Soon, actually June 1st Virtual Machines will go GA on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. With that the exact prices are finally known. You can take a look at http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/overview/ for all technology in the Azure stack. For VM’s specifically these are the prices known as of now.

Compute Instance Name	Virtual Cores	RAM	Price Per Hour (GA Price Starting Jun 1st)	Price Per Hour (Promotional Price Until May 31st)
Extra Small (A0)	Shared	768 MB	$0.02 (~$15/month)	$0.0133 (~$10/month)
Small (A1)	1	1.75 GB	$0.09 (~$67/month)	$0.08 (~$60/month)
Medium (A2)	2	3.5 GB	$0.18 (~$134/month)	$0.16 (~$119/month)
Large (A3)	4	7 GB	$0.36 (~$268/month)	$0.32 (~$238/month)
Extra Large (A4)	8	14 GB	$0.72 (~$536/month)	$0.64 (~$476/month)

And for the more power intensive material:

COMPUTE INSTANCE NAME	VIRTUAL CORES	RAM	PRICE PER HOUR
A6	4	28 GB	$1.02 (~$759/month)
A7	8	56 GB	$2.04 (~$1,518/month)

It’s great to see this entire platform evolve so fast.

Grz, Kris.

And win cool prices!

Grz, Kris.

By default you only get to download a small file that, once executed, will gather all the needed materials and install it. From home this worked pretty well for me but at work, likely due to a network setting it didn’t. Making use of several search engines for an offline installer I found nothing. Hmmm, what to do.

Well it turns out to be that one can make use of the small download to gather all the material locally.

Simply open a command window, navigate to the place on disk where you have the installer of Updated 2 ready and type in:

vs2012.2 /Layout

That will open up a window where you can select a download folder:

After a while you’ll get the following window:

which gives you an installer and a folder with a bunch of subfolders totaling to 1.8Gb.

Now clicking that executable will install Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 from a local installation. For me this helped out getting around the restrictions of some proxy/firewall settings at the company to be able to install the goodies.

Grz, Kris.

Grab it while it’s still hot at this place.

And what’s all new you may ask. Well…

Agile planning

Visual Studio 2012 introduced a new set of capabilities to support agile teams—on their terms. Update 2 adds new capabilities for your team to customize and get more out of its agile tooling. You can now add customizable columns to your Kanban boards so that they more accurately reflect your organization’s structure. Work item tagging helps teams to manage their work items by adding tags to get more out of their data.

Quality enablement

Maintaining quality throughout the development cycle is one of the key focus areas for Visual Studio 2012. In Update 2, you can continue to drive quality wherever you are through web access for Test Case Management. You can author and execute test cases remotely, making it easier for all members of your team to participate in test case reviews. You can also profile your unit tests to create better code by tracking the end to end flow of your code, including the unit test itself.

Line-of-business (LOB) application development

With Update 2 we continue to invest in making it easier for you to develop LOB applications. You can quickly create SharePoint apps and HTML5 client apps using LightSwitch. Just design your app and let the LightSwitch templates provide the fit and finish so you can get your LOB applications running quickly. With the addition of WPF, Silverlight and SketchFlow to Blend for Visual Studio, now you have everything you need for designing and coding your desktop applications in Visual Studio.

Developer experience

When you spend a lot of time developing software, you want tools that will provide an enjoyable developer experience. Update 2 includes enhancements and updates to improve the developer experience for Visual Studio 2012. Code map debugger integration gives you a visual representation of your code while debugging so you can identify issues faster. You can also create great apps for Windows Store using profiling enhancements to find issues earlier that could impact your users.

KB2797912: Description of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2

Additional Updates

Additional downloads for Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (Visual Studio 2012.2) are also available for:

• Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 with Update 2
• Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Express 2012 with Update 2
• Team Explorer Everywhere for TFS 2012 with Update 2
• IntelliTrace Collector for Visual Studio
• Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2012 Update 2
• C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 Update 1
• Agents for Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Update 2
• Agents for Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 Language Pack

And best of all: another theme:

and a feature that I need to discover more but looks awesomely cool is codemap:

Grz, Kris.

