Building applications for Windows Azure

Windows Azure is an upcoming operating system for the cloud from Microsoft, announced on October 27 at PDC. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage Web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers. Azure goes beyond what other providers, such as Rackspace's Mosso or Amazon's EC2, offer. First, it will be available with a complete suite of tools and technologies for building your next big cloud application. Second, the Azure platform's goal is to support all developers and their choice of IDE, language, and technology; meaning that you can use your favorite tools for all kinds of development as well as Python, PHP, Ruby, Eclipse and so on. It supports popular standards and protocols including SOAP, REST, and XML. Using the Windows Azure tools, developers can build, debug, and deploy to Windows Azure directly from their existing development environment.

I have written an article "Building applications for Windows Azure" which will walk you through the steps to build an application from scratch on the recently released Windows Azure CTP, Microsoft’s answer to cloud computing. This application will let users add tasks into their Todolists and track them at a later time. The objective of this application is not to use any local data storage like SQL database. Instead, it will store and retrieve data from the cloud which means no matter which language/platform you write your application on, it will be able to access the data. For instance, if you would like to develop an iPhone application which will be able to play with your saved tasks on the go, you will be able to do so. Hope you will enjoy the article.

Link: http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/aspnet/Building-applications-for-Windows-Azure.aspx

Client Perspective of Windows Azure Services Platform

Windows Azure was announced on PDC 2008 (Oct 27) and will hopefully be released mid next year. You probably already know about Azure by this time. If no, I would like to quote some from www.azure.com as intro: The Azure Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. The Azure Services Platform provides a range of functionality to build applications that span from consumer web to enterprise scenarios and includes a cloud operating system and a set of developer services. Fully interoperable through the support of industry standards and web protocols such as REST and SOAP, you can use the Azure services individually or together, either to build new applications or to extend existing ones.

Let us have a quick overview of the clients we usually use in our daily life, then we will explore the potential of Azure and what is waiting for us down to the road:

Windows Client

• Full capabilities, power, rich UI, high performance
• Ability to utilize local resources e.g. audio, camera.
• Capable of blending different hardware and software resulting in amazing applications
• Private data, reliable and fastest
• Personal, trusted and full control

Web Client

• Data accessibility, availability
• Connect with devices, data services, friends
• Sociability, ability to share
• Interaction, collaboration, email, instant messaging
• Searchable
• Data security is questionable
• Open formats and standards for data exchange

Mobile Client

• Low capability compared to regular PC horsepower
• Portable: palm reach
• Smart device while powered by web. e.g. Search for restaurants nearby
• Your 24/7 companion

Smart Client

Did we forget about Smart Clients? These applications are usually Windows Forms application which take all the advantages of Windows Client including offline storage, utilization of local resources as well as the goodness of internet connectivity. The Smart Client was coined few years ago, but for .NET developers all Windows Client is pretty much generally considered as Smart Clients. The idea behind Smart Client was to utilize full local computing capabilities and exploit the web's accessibility, availability and nature of openness through XML Web Services to developers build great software.

Mesh

An important part of Live Services is Mesh, which enables developers to build application for consumer devices which are physically close to them. If you are at home you would be able to access through Windows Client, if you are on the go, you would be through Mobile Client, if you have Internet access only, you would be able to avail the service through Internet. Mesh allows us to get all those devices get connected, exchange data and stay synchronized. You can even add a Mac as device into Mesh to work with. Data communication among devices through Mesh is secured, since the data transferred between them are surely encrypted.

The following screenshots show how you can sync your local PC using Mesh and how your friends can share files or work on files you gave access them to:

Goodness of all Clients

Windows Azure Services Platform is actually an array of technologies, consists of set of tools, and extremely scalable on demand powered by Microsoft datacenters and their ingenious virtualization technology. The core of this platform is to provide user with best experience taking the goodies of each client platform we use in our daily life. Combining the power of HTTP, XML, REST and WebServices Azure lets developers to build cloud enabled applications. The basic advantage of using open and standard protocol for communicating between clients is decreased dependency on the tools, languages or platform of the client. Client could be made by Ruby, Python or it could be in iPhone.

Azure enables you to store your data in the cloud. No matter which client you used to work on your data, if you change your client, time-space, you will be able to get back to the same data once you worked on some other devices/OS.

Why hosting cloud application with Microsoft?

Microsoft has 460 millions Live users to date backed up by hundreds of thousands of servers in their datacenters. How many times have you seen Microsoft's sites down? I have not seen many times in life. So, their ability to host, manage super scalable and high traffic websites is not questionable at all. Who else can be a better host of your next big application other than Microsoft?

Cloudship: Membership Provider for the Cloud

Planning to move to the Azure Cloud, but already tied to the Membership API? I have recently written an article on Windows Azure which guides you to build a complete Membership provider library which can be leveraged by existing application to link to Microsoft’s cloud platform Windows Azure with no friction. Goals of this project were to be able to use regular ASP.NET Login controls, existing Membership code e.g. Membersip.UpadateUser(), MembershipUser.ChangePassword().

Last, but not least one of the major goals was ease of use. No matter which suite of controls you use: ASP.NET AJAX or MVC, Cloudship can be leveraged as your Membership provider. To install it, into your existing application, simply:

1. Reference the DLL
2. Insert few lines inside web.config
3. You are good to go

In this article you will learn how to implement your own Membership API, thus you can start moving you application data to the Azure Cloud – the future of development and business with Microsoft. Here you go - Cloudship: Membership Provider for the Cloud.

Fixing DevelopmentStorage's database cannot be found problem on Windows Azure

This could be a common problem who are not using SQL Express. If you run an Azure application you may find it seeks for SQL Express instance in your machine if you do not have already. You may also find "An error occurred while processing this request." error due to this reason while you try creating tables from your models by StorageClient.TableStorage.CreateTablesFromModel. All you need to do is fire up Visual Studio and open the config file for DevelopmentStorage at C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0\bin\DevelopmentStorage.exe.config. Now modify the connection string and the dbServer attribute of the service tag for Table, and save.

  <connectionStrings>
    <add name="DevelopmentStorageDbConnectionString"
         connectionString="Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Initial Catalog=DevelopmentStorageDb;Integrated Security=True"
         providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
  </connectionStrings>
  
  <appSettings>    
    <add key="ClientSettingsProvider.ServiceUri" value="" />
  </appSettings>
  
  <developmentStorageConfig>
    <services>
      <service name="Blob"
               url="http://127.0.0.1:10000/"/>
      <service name="Queue"
               url="http://127.0.0.1:10001/"/>
      <service name="Table"
               url="http://127.0.0.1:10002/"
               dbServer="localhost\SQLExpress"/>
    </services>
    ...

Restart Visual Studio and open up the Azure project again, now you should be able to run the DevelopmentStorage with the existing database installation of your PC.