Microsoft's Azure platform is an exciting offering in the cloud services market space. Designed to compete with Google AppEngine and Amazon Web Services, Azure stresses a familiar development environment (primarily .NET, SQL Server, and Visual Studio) with a rich set of capabilities. In addition to using Windows Azure to host web applications and services, SQL Azure provides a relational database in the cloud, and Access Control can be utilized to integrate user accounts with identity providers. We can leverage our skills to build powerful applications on Azure with relative ease.
The aim of this book is to gain an understanding of the process, advantages, and challenges of building an application on Azure. We do this by providing in-depth discussion of the platform as we build a sample application.
Chapter 1, Introduction to Cloud Computing, provides an introduction to cloud computing and enterprise applications.
Chapter 2, The Nickel Tour of Azure, is an overview of the service offerings in the Microsoft Azure Platform.
Chapter 3, Setting Up for Development, shows us the tools required for developing applications for Azure and how to set up our development environments.
Chapter 4, Designing our Sample Application, provides the overview of the sample application that will be built throughout the rest of this book.
Chapter 5, Introduction to SQL Azure, provides an introduction to SQL Azure and discusses the differences between SQL Azure and SQL Server 2008. We also create the database objects for our sample application in this chapter.
Chapter 6, Azure Blob Storage, discusses the Blob Storage service and how to interact with blobs using either a .NET client library or REST services. We also create the containers and blobs for our sample application in this chapter.
Chapter 7, Azure Table Storage, discusses the Table Storage service and how to interact with tables using either a .NET client library or REST services.
Chapter 8, Queue Storage, speaks about the Queue Storage service and how to interact with queues using either a .NET client library or REST services. We also create the queues needed for our application in this chapter.
Chapter 9, Web Role, gives an overview of what a web role is, and some of the similarities and differences between a web role and a traditional web application. We also build the portal web role for our sample application in this chapter.
Chapter 10, Web Services and Azure, discusses WCF web services and provides an overview of building a web service. We also build the web service needed for our sample application.
Chapter 11, Worker Roles, speaks about worker roles and many of the functions they can perform. We also build the worker roles for our sample application in this chapter.
Chapter 12, Local Application for Updates, teaches us how to build a Windows Forms application that interacts with our web services.
Chapter 13, Azure AppFabric, provides an overview of the Azure AppFabric, and discusses the capabilities of Access Control and Service Bus. We also configure Access Control for our sample application.
Chapter 14, Azure Monitoring and Diagnostics, discusses the diagnostic monitoring services available in Microsoft Azure, along with how to enable these services in our sample application.
Chapter 15, Deploying to Windows Azure, teaches how to deploy our sample application to Windows Azure and how to change our application's configuration once it is deployed.