On Thursday May 13th, I travelled to the North York Community Centre to give a presentation at the Toronto Visual Basic User Group on Windows Azure. I’d like to thank the group for having me out, with a Special Thank you to the User Group leader Rob Windsor who was celebrating his Birthday that very night.
With a crowd of approximately 10 people this may have well been one of the smallest groups that I had giving my Windows Azure presentation to, but definitely by far the most interested in the cloud. The majority of the audience had questions, and may offered up more than one question, which is typically rare for a User Group.
There was one Question that I wasn’t able to answer at the event which I hope to clarify here.
The Question was brought on by the statement that a Windows Azure Queue Message was capable of storing up to 8KB. I’m glad to see questions like this arise as it lets you know that the audience is listening, here’s the question, “What is the maximum size that can be stored within a column of the Table Storage Service.”
After a little bit of research here is the official word from the MSDN Windows Azure Documentation Library.
An entity may have up to 255 properties, including the 3 system properties described in the following section. Therefore, the user may include up to 252 custom properties, in addition to the 3 system properties. The combined size of all data in an entity's properties may not exceed 1 MB.
I have posted the slides on SlideShare, the slides themselves aren’t terribly informative the true value of the slides is in the Speakers notes which unfortunately don’t get posted. If you’d like to get a copy of the slide deck, please drop me a line.
The code that I presented is an open source project which is available on CodePlex. The Azure Email Queuer is meant to be a Starter Project for an Internet Email Marketing Tool. The current hosted source is a little bit out of date, but I will be working towards Updating it shortly. You can download the Visual Basic version of the Azure Email Queuer from my website.