For v2 we are planning to leverage more of the Azure platform, specially the Azure Storage. We will be servicing Hotel images directly from here. This could enhance the already good response times we have right now. Activating the CDN for this would bring some additional benefits as well.

The other good experience (should I say, the most important for us?? ) have been around the costs. After some changes, like moving out the Content Admin application from Azure to my regular Hosting provider, we are now paying an average of  60 USD per month. Not bad for a reliable and fast platform like this with access to data in SQL Server.

However, Azure is a new platform, and although it provides a good set of basic services, the portal still lacks of some important services, some available in some other PaaS offers (like AWS), such as:

• It stills lacks an out-of-the-box UI in the Azure portal that enable Admins to monitor the load of the instances (in term of CPU, RAM, Disk Access, etc) – pretty much the functionality offered by really good tools like Azure Diagnostic Manager by Cerebrata. Why is this important? Well, because either you or the platform need to make decisions base on the load.  Should we allocate another instance to accommodate an increase in traffic?  — this is the base of the elasticity paradigm.  The Azure portal should bring some support to define such rules. The capability to define the number of instances per day of the week (i.e. what if the solution expects more traffic during the weekend..)
• In addition, there is a lack of traffic statistics reporting in the Azure Portal. We are currently handling this through Google Analytics – but it would be great to have this integrated in the Azure portal.
• It would be valuable to have access to some “Event Log” window from the Azure Portal with diagnostic information. Sometimes your application has problem and does not start but you cannot get the error info – it is like flying blind.

The good thing is that Azure is really strategic for Microsoft, and I expect to see this functionality shortly as part of the service.

This time Andres, one of our hiking partners convinced our guide to hire horses and save us around 2 hours of walking up to four thousand meters. We rode to a small, cozy refugee /hostel in the top of a small hill, just beside the most beautiful laguna I have ever seen – I regret I did not get a single picture of this multicolor beauty – the horse trail is so step and rocky that you have to firmly grab your seat – no time for holding a bulky camera.

Our horses took us through a step and rocky trail to a place called “el hotelito”, a known place for campers, in the middle of a narrow valley looking at the snow peaks. In this place the horses will rest and wait for us. We started to hike up over a extremely step hill covered with huge rocks during one hour to a granite plateau at 4500 meters.

Walking in this plateau was very easy, with stunning views of the “pulpito del diablo” and the “pan de azucar”. 45 minutes and we reached the ice border. In this place we put in our crampons and follow the guide walking over the ice field. First time I do this and it feels like walking on glass pieces. Global warming is quickly melting these beautiful ice fields – the place is full of deep cracks. There are painted marks in the rock signaling where the ice border was in 2006 – like 100 meters downhill! This makes walking in this place, plus the high temperatures very difficult and risky, moreover we were not tied together with as rope!

After one hour we reached the 5000 meters. Andres wanted to make the summit of the “pan de azucar”, I waited in a beautiful and flat place besides the “pulpito” along with Liliana, for 45 minutes. What a great place to take pictures and the perfect blue sky make it even better.

Descent was quick. Andres and Liliana had to catch a bus in the town at 6.30, so all the journey we did in about 6 hours we now had to undo it in less than 4 hours. Both ankles hurt as we rush to the town. They  finally made it and we were ready for a good night sleep.

Next day we took it really easy, and we went to some “termales” nearby. I was so glad we could finish this trip in such a relaxing place with some beers.

The amount of foreign travelers visiting Colombia has incremented during the past years due to a better perception in terms of security. The idea with Hoteles.com.co was to create a catalog of the best hotels, hostels and B&Bs in Colombia. This catalog is fully bi-lingual and constantly updated. Maps are also keys to the design of the site, and a good portion of the hotels in our database have accurate locations thanks to Google Maps.

From the technical side, the site is fully optimized for speed, using the new ASP.NET MVC model, and is basically the first solution in Colombia taking advantage of the new Windows Azure platform for cloud computing.

Please check it out and let me know your thoughts!

The walk was difficult, but nothing serious, through a beautiful valley of fraylejones. We continued our hike climbing more and our over stone trails. That single day we hiked 1000 mtrs to up to 4500 mtrs. (a personal record!). Could you believe I forgot to bring something for lunch? I am such an amateur…      Fortunately, Leo (our 2nd guide) kindly shared his soup/tuna with me. We had lunch besides a beautiful pond, full of fraylejones and crystal waters.

Finally we arrived to the camp site after 6 hours of walking. That was a significant test of my physical conditions. The site was basically a small plateau between the dust, and rocks.

There is no vegetation at this altitude. A short walk from here was the “Laguna Grande de la Sierra”, surrounded by the “Concavo”, “Toti” and “Pan de Azucar” peaks. We would try to climb the last one during the next day.

