Interesting little Azure points

I often discover little interesting facts about Azure while I am using it that I would blog about but would only last one line/paragraph so I don't bother. This is what I should tweet about I suppose but I get the feeling my tweets (@britishdev) get lost within 10mins surrounded by your little cousin Kate reporting, "@KatezLulz: OMG I just ate broccoli!!!1! :p" and I can't compete with that. So here is a blog post which I will try to keep updates with short and sharp points about Windows Azure.

#1 What happens to your Azure deployment if your machine is turned off halfway through?

It depends where you are in your deployment. As long as the uploading phase is done you will be fine. Sort of. Visual Studio and the management portal make it look a lot more simple than it is to deploy an Azure package but it does it in steps like: Upload, Create, Start instances etc (or along those lines anyway). So if you switch your computer off after you have uploaded you will not lose everything and have to start again but it wouldn't have deployed fully either. Next time you log in to the management portal you will find your instances are there but "Stopped" so you simply need to start them using the great big Start button in the Azure management portal and it is done. Trivial.

#2 You can filter your Azure Table Storage viewer in Visual Studio

Type filters into the bar such as Timestamp gt datetime'2012-01-19T10:00:00Z'. This will get every record after 19^th Jan 2012 10am. Here is a full list of table filters.