mca blog

i had a handful of questions from blog comments and tweets. after trolling the conference booths and talking to teams, here's what i found today:

will the Azure SDK run on XP?

nope. apparently, there are some dependencies within the Azure SDK for virutalizing the 'cloud' environment locally. that means you need Server 2008 or Vista to host the SDK. however, the actual APIs are all accessible via HTTP/REST. that means you can hand-craft your interactions w/ Azure services w/o running the SDK bits.

when will SDS support BLOBs via SOAP?

BLOB suport via SOAP should be available in the next sprint. sprints are usually 12 weeks apart and the latest sprint dropped this week. until then, you need to use the HTTP/REST interface for BLOBs in SDS.

are there plans for a DEV vs. PROD environment for SDS?

not currently, but it's something they will consider. currently they figure storage and provisioning is pretty cheap, so setting aside DEV clusters may not be critical yet.

when will the Location header be supported for SDS REST PUT/POST?

apparently, this was supposed to be in the latest sprint, but didn't make it. they promise to get it in the next release. it had a blocking issue in HTTPS cases and that is now resolved since the new release will always use HTTPS.

when will Content-MD5 headers be supported in SDS

this may not come in the next sprint, but is on the list. there are some additional issues w/ supporting the Range header and how to deal with hashing of both the payload and the resulting entity for partial updates. gets kinda messy.

when will SDS support "/" in the entity name via the REST interface?

currently SDS treats the "/" as a container->entity delimter when it appears on the URL. SOAP does not have this limiationt. this may be subject to some "Auth-Z" considerations when allowing folks to address partial entities (see above). not something in the next sprint, for sure.

when will SDS support PUT for creating entities instead of just POST?

this is on the list, but not for the next sprint. for the near future, plan on using POST to do creates. even if/when PUT(create) support is added, POST will still work the same way.

that's my list for today. feel free to post comments here or send me a tweet if you have other questions.