Cloud Services (Web and Worker Roles) announcements

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  Remote Desktop Connection Issues: CredSSP
  Micah McKittrick Monday, May 14, 2018 5:03 PM

  With the release of the March 2018 Security bulletin, there was a fix that addressed a CredSSP, “Remote Code Execution” vulnerability (CVE-2018-0886) which could impact RDP connections. The vulnerability was discovered to which the exploits observed were:

  • Targets receive a malicious RTF Microsoft Office document
  • After being opened, the malicious document causes the second stage of the exploit to be downloaded in the form of an HTML page with malicious code
  • The malicious code triggers the use-after-free memory-corruption bug
  • Accompanying shellcode then downloads and executes a malicious payload

  For additional information regarding this update and mitigation steps see the following blog: 

  Unable to RDP to Virtual Machine: CredSSP Encryption Oracle Remediation 

  For general discussion of this topic please see: 

  General Discussion - Unable to RDP to Virtual Machine: CredSSP Encryption

  If the mitigation steps detailed in the above links do not solve your problem please submit a new forum post to: 

  Azure Virtual Machines

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  New article published: Table Storage vs. SQL Database (formerly SQL Azure)
  SethM-MS Wednesday, July 25, 2012 9:56 PM

  You might find this new MSDN article interesing: it compares two types of structured storage supported by Windows Azure: Windows Azure Table Storage and Windows Azure SQL Database (formerly SQL Azure). The goal of this article is to provide a comparison of the respective technologies so that you can understand the similarities and differences between them. This analysis can help you make a more informed decision about which technology best meets your specific requirements.

  Check it out and please do rate the topic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj553018.

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  Follow @wapforums on Twitter to stay connected with the Windows Azure Platform MSDN forums
  Jialin Xin Friday, February 18, 2011 7:20 PM

  As posted on the Windows Azure Team Blog:

  The Windows Azure Platform MSDN forums provide free online community support for Windows Azure and SQL Azure developers from Microsoft insiders, MVP's, and like-minded developers. The forums are a great means to get quick answers and support on all things Windows Azure without having to log a support ticket. The Windows Azure Platform forums average more than 360 new posts a month and 99% of the posted questions receive a response within one day.

  To make it easier to stay on top of what's happening on the forums, you can now follow @wapforums on Twitter to keep track of new forum questions and discussions as they're posted. When you're logged into Twitter, you'll be able to see questions as they're asked, get community tips as they're posted and identify discussions that you may want to participate in.

  And be sure to watch for posts from #MSTechTalk for tips and discussions from Microsoft engineering teams and #WAPSupport for posts related to top support questions.

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  Forums for Windows Azure AppFabric CTP & SQL Azure Labs Support
  Brian Aurich Thursday, January 20, 2011 5:51 PM

  The SQL Azure and Windows Azure AppFabric teams have forums setup specifically for support & feedback of their products in CTP and Labs.  These forums should be reserved for conversations only while the product/feature/version is not a production release.  Along with community members providing answers, these forums are supported by the product groups.
  
  You can find these forums with the descriptions of what they cover under the Windows Azure Platform - CTPs, Betas & Labs forum category.
  
  Currently, the Windows Azure Betas & CTPs (XS instances, VM Roles & Windows Azure Connect) are supported under the primary Windows Azure Platform forums .
  
  Thank you,

  Brian Aurich - Windows Azure Community PM

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  Windows Azure Platform FAQs
  Brian Aurich Wednesday, December 1, 2010 9:43 PM

  Frequently Asked Questions for the Windows Azure Platform are available here:

  http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/faq/default.aspx

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  Windows Azure Platform Training Course and Training Kit - Septemeber 2011 refresh released
  Brian Aurich Wednesday, December 1, 2010 7:46 PM

  The Windows Azure Platform Training Course includes a comprehensive set of hands-on labs and videos that are designed to help you quickly learn how to use Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and the Windows Azure AppFabric.

  The Windows Azure Platform Training Course is available here and includes a link to the latest offline training kit.

  Wade Wegner provides information about the September update in his blog here.

Azure Storage announcements

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  Azure Ultra disks GA
  DiegoRamirez-MSFT Thursday, August 15, 2019 3:25 PM

  With general availability of Microsoft Azure Ultra Disks Storage today, we are delivering the next generation of our highly performant Azure Managed Disk, for data intensive workloads migrating to or running in the cloud. Azure Ultra Disk will help you get maximum extremely scalable performance and sub-millisecond latency for applications and databases like SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, Cassandra, Oracle DB, Postgre SQL, NoSQL, MySQL and many more.

  Azure Ultra Disks will give you access to the best in class IOPS, throughput and latency in the cloud. You can now:

  • Choose from a range of different disks sizes ranging from 4 GiB up to 64 TiB with granular increments
  • Scale performance up to 160K IOPS and 2 GB/s per disk with zero downtime using our flexible innovative design
  • Achieve the optimal performance you need per disk even at low storage capacities 

  Our preview customers have benefited by achieving new levels of performance and scale on Azure for their Virtual Machine and Container workloads. Get started today with Azure Ultra Disk Storage.  Please refer to our how-to-guidefor a deep dive and learn more at https://aka.ms/UltraDiskBlog.

  
  

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  Archived Windows Azure Storage Forum Content
  Brad Calder Saturday, March 26, 2011 6:48 PM

  When the forums moved into specialized areas, the original forum content for Windows Azure was left archived at this link:

   

  http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-GB/windowsazure/

   

   

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  Windows Azure Storage Team Blog
  Brad Calder Saturday, March 26, 2011 6:58 AM

  Please see the Windows Azure Storage Team Blog for more information on Windows Azure Storage

   

  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/

   

Azure SQL Database announcements

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  New service update available for SQL Data Sync!
  Shirley Wang [ADF] Thursday, May 28, 2015 2:58 PM

  While it has been 3+ years since we last announced an update to SQL Data Sync service, we have been continuously deploying updates to the backend service to address top customer issues.  We are listening to your feedback, and today we are happy to announce the latest update which includes both service changes and a new SQL Data Sync agent install.  This update includes two main enhancements:

  1. Support for synchronizing tables that have column collations:
  • If the selected sync schema tables do not already exist in your hub or member databases, upon deploying the sync group, SQL Data Sync will automatically create corresponding tables and columns in the empty database with the same collation settings as the select sync schema.
  • If the tables to-be-synced are already created in both hub and member databases, SQL Data Sync requires the primary key columns have the same collation between hub/member databases to successfully deploy the sync group.  There is no collation restriction on the non-primary key columns.
  2. Improvements to performance and resilience:
  • We enhanced batch transfer of serialized changes from source to destination, so you should see faster sync throughput.
  • We improved transient error handling logic when reading from the source or writing to the destination.

  The new version of SQL Data Sync agent in the download center.  Please follow the step-by-step instructions here to install a new Data Sync agent.  If you have an existing agent, you can refer to this MSDN article for detailed upgrade procedures.  A previous version of Data Sync agent will continue to work until it expires on 8/18/2015.

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  Understand Azure SQL Database and SQL Server in Azure VM
  Vinod Ramakrishna Friday, October 3, 2014 6:35 PM

  Microsoft Azure provides you two options when hosting your SQL Server-based data: Azure SQL Database and SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machine. This new article explains how each option fits into the big picture in Microsoft’s Data Platform, and then discusses the common business motivations that might affect your choice. Please take a look at it!

  http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/data-management-azure-sql-database-and-sql-server-iaas/

  ---

  Selcin Turkarslan