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[hhaggan]

Windows Azure Media Services

i just blogged about the Windows Azure Media Services.  A service that help the developer with all the media files rather than the unstructured storage.  This helps a lot with streaming and storing this media. 

Imagine the pain that you would feel when developing the unstructured storage and the time that you will waste whether for storing the media or streaming and transferring the Media.

for the storage perspective, if you are willing to store a very large file which can reach some gigabytes and you have worked with the blob storage or the unstructured data before you will certainly realize how painful, hard and time wasting to do so.

for transferring the media, this will mainly depend on the way you store your media on it.  i mean the best way to do so will be by dividing the media into block and transferring each block to the client.  if any problem occur to any of the transferred packets the server will have only to re-transfer the block that faced problem during the transfer.

The Windows Azure Media Services, mainly provides 3 things that helps the developers for the media development and maybe with the data management.

- the first thing is the upload the videos  or the different type of Media

- the second thing is to encode the videos uploaded

- the third thing is to stream or to download the Media to different type of clients.

currently Windows Azure Media Services is available for the development using the C# and Java programming language.  i dont think that it will be available in Node JS or Mobile Services, or actually it is not available for the following reason that the Node JS as it is designed to handle a very large number of concurrent users but it is not designed for heavy processing power or video transcoding.

[hhaggan]

Windows Azure Node JS

I am currently working on a project based on Microsoft Windows Azure Mobile Service.  i really admit and agree on whoever said that if you want to "go fast, go slow" especially in Software development.  Simply because as long as you understand more about the topic the more you discover issues that might help you understand more and build better solutions.  As much as you understand as much as you know the capabilities of the tools and the API.

after digging for some time and the new updates that were launched recently, you can understand that this tool, the Windows Azure Mobile Service is based on Windows Azure Node JS.  Before if you start developing on the Windows Azure Mobile Service you wouldnt be able to do a lot on the server side, just few static functions, the insert, retrieve, push notifications, and other few limited functions.

after the last updates released and actually that helps a lot in the different client applications, you can create you own custom API using the Node JS NPM in the development.