Actually I didn’t see at first that there was newly created content on the ASP.NET website hence the reason why I write this post. The series needs a bit more love to be detected.

• Building Web Apps with ASP.NET Jump Start: (01) What's New in ASP.NET 4.5
• Building Web Apps with ASP.NET Jump Start- (02) Building and Deploying Websites with ASP.NET MVC
• Building Web Apps with ASP.NET Jump Start- (03) Creating HTML5 Applications with jQuery
• Building Web Apps with ASP.NET Jump Start- (04) Building a Service Layer with ASP.NET Web API
• Building Web Apps with ASP.NET Jump Start- (05) Leveraging Your ASP.NET Development Skills to Build Office Apps
• Building Web Apps with ASP.NET Jump Start- (06) Building and Leveraging Social Services in ASP.NET
• Building Web Apps with ASP.NET Jump Start- (07) Building for the Mobile Web
• Building Web Apps with ASP.NET Jump Start- (08) Real-time Communication with SignalR
• Building Web Apps with ASP.NET Jump Start- (09) Taking Advantage of Windows Azure Services

Grz, Kris.

I’ve been giving presentations myself about this little handy tool from Microsoft and I’m happy to see that version 3 saw daylight and that I can finally speak about it as well. There are some very nice new features to it so be sure to check it out.

What to expect: Cloud, Git, TFS.

Download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/next/.

Also check out the WebCamps video where Vishal Joshi explains about all the new features in WebMatrix 3.

Grz, Kris.

Yes! I got the email message in my inbox yesterday evening that I got renewed as an MVP. I’m of course very happy to be renewed for the efforts I made during the past year in the community.

I also got to hear that several of my buddies also got renewed and that Mike Martin got his for the first time. Congratulations to all!

As you can see I had to celebrate this last evening with another MVP: Bilal Haidar who was visiting Belgium.

Grz, Kris.

I got word the ASP.NET MVC hands on labs are available online also. So if you want to get to know more or just want to get your hands dirty for the first time with this great technology stack simply navigate to http://www.asp.net/mvc/tutorials/hands-on-labs.

Grz, Kris.

Since several years Microsoft helpers have created the All in One Code overview filled with samples & search possibilities for those common scenarios they saw being asked for over and over again on forums or newsgroups. It’s cool to see it has now also become a Windows 8 Store App.

Grz, Kris.

One day – four locations – on site experts – prizes – fun. That’s basically what’s going to happen on March 27th at four different locations in our cozy Belgian country. You can opt between:

• Brussels
• Genk
• Mons
• Kortrijk

Like in the past there are 2 main sessions: one at day and one at night so you can choose yourself when you want to sleep or try to win a prize. Talking about prizes this might certainly interest you and get you engaged:

• 1st Place: free & full entrance to TechEd Madrid 25-28 June
• 2nd Place: Marvellous Asus Vivo Tab
• 3rd Place: Hot Windows Phone 8

Of course something cool like this isn’t real before you see a banner so here you go:

Grz, Kris.

This year I went again to the MVP summit in Redmond and Belle Vue. I had a blast to see so many familiar faces again, get to know many more people and having lots of interactions and networking. The technical sessions were interesting but the most awesome times were the after hours meetups. As I got awarded as MVP of the year this year I also got the opportunity to go out on a nice dinner with several other MVPs holding that title and several high ranking managers at Microsoft. The day after I also met up with people from the TFS online group and several program managers of the Windows Azure Web Sites group. It was very nice to interact and provide feedback.

On the last day we also tried to gather as many of the ASP Insiders as possible and have a cool picture of the gang . I’m the third person from the left with the green sweater.

Of course I hope to be there again next year as well .

Grz, Kris.