shows that Silverlight (especially in the UK) is making its name in media. BBC, Sky + ITV (UK's biggest networks) all have (or about to have) Silverlight based Internet TV Offerings. Very cool.
I know this has been out for a few weeks now (i'm not the quickest off the mark, but it's still v.cool)
Check out more about Sky's offering below:
https://skyplayer.sky.com/vod/page/home.do
http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/dec08/12-04SkyPlayerPR.mspx
I had this discussion last week and may’be if I have time over Christmas, I might build one.
What would be really cool if someone built a little tool to allow you to browse / view data held in a table in Windows Azure Storage Services.
I don’t think this would take long to build, would be pretty simple and would be incredibly useful.
All the browser would need to do really is take the serialized data, and extract it out to equivalent rows and columns.
Maybe one exists already? If so, let me know.
