As announced by Scott Guthrie recently, Windows Azure Web Sites now supports the .NET Framework 4.5. Some awesome ASP.NET features are now available to web developers who want to host their ASP.NET applications on Windows Azure following the web sites offering getting support for .NET 4.5. One feature I’m especially excited about is Entity Framework Spatial support. Only available in .NET 4.5, EF Spatial is something that gives developers who want to build location-aware applications the ability to easily save and retrieve location data without having to invent crazy solutions using SQL code. I’ve implemented the Haversine formula using a SQL stored procedure in the past, and I can speak from experience when I say that EF Spatial is about 10,000 times easier and more logical. Don’t take my word for it, though. Take a look at the sample code I’ll show you in this blog post, which demonstrates how you can develop a location-aware API using ASP.NET Web API, EF Spatial, and host the whole thing on Windows Azure Web Sites.

The Windows Azure Web Sites team has added another web application to the growing list of options available for pre-configured web sites and applications you can use to get your site up and running in minutes. Today’s addition is Gallery Server Pro, a web-based tool for managing your image or video library. This post will walk you through the process of getting Gallery Server Pro running in Windows Azure Web Sites, so if you have a huge collection of images you’d like to post online, you won’t want to miss this post.

The Windows Azure Web Sites team has been hard at work looking at various applications and working with vendors and community contributors to add some great applications to the web sites gallery. If you’re a blogger and you’d like to get started for free with a simple, yet extensible blogging tool, you might want to check this out. Starting this week you can install BlogEngine.NET into a free instance of a Windows Azure Web Site. I’ll walk you through the process in this post.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a few community events in Europe. The trip was fantastic, with some talks to be done in front of various groups throughout Belgium and Sweden. In this post I will summarize the event, provide some links to the slides I created, and thank all the great people who made the trip one of the more memorable.

The next Windows Azure code sample released by the Windows Azure Evangelism Team is the CloudMonitR sample. This code sample demonstrates how Windows Azure Cloud Services can be instrumented and their performance analyzed in real time using a SignalR Hub residing in a web site hosted with Windows Azure Web Sites. Using Twitter Bootstrap and Highcharts JavaScript charting components, the web site provides a real-time view of performance counter data and trace output. This blog post will introduce the CloudMonitR sample and give you some links to obtain it.

The newest sample from the Windows Azure Evangelism Team (WAET) is a real-time, browser-based web site monitor. The SiteMonitR front-end is blocked out and styled using Twitter Bootstrap, and Knockout.js was used to provide MVVM functionality. A cloud service pings sites on an interval (10 seconds by default, configurable in the worker’s settings) and notifies the web client of the sites’ up-or-down statuses via server-side SignalR conversations. Those conversations are then bubbled up to the browser using client-side SignalR conversations. The client also fires off SignalR calls to the cloud service to manage the storage functionality for the URL’s to be monitored. If you’ve been looking for a practical way to use SignalR with Windows Azure, this sample could shed some light on what’s possible.

Windows Azure Web Sites customers who run web sites in shared instance mode have a generous amount of storage space to use for multiple web sites. The 1GB limit for free customers is more than enough to get a site up and running with lots of room left over for storage. A site’s log files contribute to the amount of space being used by a site. If a site has a lot of traffic, the log files could grow and eat into the space available for the important assets for a site – the HTML, executables, images, and other relevant assets. That’s the sole purpose for the Windows Azure Web Sites Log Cleaner, a NuGet utility you can grab and use in your site with little impact or work.

In keeping with the Windows Azure Evangelism Team’s mission of providing samples that demonstrate how to use various aspects of the Windows Azure platform, I’d like to introduce you to the PhluffyFotos application. The idea behind PhluffyFotos is to offer an image-sharing application that allows users to upload, tag, and share images on line. The MyPictures application sample introduced you to the idea of storing images in Windows Azure Blob Storage via Web API, but PhluffyFotos takes the idea of an image-sharing application a few steps further architecturally. Take a look at this sample if you want to see how various Windows Azure components – Web Sites, Cloud Services, and Windows Azure Storage – to see how to add background processing to your web application, all hosted in the cloud.