Update Services such as Windows Azure Mobile services, Web sites, and so on

This morning we released some enhancements to Windows http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13357.html ">azure." These new features include:

Mobile Services (support for Work Scheduler, European Regional support, command line support) Web site (extended scale, integrated source code management) SQL Data Sync (support in the new HTML portal) ACS management (support in the new HTML portal) Media Services (work and task management, Blob storage support, retention calculation) virtual network enhancements subscription filtering supports Windows Azure Store (now available in more countries)

All of these improvements are now in the product and can be used immediately. Here are more detailed information about them:

Mobile Services

Windows Azure Mobile Service now supports easy scheduling of background work (also known as cron work) to be performed at predetermined intervals, which can run the device independently to access the service (make sure you do not block or deny any requests from your users). The functionality of this work scheduler allows you to perform a variety of useful scenarios without creating or managing a separate virtual machine. Some scenarios that you can use to enable it include:

periodically clears old/duplicate data from the table. Periodically query and aggregate data from external Web services (tweets, RSS entries, location information) and cache them in a table for later use. Periodically process/adjust the images submitted by the user of your service. Schedule time to send push notifications or SMS messages to your customers to make sure they reach the user at the right time.

With today's version, you can now easily register background tasks by navigating to the new Scheduler (Scheduler) tab of your mobile service on the Windows Azure portal, and then clicking the Create button:

Doing so will let you name a new job and then choose how often you want to run it (note: You can also change this scheduler later):

Once you have created a job, you can drill into it and select the Script tab to write the server script that you want to execute at the loop interval. For example, the following script reads a Twitter update about "Red Polos" and sends a push notification from the mobile service:

Once you have entered the script, you can save it and then click the Run Once button to perform a pilot run. The Run once feature can easily test your work scripts before you enable looping work. To enable circular execution for your work, click the Enable button in the script view or switch back to the Scheduler tab, select the job, and then click the Enable button to activate it.

This new work Scheduler feature makes it incredibly easy to integrate background work into your mobile service (without having to create or manage a separate VM to run it). It can be used by all mobile services (even the free level). The free layer of mobile services includes support that allows you to run a background job every hour. If you upgrade your mobile service to have a reserved instance, you can run up to 10 jobs every 15 minutes.

Check out a document for Windows Azure Mobile services to go deeper into the tutorial for your work scheduler.