Azure Dev Challenge Questions Tackled Last month Microsoft announced its first-ever Azure Developer Challenge . Since then, we've received strong interest and several questions about the competition.   The question I most frequently receive is, "Why is the Azure Dev Challenge open to US residents only?" I am pleased to announce that starting today the Azure Developer Challenge is open to developers outside of the US. Without starting to sound like a lawyer, there were legal and regulatory considerations that took us a little bit longer to resolve for international. We now have those worked out and can't wait to see your applications. See my previous post for more info on getting registered.   Seperately, we received questions about interopoerability and the use of existing code. Specifically... "Can we use jQuery ?" the answer is yes. Experiment, have fun, and send us feedback about your experiences during the process of submitting an

OS & Framework Patching with Docker Containers - a paradigm shift Thinking of containers, we think of the easy packaging of our app, along with its dependencies. The dockerfile FROM defines the base image used, with the contents copied or restored into the image. We now have a generic package format that can be deployed onto multiple hosts. No longer must the host know about what version of the stack that's used, nor even the version of the operating system. And, we can deploy any configuration we need, unique to our container. Patching workloads In the VM world, we patch workloads by patching the host VM. The developer hands the app over to operations, who deploys it on a VM. Along with the list of dependencies that must be applied to the VM. Ops then takes ownership, hoping the patching of the OS & Frameworks don't negatively impact the running workloads. How often do you think ops does a test run of a patch on a VM workload before deploying it? It&#