[E-book] - Cloud Migration & Modernization

Get ready to help your customers move to the cloud with the Cloud Migration playbook. This Microsoft practice development playbook is provided free from Microsoft.
You can learn about:

• Strategies for building your cloud business, including which workloads to target, how to value your services, and how to build your tech team.
• In-depth technical details on how to plan and perform a workload or application migration to Microsoft Azure.
• Best practices and real-world guidance sourced from dozens of Microsoft partners who are either delivering or preparing to deliver cloud services.

This playbook is intended for the business and technical leadership for new and existing Microsoft
partners focused on migrating workloads to Microsoft Azure or modernizing legacy applications
to the cloud. 

Objectives: The goal of this playbook is to help you accelerate or optimize your Azure-focused practice by teaching you the ins-and-outs of migrating workloads or modernizing applications and hosting them in Microsoft Azure.
For the business side, this playbook provides an understanding of the strategies you can take to build a migration or modernization practice, including which workloads to focus on, how to price your services, and how to build your technical team. For the technical side, this playbook provides detailed
guidance on how to plan and execute the migration of an existing workload or application to Azure, including advice on different approaches and the tools you may find useful, and technical details on best practices with infrastructure migrations. Application modernization,optimization, and management are discussed, as are Azure best practices and advice on how to build unique IP
to make your migration practice more successful.

This playbook is part of a series of guidance written by Microsoft Partner Opsgility, in conjunction with the Microsoft One Commercial Partner group and 12 other successful Azure partners that have volunteered their time to provide input and best practices to share with the rest of the partner community.

Complete and submit the form to download the book from here. (PDF size 9.83 MB)

Boeing Marketing with Microsoft Technologies

The Boeing 737 is the best-selling airplane in aviation history. With new 737 models continually being developed for the product line, Boeing wanted to create exciting new ways of marketing the aircraft to prospective customers. It turned to Microsoft and Wire Stone, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, to create a tool that it calls "Boeing 737 Explained."

Based on thousands of high-resolution photographs that are stitched together to create a seamless, immersive presentation, Boeing 737 Explained provides a rich, compelling way for customers to view and understand the plane without needing to actually stand next to one. The tool runs on Windows 7 and is hosted on the Windows Azure cloud platform, using Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Touch technologies, providing users with a dynamic experience, whether viewing it with Microsoft Kinect on a cinema-size screen or Windows Phone.

“Boeing 737 Explained” Windows Azure & Silverlight Demo

Boeing Takes to the Cloud with a Solution to Market its Best-Selling Airplane

“Boeing 737 Explained” Kinect Demo

Learn more by accessing the project case study: Boeing Takes to the Cloud with a Solution to Market its Best-Selling Airplane

The largest photo on Earth–70 billion pixels Budapest

Check this  – the largest Photo on Earth – 70 Billion Pixels. (70 gigapixels) !!

http://www.70-billion-pixels-budapest.com/index_en.html

 

 

Go to the above given link to view the photo, click at the bottom thumbnails to zoom into that particular image. Click on ‘Home’ at left side above slider to get back to see the entire image. Try the Aero-plane thumbnail and others to zoom in.

 

Some Amazing facts -

“The World Record starts with a high definition camera and and a telephoto lens with an extremely narrow field of view. Sony’s A900 25MP camera seemed an obvious choice, and Sony was pleasantly eager to provide us one. Fitted with a 400mm Minolta lens and 1,4X teleconverter, it provided a 2,4 degree horizontal FOW per frame. Our estimate was that a 60 gigapixel image (with the necessary overlaps) would require 5040 individual photographs — 24 rows with 210 frames in each, taken with a 360 degree horizontal and a 60 degree vertical FOV. Counting with 4 seconds per frame (during which the robotic head re-adjusts for the next shot), it was quite clear that the task would take a minimum of 6 hours to complete…”

 

 

“Should the final image be printed, the finished 300 DPI picture would make a poster 156 meters long and 31 meters tall. The amount of paper it would take would also cover two 10-story apartment blocks.”

 

 

“Post-processing was done on a Dell Precision T7500 Workstation with twin 4-core Xenon processors, 24GB memory and 6TB hard disk, courtesy of Microsoft Hungary. For the initial compilation we used Autopano Giga, the most complete software solution for processing high-resolution images. The task took two days to complete and resulted in a single 200 GB Autopano KRO file.”

