Now you can IM from your browser directly with Windows Live Web Messenger (http://webim.sg.msn.com/)
No software installation required.. pretty cool. you can now chat with your friend at school, at work, in the library, or overseas!
Windows Azure:
- Compute = $0.12 / hour
- Storage = $0.15 / GB stored / month
- Storage Transactions = $0.01 / 10K
- Bandwidth = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB
SQL Azure:
- Web Edition – Up to 1 GB relational database = $9.99 / month
- Business Edition – Up to 10 GB relational database = $99.99 / month
- Bandwidth = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB
.Net Services:
- Messages = $0.15/100K message operations , including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens
- Bandwidth = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB
How Comsumption is Measured
Windows Azure
- Compute time, measured in machine hours: Windows Azure compute hours are charged only for when your application is deployed. When developing and testing your application, developers will want to remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing.
- Storage, measured in GB: Storage is metered in units of average daily amount of data stored (in GB) over a monthly period. E.g. if a user uploaded 30GB of data and stored it on Windows Azure for a day, her monthly billed storage would be 1 GB. If the same user uploaded 30GB of data and stored it on Windows Azure for an entire billing period, her monthly billed storage would be 30GB. Storage is also metered in terms of storage transactions used to add, update, read and delete storage data. These are billed at a rate of $0.01 for 10,000 (10k) transaction requests
- Bandwidth requirements (transmissions to and from the Azure datacenter), measured in GB: Bandwidth is charged based on the total amount of data going in and out of the Azure services via the internet in a given 30-day period. Bandwidth within a datacenter is free.
- Transactions, measured as application requests
SQL Azure
Web Edition Relational Database includes:
- Up to 1 GB of T-SQL based relational database
- Self-managed DB, auto high availability and backup
- Auto Scale with pay-as-you grow
- Best suited for Web application, Departmental custom apps.
Business Edition DB includes:
- Up to 10 GB of T-SQL based relational database
- Self-managed DB, auto high availability and backup
- Auto Scale, Pay-as- you grow
- Additional features in the future like auto-partition, CLR, fanouts etc.
- Best suited for ISVs packaged LOB apps, Department custom apps
.NET Services:
Messages (Includes Access Control, Orchestration, and Reliable Queuing for message): .NET Services allow developers to easily connect their cloud applications and databases with existing software assets and users. This connection between cloud and on-premises assets is facilitated by the exchange of messages. The consumption-based pricing model means that customers will pay only for the number of message operations that their applications use. The definition of a “message operation” includes Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens. Messages are charged to the customer in discrete blocks of 100,000 (“100k”) for each monthly billing period, meaning that
- A customer who consumed 95,000 messages would be billed for 1x100k messages (plus the bandwidth used to send messages in or out).
- A customer who uses 150,000 messages in a billing period would be charged for 2x100k messages (plus the bandwidth used to send messages in or out).
- A customer who uses 20 million messages in a billing period would be charged for 200x100k messages (plus the bandwidth used to send messages in or out).
You can read more about SLA and other information at http://www.microsoft.com/azure/pricing.mspx
The XP2Win7 project features the PhotoView, a WPF application that runs on XP. But the fun starts when you run the same application on Windows 7, which unlocks new technologies such as Taskbar, the Sensors and Location Platform, and Multitouch, as well as “old” Vista friends such as Application Recovery and Windows Search.
Our goal is to show developers how to take advantage of the new Windows 7 features while keeping backward compatibility with older windows versions. We also wanted to show a managed code application that uses a lot of the native API that are not present in the .NET Framework, and by doing so to lower the bar for.NET developers as they target Windows 7.
You can read Jason post about the application
You can download the application from here - http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/XP2Win7
And here are some screen capture of the application running on Win 7 and Windows XP.
Domain selection is one of the most important component of SEO. A good domain name will give you a significant amount of relevancy when people searched on terms related to your site. For example, when people search about “Windows Live”, they will be matched first with the Live domain. Choosing a good URL basically sets out the right foundation to build upon your content and other SEO related work.
Some key points on Domain names:
http://www.mysite.com
http://mysite.com
http://sg.mysite.com
are all different site although they belong to the same parent domain. Search engine view sites based on their absolute URL instead of parent domain. This is important because we will want to avoid having multiple variations of our domain on the web and causing us to dilute the inbound links and pagerank associated with us.
If you:
- Already have a range of domains pointing to the same location (e.g. you have people coming into your site on http://mysite.com and http://www.mysite.com)
Step 0: Identify a list of URL that you think your visitors are using. (e.g. with and without www, with default.aspx or without, with index.html or without, etc). If the site is already active, you can take a look at the referral URL or landing page URL using your site statistic tool.
Step 1: Go to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ ,enter all the variations of your URL into the search bar:
What you will see here is the number of InLinks (also know as InBound Links).
Step 2: Next, you should run through the different kind of URL that you think your visitors are coming and identify the one with the highest number of inbound links.
Step 3: After you have selected the URL that is most popular among your users, you will need to set 301 Redirect for all the other URLs in the list to point to the one you’ve selected. 301 Redirect is a special code that tells the search engine that you site has been redirected and they will credit the site score to the consolidated site.
Next, if you are running a regional site, for example, http://www.mycompany.com where you want to have local site for SG/MY/TH. Many times, people will use subdomain for this purpose (creating sg.mycompany.com, my.mycompany.com, th.mycompany.com). This is fine if all the site has different content or you want to build each site separate from others.
However, more often than not, it is wiser to simply create subdirectories http://www.mycompany.com/sg or http://www.mycompany.com/my. The reason is simply because you can do SEO once for the mycompany domain and all the localize site will be able to enjoy the benefits. Furthermore, inbound links associated from all the local site will be associated with the parent domain which is a good way to chalk up more points.
Key Points to note:
- URL is extremely important. Make sure you use a domain that is relevant to your topic
- Stick to one URL for your entire site, don’t have a mix of URL pointing to the same content
- Use 301 Redirects to consolidate your site into one central landing page. 301 doesn’t deal any demerit points and is the correct way to redirect page points to the main site.
- Try to use subfolders instead of subdomain if your site is showing the same content