Azure service platform is a cloud computing platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. This provides operating system & different set of development service which the developers can use to build their own web applications or enhance them directly in that platform. Without purchasing any upfront technology, developers can create their applications more quickly & easily in the cloud. They only need working knowledge in .Net Framework & Visual Studio Environment. Azure service currently supports native languages. In future it will support many more including Microsoft & Non-Microsoft languages. Once the coding is done, the developer can build & host the application in the cloud, so that end user will be able to run it over the internet.
Azure platform consists of Windows Azure, which is an Operating System to provide on demand computing, storage and management of cloud applications. In short, Windows Azure is an Operating System for the cloud computing platform designed for utility computing. It provides facilities to write, host or manage applications & store data on demand. The service layer consists of different services like: Live Service, .Net Service, SQL Service etc. which provides building blocks within the platform for the developers.

Cloud computing is a dynamic style of computing in which virtualized resources are provided as a service over the internet. The users of cloud computing need not to worry about the capital expenditure and maintenance cost of hardware and software resources. They have to pay only what they are using. This can be of two types. User can either pay the provider based on the resources consumed during the time period or a time based subscription.

Microsoft provides a tool named “MakeCert.exe” which helps us to create a temporary SSL Certificate for development environment. This tool comes with Visual Studio & also with Windows SDK. If you installed Visual Studio, you can find it in this location: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio <VERSION>\SmartDevices\SDK\SDKTools”. If you installed Windows SDK, you will get it here: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\<VERSION>\Bin”.

Now open Command Console (“cmd.exe”) & change your current directory to one of the location specified above. Type the following in Command Prompt & hit enter:

makecert -b 01/01/2009 -e 01/01/2020 -n "CN=Developers" -pe -r -sk "Microsoft Cryptographic Provider" -ss "Microsoft Cryptographic Store" c:\developerCertificate.cer

This will create a test certificate (valid from 01/01/2009 to 01/01/2020) named “developerCertificate.cer” in your ‘C’ drive, which you can use for development environment. You can change the validity period by changing the begindate (-b) & expirydate (-e). You can also change all the parameters specified above.

Here is the list of the parameters mentioned above:

Parameter	Description
-b	Begin Date
-e	Expiry Date
-n	Certificate Subject Name
-pe	Mark Generated Private Key as Exportable
-r	Configures MakeCert to create a self-signed root certificate
-sk	Subject’s Key Container Name
-ss	Subject’s Certificate Store Name

Silverlight 3, though it is in beta stage, but it came up with lots of new features. Some of them are mentioned below:

• Silverlight 3 now supports H.264 video formats & AAC audio formats. Now it also supports RAW audio/video pipeline
• It now supports GPU Acceleration by adding a parameter (EnableGPUAcceleration = "true") in the Silverlight object
• It now supports 3D functionalities. You can now add Perspective view to the element level
• Various Effects has been introduced in Silverlight 3 using Pixel Shader API (e.g. Blur, DropShadow etc)
• Various Animations (like: bouncing, transition) are now part of the Silverlight 3
• A user can start a Silverlight out-of-browser "application" either by right-clicking on the Silverlight element or by clicking on a button within the application itself
• Silverlight now supports custom dialogs. By using the SaveFileDialog you can now write contents outside the sandbox
• It now supports local messaging across multiple silverlight plugins
• XAP compression has been improved
• Lots of new controls (like: DockPanel, WrapPanel, Label, ViewBox, TreeView, ExpanderControl, AutoCompleteBox) were added in this version. New controls in the Silverlight Toolkit are also available
• DataPagination has been added in Silverlight 3
• Using NavigationFramework you can now navigate to different view of the application. You can now integrate the browser back/forward functionalities with this framework
• Binding of elements are now available by which you can update the UI without any code. Data validation in binding is also available in this release
• AssemblyCaching is now available by which you can download the external assemblies only once & later you can use them from the cache. This will improve the application load time during next load
• In Silverlight 3 Network monitoring API has been introduced, by which you can check whether the application is connected to the network or not
• Now binary XML format is also supported in addition to the text XML which will improve the performance in the messaging area

Cheers :)

Microsoft has released Silverlight 3 Beta 1, which is backward compatible with Silverlight 2. That means, you can run your existing Silverlight 2 applications in Silverlight 3 environment.

Here you will find some important links:

• Developer Runtime
• Silverlight SDK
• Tools for VS 2008 SP1
• Expression Blend 3 Preview
• Online Documentation
• Offline Documentation