Microsoft has recently announced that it is enabling Linux on Windows Azure, and working on allowing its customers to make virtual machines (VMs) persistent on its Windows Azure platform. This means that users will be able to create virtual Linux servers on Azure without losing data. Though Azure already provides support for VMs, the company is now fulfilling the desires of customers requesting to add persistent VMs to Azure. Azure currently has the ability to run VMs, but any time the server is rebooted it loses state.

“The current VM role when rebooted or randomly recycled by the Azure platform loses any data stored — any persistence. So for applications that rely on the machine name or files/config that constitute “state” not stored in SQL Azure (or externally), this is a problem. This is also one of the technical reasons why you wouldn’t try running SharePoint on the current Azure VM role,” explained an anonymous Microsoft partner.

To benefit its customers, Microsoft intends to launch a Community Technology Preview (CTP) test-build of the persistent Virtual Machine capability in the spring of 2012.  Linux on Azure is a hot news topic in the tech industry. This move gives Azure general purpose infrastructure-as-a-service capabilities to complement the existing platform-as-a-service offering. According to some, the ability to run persistent machines and Linux support are both frequently requested demands by customers. But Microsoft apparently won’t officially support Linux, encouraging customers to upload their own images instead.

In other Microsoft news, the company offered an emergency .NET fix to thwart hash table collision attacks. Microsoft recently faced four security issues, which is much critical as compared to normal security attacks. Here are the details:

An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take any action in the context of an existing account on the ASP.NET site, including executing arbitrary commands. In order to exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must be able to register an account on the ASP.NET site, and must know an existing user name.

Besides .NET, several other programming languages were also affected by this security attacks. Below is the complete list for your reference:
• Java, all versions
• JRuby <= 1.6.5
• PHP <= 5.3.8, <= 5.4.0RC3
• Python, all versions
• Rubinius, all versions
• Ruby <= 1.8.7-p356
• Apache Geronimo, all versions
• Apache Tomcat <= 5.5.34, <= 6.0.34, <= 7.0.22
• Oracle Glassfish <= 3.1.1
• Jetty, all versions
• Plone, all versions
• Rack <= 1.3.5, <= 1.2.4, <= 1.1.2
• V8 JavaScript Engine, all versions