Azure Support

The Windows Azure CDN is a convenient way for application developers to minimize latency that geographically dispersed application users will experience. As of  as of February 2010, the Azure CDN is currently in CTP and incurring no charges. Who Needs a CDN? Application users that are geographically far away from the data center where a [...]

We previously looked at Creating an Azure App in Visual Studio and then Deploying the App on Azure . The application we built was a very simple one requiring no storage, we now turn our attention to extending the demo application to include Azure Storage. For this example we will use the blob storage in [...]

In a previous article we looked at how to build a basic Azure application using Visual Studio. We now continue with how to publish and deploy that the application. For this demo we will be deploying a Web Role on Azure. In the Visual Studio Solution Explorer right click the cloud project and select Publish… [...]

Overview Designed for use by the self-employed or any individual user, Azure Time Clock is a Windows Azure application that gives the user the ability to clock in and out of the application to keep track of their time worked. The active user count and processing use can vary greatly at any given time with [...]

Continuing on from Part 1 , the concluding part of the case study looks at creating the UI, persisting the data and integrating the various parts of the project. Creating Web Role to Display the Time Clock and Process User Input Add a reference to the storage client API assembly. Right-click the AzureTimeClock_WebRole project node, [...]

If you are a serious Windows developer  you will by now have come across Windows Azure Platform. Windows Azure Platform, which is an Internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, is currently (as of January 2010) open to developers and beta testers and will go into a pay-based model starting from February 2010. [...]

The first thing to do is download and install the Azure Tools & SDK , this installs the Visual Studio templates as well as a simulated Azure environment on your local machine.  To run the development environment from Visual Studio, you will need to run the Visual Studio as an admin. In Visual Studio, start [...]

When a Windows Azure Project (such as a WebRole) project is created, Visual Studio automatically creates two projects – the actual application (for example a WebRole web application) and a CloudService project which controls and defines how the application will run on Azure. In the CloudService project there are two xml configuration files, ServiceDefinition.csdef and [...]

SQL Azure comes with a built-in  firewall, through which all connection attempts to a SQL Azure database must pass. By  default the firewall blocks all access to the database even from your own Azure applications. The first step in configuring the firewall is therefore to navigate to SQL Azure in the online Azure developer portal, [...]

In addition to SQL Azure, Windows Azure features four persistent storage forms Tables, Queues , Blobs , and Drives. In this article we will focus on Tables. Table Storage Tables are a very interesting new storage method offered in Windows Azure and are Microsoft’s Azure answer to Amazon SimpleDB..  The SQL Azure database offers a [...]