What a gorgeous, pristine, cold and isolated place! Fortunately, only another tent was there—two young park rangers (how could somebody work at this altitude and conditions?). Night there was simply miserable, strong chilly winds smashed my tent for hours. Head aches also prevented me from getting a good sleep. My thumbs started to crack because of the cold and dryness, making the disassembly of my tent the following day a painful operation. In addition, the strong winds did not helped much.

We started our descent at 9AM, leaving our still heavy packs to be picked up by horses later to “La Esperanza”. We arrived there after 4 hours of walking. I can feel that my body is responding better to altitude. We had a yummy trout for lunch, and a 4WD took us to the “Finca de los Herrera”— a beautiful finca conditioned for campers, like 20 mins from “La Esperanza”. We pitched our tents, then I had another chilly shower (call me masochist!), dinner and a good night sleep. This was our coldest night during the trip—anything liquid left outside was solid ice the next morning.

A 4WD took us and our equipment to a small lodge/restaurant/grocery (“La Esperanza”) in the end of the road to La Laguna Grande de la Sierra, our first destination.

From there we hiked for 30 mins to our first camping site (at 3500 mtrs.). The place was gorgeous, just besides a crystal clear river falling directly from the glacier . This river was so inviting, and the weather so warm that I took a plunge in its gelid waters…

Camping place was ok—hidden in the bushes, but very cold during the night, there was even a thin crust of frost over the tent the following morning.  

The bus trip was long, during the whole night but without incidents. Unfortunately I could not see much of the scenery.

View Larger Map

Guavita cathedral was lovely, very different. We arrived early in the morning to this cold, remote town in the mountains. I grabbed a coffee in the main plaza and good breakfast in a nearby hotel. My guide did not showed up on my arrival, so I decided to spend the day resting until my guide shows up (I could not sleep much in the bus by the way) in a good Hotel I found just around the corner of the main plaza.

There were some travelers in the plaza, but most of the people come for daytrips with no camping equipment.

I still feel my pack heavy (14 kilos when I left).

Suggested Packing List (4 days)

This town is very small, and beautiful, still not spoiled by modern Colombia. I finally met my guide at 4pm. He was expecting my arrive at that time!! – his cell phone was malfunctioning—so he did not get a single one of my calls since yesterday! Anyway, this is not the only improvised aspect  I have seen of this trip from their side… let’s see how things get through. I decided to take the “golden retriever approach” and simply be nice – anyway the hotel where I spend the whole day was quite good, clean and very cheap (COP 15K!! ~ 7USD ), and the meals great and also cheap (~ 3USD).

My guides have a beautiful house a few block from the main plaza. It is a big, old, authentic house with many rooms around a big patio. Full of photo opportunities.

Many campers and climbers come a go during that day. By night, we took it easy and had some beers around a fire in the central patio.

If you plan to use SQL Azure then migrate your DB to Azure first. Below you will find some tips to perform this process. Yes, you will find lots of things that do not work on SQL Azure. The good thing is that moving the ASP.NET will be way easier… Once completed, then connect your local application to the DB instance in SQL Azure. This way you debug your application and find additional problems. Remember that you could get the connection string through the SQL Azure portal. Test your app. Does everything work? Then move your ASP.NET app to Azure and publish it. Congratulations, you are now connected to the Cloud!

Here are few points I found migrating my ASP.NET MVC app:

1. There is no support for Session Affinity (Azure is Stateless) – I’m aware that Azure load balancing doesn’t support Session Affinity – hence the existing web application should be changed if it has session affinity.
2. If you get this error debugging your app in Azure: "Windows Azure Tools: Failed to initialize the Development Storage service. Unable to start Development Storage. Failed to start Development Storage: the SQL Server instance ‘localhost\SQLExpress’ could not be found. Please configure the SQL Server instance for Development Storage using the ‘DSInit’ utility in the Windows Azure SDK." 
   It is because the Dev Store is pointing to a named instance of SQLExpress and if you are using SQL Server like me, then you would need to do like what the error message said.
   Go to where the devstore is installed i.e.
   C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0\bin\devstore
   and type
   dsinit /sqlinstance:.
   Take note of the "." which indicates your current default unnamed SQL Server instance.
   You will then be prompted with a screen that informs you that the installation is successful and the development storage is ready for use.
   You can now start the Development Storage service.
3. If you get a lovely 403 – Forbidden: Access is denied. You do not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials that you supplied. It’s because you hit the directory instead of a page.  Check this page out to see how to set a default document in the web.config (web role’s don’t automatically load a default.aspx like you might expect – you have to set it): http://blogs.msdn.com/rakkimk/archive/2007/05/25/iis7-how-to-configure-the-default-document-of-the-website-in-its-web-config.aspx
4. If your ASP.NET app is based on MVC, ensure that the System.Web.MVC assembly is included in the service package that you deploy to Windows Azure. To do this, for a Visual C# project, expand the References node in Solution Explorer for the MVCAzureStore project, right-click the System.WebMVC assembly and select Properties. Make sure the Copy Local option is set to True.

