So - I haven't been doing much blogging or speaking on WebMatrix or node recently. For the last year and a half, I've been part of the team that's building the new Azure portal - and it's been quite an experience. A lot has been said about the end to end experience, the integration of Visual Studio Online, and even some of the new services that have been released lately. All of that's awesome, but it's not what I want to talk about today. As much as those things are great (and I mean, who doesn't like the design), the real interesting piece is the underlying architecture. Let's take a look under the hood of the new Azure portal.

A little history​

Over the last few weeks, I've been slowly moving my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. The change has been a long time coming, and so far I couldn't be happier with the results. I thought it may be interesting to make the ultimate meta post, and write a blog post about my blog. You can take a look at the source code on GitHub.

What's wrong with Wordpress?​

Wazstagram is a fun experiment with node.js on Windows Azure and the Instagram Realtime API. The project uses various services in Windows Azure to create a scalable window into Instagram traffic across multiple cities.

• View the demo on Windows Azure
• View the code on GitHub

I spend a lot of time at the command line. As someone who likes to code on OSX and Windows, I've always been annoyed by the Windows command line experience. Do I use cmd, or PowerShell? Where are my tabs? What about package management? What about little frivolous things like being able to resize the window. I've finally got my Windows command line experience running smoothly, and wanted to share my setup. Here are my 5 steps to a Windows command line that doesn't suck.

1. Use Console2 or ConEmu​

A few months ago, we introduced the new node.js features we've added to WebMatrix 2. One of the missing pieces from that experience was a way to manage NPM (Node Package Manager) from within the IDE.

This week we shipped the final release of WebMatrix 2, and one of the fun things that comes with it is a new extension for managing NPM. For a more complete overview of the WebMatrix 2, check out Vishal Joshi's blog post.