Summer is here! Well, it is in most places. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we’re still waiting. Not to fear…we’ve got good reading weather! Here’s how we are keeping busy waiting for summer to arrive…

• Windows and Node: PowerShell: Yes, we know it’s not Bash, but it’s still pretty useful. This article provides a brief introductory to PowerShell for node developers that have a Unix background, but want to learn a bit about PowerShell and how they can use it with node.
• Web Sites Series: Experience Windows Azure Web Sites from beyond Windows: Some experiences creating node applications on Windows Azure Web Sites from Mac and Linux systems.
• Web Sites Series: Create PHP and MySQL sites with Windows Azure Web Sites and WebMatrix: “This post covers how to create a site in Windows Azure, download and customize it, then deploy back to Windows Azure Web Sites. We will be using WebMatrix, a free, lightweight web development tool. We’ll look at some of the new capabilities in WebMatrix that make writing sites easier and new features in the Windows Azure portal.”
• Infrastructure as a Service Series: An Overview of Windows Azure Virtual Network: The virtual network feature is pretty cool if you need to connect something from your local datacenter to something running in Windows Azure. This article provides an overview of this functionality.
• Three ways of deploying node.js apps to Windows Azure: Tomasz Janczuk goes over the pros and cons of worker roles vs web services, and then provides a 3^rd alternative in git-azure.
• Managing the Cloud from the Command Line: Scott Hanselman talks a bit about the new Windows Azure command line tools, which are cross platform tools for managing several features of Windows Azure such as web sites and VMs.
• A Gentle Reintroduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript: Part 1: Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on Reactive Extensions for JavaScript with a basic example of using Reactive Extensions.
• Cloud Types for Eventual Consistency: “To make eventual consistency more programmable, we propose the use of specialized cloud data types. These cloud types provide eventually consistent storage at the programming language level, and thus abstract the numerous implementation details (servers, networks, caches, protocols). “
• http://dragonbe.azurewebsites.net/: Create a blog on Windows Azure Websites...with your iPhone.
• Reintroducing Windows Azure, Part 4: Linux Virtual Machines: "In this post we show that the capabilities and level of experience for Linux match that provided for Windows. The support for both operating systems is top notch."