Here there are some tips for moving your DB to SQL Azure:

1. SQL Azure Database exposes a Tabular Data Stream (TDS) endpoint to databases that are hosted in the cloud. TDS is the same network protocol that on premise SQL Server uses, therefore, a desktop client application can connect to SQL Azure Database in the same way it connects to an on-premise SQL Server instance.
2. You won’t be able to connect to your remote SQL Azure DB using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2008.  I guess this will be supported in R2. Currently you can only connect using a “Script Window” to an specific DB. There is no support to “USE <DB>” though.
3. Remember that SQL Azure only support a subset of the services provided by your on-premise SQL Servers (check out this list of supported SQL commands, or Unsupported Transact-SQL Statements (SQL Azure Database) – MSDN).
4. There is no GUI-based admin tool, so you will need to create everything (Users, Logins, DB, Tables) using SQL commands and scripts. There is a couple of community provided GUI tools to enable basic operations on your DBs. Check SQL Azure Manager
5. If you want to migrate one DB from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Azure, and you expect to find some “Attach DB” or “Restore Backup”…forget it, you will need to use your good-old Bulk Copy/BCP, INSERT scripts or  SS Integration Services (SSIS). If you want to give SSIS a try this could help you. Some other handy tools:
   1. I just found a plug-in called SQL Azure Data Sync Tool for SQL Server, but I have not tried it.
   2. SQL Server Migration Wizard http://www.azuresupport.com/2009/12/sql-azure-introduction/2/ . I ended up generating INSERT scripts using this tool.
6. Be aware of some deprecated features while moving your DB structure and data using SQL scripts:

• ‘ANSI_NULLS’ is not a recognized SET option.
• Deprecated feature ‘SET ANSI_PADDING OFF’ is not supported in this version of SQL Server.
• Deprecated feature ‘More than two-part column name’ is not supported in this version of SQL Server.  This a significant change if your using Schemas.
• Deprecated feature ‘Data types: text ntext or image’ is not supported in this version of SQL Server.
• Deprecated feature ‘Table hint without WITH’ is not supported in this version of SQL Server.

A full list id found at Deprecated Database Engine Features in SQL Server 2008 – MSDN.

See you up there!

Es difícil encontrar un libro y especialmente en español, donde el tema central sea los viajes y no se centre solo en describir las maravillas de un sitio o un recorrido a través de espectaculares fotos. Es difícil encontrar uno que realmente se diferencie de una típica guía de viajes, donde el autor a través de su mente abierta describa y medite sus experiencias al salir de la seguridad de la conocido, a lo extraño, a conocerse, y a comprender a insuficiencia del hogar.

Y es que existe una radical diferencia entre el turista (como dice el autor, “dirigido a atracciones programadas y seguras”), y el viajero, y encontré recientemente un libro que logra explicarlo de una manera magistral y sobre todo poética. Lo encontré por pura casualidad en la librería de la BLAA. No tuve mucho tiempo para hojearlo, pero hubo química inmediata. Afortunadamente no me equivoqué. El libro se llama “Ese deseo de estar donde no estas” de el fotógrafo Argentino Angel Beccassino, quien tambien vivió un tiempo en Colombia.

Los viajes descritos a través de sus increíble fotos son a lugares interesantes como Nepal, Mali, India, Camboya, o Bolivia, solo para nombrar algunos pocos, como verdadero viajero, fuera de la zona de confort de Europa o EU. Hojearlo es una tortura para los que nos sentimos encerrados, en el ciclo interminable de lo predecible.

Want to see my last known position? Check this out:

http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0fsO8qVuo7rat0EBdioLWddeqUvKpLeMk

See you out there!

Off Topic:

• Should I use an ORM tool like SubSonic, nHibernate, or .netTiers? Which one of these have the best performance? I am current using bare DataReaders (which are lighting-fast), but I am sick of updating the DAL components with every change in the DB. Should I stay or move? Now or never..
• Remember the performance benefits of using SPs vs Inline-SQL? Well, since SQL 2K both methods have pretty much the same performance! Both are compiled by the DB engine. Did you know that?? Check this.
• Building a quick-n-dirty Web app to CRUD the data of the H Initiative. Playing with GuidViews,  DetailViews and SqlDataSource controls, knowing their pros/limitations.
• I finally got my Windows Azure and SQL Azure test accounts. Time to current iteration the H Initiative in the clouds.