 

Web display

To display it on the web, we compiled a picture consisting of 21 individual layers, each compiled of a series of 254x254 JPGs in a so-called image pyramid. The full pyramid consists of 1.476.098 frames, of which over 1 million is situated in the deepest layer. We used the Microsoft Silverlight plugin which, with its ever-so-slight color washing, provides the best results among current technologies. More importantly, it allows users with mid-spec machines and average internet connections to experience the World Recorder panorama in its full glory.

Data storage

Due to the level of projected interest and the resulting bandwidth demand, we needed a safe and stable storage solution. Windows Azure offers both in a platform based on „cloud computing”, which provides equal chance of access to all and every users from anywhere in the world. Computing and storage capacities are dynamically scalable to bandwidth demand.

Windows Azure also supports a large number of popular technologies and protocols including SOAP, REST, XML and PHP.

 

Also check the making of video and other interesting information in detail from that site.

Amazing !! Try to explore and zoom in to discover ! http://www.70-billion-pixels-budapest.com/

Free Ebook- Windows Azure Platform: Articles from the Trenches Volume 1

Check out this Free ebook on Windows Azure.

“This book pulls together great articles from many of those developers who have been active with the Windows Azure Platform to hopefully help others become successful. There are twenty articles in this first volume covering everything from getting started to implementing best practices for elastic applications…”

You can download this book from here.  (Download size – 3.33MB)

(Source:TWC9)

Nike’s Jordan Brand Social Mosaic uses Silverlight , Windows Azure Cloud Service

Jordan Brand, a division of Nike, is celebrating its 25year anniversary and has created a Stunning Mosaic called Mosaic 23/25 also known as Social Mosaic. It allows enthusiasts to connect with the Jordan Brand by allowing them to upload photos of themselves with their Air Jordan shoes. And all these photos containing thousands of images form a mosaic.

 

 

“Powered by Silverlight 3, the Social Mosaic leverages both Deep Zoom, which provides the ability to interactively view high-resolution images, and Multitouch capabilities. Once the consumer uploads their photo(s), they are sent a photo ID so that they can visit the mosaic to find their photo.  Silverlight Deep Zoom allows the consumer to pan and zoom deep into the mosaic to see their picture and experience their own contribution to the Jordan Brand community. With Multitouch, they can interact with the mosaic through touch screen functionality, if supported by their hardware, to further enhance their interactive Jordan Brand experience.

In addition to this innovative user experience, the ability to quickly develop the Social Mosaic and host it in the cloud was of paramount importance to the Jordan Brand team, so they turned to the Windows Azure platform.”

You will have to check the site here to experience this Mosaic magic !

(Source: Silverlight Blog )

MeshPack from Microsoft Startup Labs

 

MeshPack is built on Windows Live Mesh platform, by the Microsoft Startup Labs. At present there are 4 Apps in the MeshPack :

• Collaborative Crossword: A crossword puzzle designed for multiple users to solve together
• CorkBoard: "Bulletin board for the digital life"
• MeshLists: A list creation/sharing tool
• CrowdVote: A collaborative group-polling tool

The Mesh Pack is currently limited to the Live Framework - Community Tech Preview participants.You need a PDC Live Mesh token to get access.
To learn more about Live Framework and the mesh technologies, and to get into the CTP go to azure.com.

(source:James.Random())

How do people pronounce A Z U R E …….Ashure … Azyouwere ??

The Azure Services Platform was announced in front of thousands of developers at this year’s PDC, everyone saw it but, no one is sure how to pronounce it.

Check this out, what happens when one asks people to pronounce…

A Z U R E……… quite hilarious!

The Azure Services Platform … Ashure … Azyouwere ??

btw this is how you pronounce ‘azure’ according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary.

Another audio pronunciation link for azure.

Also on msn encarta : http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_1861588117/azure.html

Azure Services Training Kit

Want to learn how to use the Recently announced Azure Service Platform? Get this Training Kit.

The Azure Services Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content including samples, demos, hands-on labs, and presentations that are designed to help you learn how to use the Azure Services Platform. This initial PDC Preview release includes the hands-on labs that were provided at the PDC 2008 conference. These labs cover the broad set of Azure Services including Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services.

Download :  Azure Services Training Kit.

System Requirements

• Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows Vista Service Pack 1

.NET Framework 3.5 SP1,Visual Studio 2008 SP1,Windows Powershell

Please Note: Many of these labs require Azure Services developer accounts. To request an invitation code that can be used to register an Azure Services developer account, please visit: http://www.azure.com