Azure adopters port .NET apps

With Microsoft's Azure platform becoming commercially available, early enterprise adopters have started porting over their .NET applications, says SearchWinDevelopment.

Since a great deal of the development for Azure applications can take place in Visual Studio starting from 2008 service pack 1, most Microsoft development houses should already be familiar with the basic tools involved.

"The great thing about Azure is Microsoft has really focused on the user experience," says Jason Haley, an independent .NET developer and Microsoft Certified Professional. "They do everything they can for you to get that application ready to ship before you get that account."

Wireless technologies developer SpiderCloud Wireless raised $25 million in a Series B funding round led by Opus Capital, reports The Washington Post.

Shasta Ventures and existing Series A investors Charles River Ventures and Matrix Partners also participated in the round, which brings the company's total funding to $40 million.

SpiderCloud Wireless provides the Enterprise Radio Access Network (E-RAN), a combination of Enterprise WLAN system architecture and UMTS small cell technologies designed to scale mobile broadband deployments inside the enterprise.

The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has introduced a new electronic order book for retail bonds, temporarily basing it on its outgoing Microsoft .Net-based TradElect platform, states ComputerWorldUK.

The new bond market will stay on TradElect until at least the end of the year, when the LSE's Linux-based platform, MillenniumIT, goes live. TradElect was built by Accenture, running Microsoft .Net and SQL Server 2000, HP ProLiant servers, within a Cisco network architecture.

In spite of TradElect withdrawal by the end of the year, LSE showed costs of £20 million (R238.5 million) on the platform, as it attempted to write it off its books and worked on upgrades to keep it competitive over its final year of operation.