Thanks to all of those who attended my MSDN webcast entitled "Discover the Windows Azure Services Platform" that I delivered on January 28th (click here to see a reply of the webcast).  I had a pretty lively audience who asked some great questions!

There was one question in particular that was asked by an attendee around and issue he was experiencing with .NET Services that I promised to get an answer to by pinging some folks from the .NET Services Product Team.  Well, I have his answer, and I promised my audience that I'd post it on my blog.  The question that was asked was the following:

"I understand at this time,with the Service Bus the registration of my Service in the Service Registry times out and is deleted after a few minutes. When will this change and Service registrations remain active in the Registry?"

Fortunately, I was able to get an answer from Clemens Vasters, who works as a Senior Technical Lead on the .NET Services Team:

"One of the issues here is that we don’t want to turn the registry into an easily approachable and sticky spam magnet (that the former public UDDI registries unfortunately degenerated into) while the service is effectively free-for-all. We are currently allowing for 15 minutes (which is obviously too short) and will extend the TTL for those entries upwards to 1-2 days in the next CTP. In the released product we will allow for significantly longer TTLs for production accounts."

So there you have it.  Straight from the "horses mouth"!  Clemens is a great guy and I sincerely appreciated him chiming in and answering this great question.

Again, thanks to all who attended the webcast!

Dot Net Solutions recently released a new version of its Wikipedia Explorer application built on top of Windows Azure. The project is about visualizing relationships between documents within Wikipedia and features a cool user interface built on Windows Presentation Foundation.

To learn more about this great sample application, head over to Dot Net Solutions' website.  You can actually download and run the application (via ClickOnce) here. 

The Azure Issue Tracker application is a sample application that allows users to capture and track various types of issues. This sample demonstrates a real-world SaaS architecture and scenario using the Azure Services Platform to perform federation and multi-tenancy. Technologies used include the Access Control service (part of .NET Services) as well as SQL Data Services (part of SQL Services).

This sample is being released in two versions: Standard and Enterprise. The Standard version allows ad-hoc users to use LiveID federation with the .NET Access Control Service and authorize other LiveID users. The Enterprise version of IssueTracker wile use the same claims-based authorization capabilities as the standard version, but allow greater control by customers over claims and authorization decisions.

To learn more about this great sample application and download the source code, head over to the Azure Issue Tracker CodePlex project website.

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What great news!  The historic inauguration of President-Elect Barack Obama will be streamed LIVE using Silverlight, our online Rich Internet Application (RIA) and media platform, via the Presidential Inaugural Committee website on January 20th.  For those of you who followed the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, you witnessed first hand and what our Silverlight technology can do in the online media arena!  This is a great time for our country and a very exciting time for Microsoft to be able to showcase argueably the most important moment of our time using the power of the Microsoft platform!

The Azure Services Platform Team has recently released an update to the Windows Azure SDK and Visual Studio Tools. These latest releases are available here:

• Windows Azure SDK: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=130232
• Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=128752

The updated SDKs include:

• Bug and performance fixes
• Improved integration with Visual Studio
• Performance improvements with execution and debugging scenarios
• Improvements to Storage Client and ASP.Net provider samples
• Added support to debug Silverlight in a web role

Just posted this morning over on the SharePoint Team Blog, we've just released a Community Technology Preview of v1.3 of the Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for SharePoint.

The CTP is available at: https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=428

To learn more about what's available in the 1.3 release, head over to the SharePoint Team Blog.