Need a way to quickly index and search your documents in the cloud? The Azure Library for Lucene.NET may be just what the doctor ordered.

If you've been considering moving to the cloud, or creating a new SaaS application, now is as good a time as ever to put your plans into action. Microsoft's 30 to Launch contest, which originally ran for Windows Phone 7 developers, is back and this time has a version for those of you who are leveraging the cloud for your application.

One of the attractions of moving to Windows Azure (or any of the major cloud providers for that matter) is the ability to have on-demand scalability. Unfortunately, out of the box, there are no tools to automatically scale the application up and down based on usage or performance on Windows Azure. What's a cloud citizen to do? You either have to monitor your application and manually scale it as it takes a hit, or you have to build your own tools that hook into the Management API to do it for you. Until now that is...