iCode Cloud

Windows Azure Development Fabric and Develoment Storage

2011-09-15T03:06:00.000-07:00

The Develoment Fabric
The Development Fabric comprises these executables : DFLoadBalancer.exe, DFAgent.exe, DFService.exe and DFMonitor.exe which the SDK setup program installs by default. The task manager’s process tab will show all these four process in the list as soon as you start the development fabric.
The Development Storage
The Azure platform supports three types of scalable storage

unstructured data (blobs)
structured data (tables)
messages between apps, services or both (queues)

execute rundevstore.exe or building and running the Azure user code in VS starts all three services even if your project requires only one of these three services.
For protection against data loss, Azure Cloud will store blobs, tables and queues in atleast three separate containers in a Single data center. You can duplicate this data any time using geolocation feature to the data center of your choice.
Azure service Definition and Service Configuration Files
An Azure project’s ServiceDefinition.csdef file defines a set of standard input endpoints and configuration settings whose values are stored in this file.
A sample code of an Azure ServiceDefinition.csdef file
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition">
<WebRole name="WebRole1">
    <Sites>
      <Site name="Web">
        <Bindings>
          <Binding name="Endpoint1" endpointName="Endpoint1" />
        </Bindings>
      </Site>
    </Sites>
    <Endpoints>
      <InputEndpoint name="Endpoint1" protocol="http" port="80" />
    </Endpoints>
    <Imports>
      <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" />
    </Imports>
</WebRole>
<WebRole name="WCFServiceWebRole1">
    <Sites>
      <Site name="Web">
        <Bindings>
          <Binding name="Endpoint1" endpointName="Endpoint1" />
        </Bindings>
      </Site>
    </Sites>
    <Endpoints>
      <InputEndpoint name="Endpoint1" protocol="http" port="8080" />
    </Endpoints>
    <Imports>
      <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" />
    </Imports>
    <LocalResources>
      <LocalStorage name="WCFServiceWebRole1.svclog" sizeInMB="1000" cleanOnRoleRecycle="false" />
    </LocalResources>
</WebRole>
<WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1">
    <Imports>
      <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" />
    </Imports>
</WorkerRole>
<WebRole name="WebCgiRole1" enableNativeCodeExecution="true">
    <Sites>
      <Site name="Web">
        <Bindings>
          <Binding name="Endpoint1" endpointName="Endpoint1" />
        </Bindings>
      </Site>
    </Sites>
    <Endpoints>
      <InputEndpoint name="Endpoint1" protocol="http" port="8081" />
    </Endpoints>
    <Imports>
      <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" />
    </Imports>
</WebRole>
<WebRole name="BusinessApplication1.Web">
    <Sites>
      <Site name="Web">
        <Bindings>
          <Binding name="Endpoint1" endpointName="Endpoint1" />
        </Bindings>
      </Site>
    </Sites>
    <Endpoints>
      <InputEndpoint name="Endpoint1" protocol="http" port="8082" />
    </Endpoints>
    <Imports>
      <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" />
    </Imports>
</WebRole>
</ServiceDefinition>

To be continued...

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Writing and running projects in Azure Development Platform

2011-09-13T03:43:00.001-07:00

Windows Azure Cloud Fabric and Azure storage services don’t support Cloud based development and the debugging operations, and hence the Azure SDK provide on-premise clones in the form of Development Fabrics and the Development storage applications which are installed with the Windows Azure SDK. SDK also installs a collection of sample apps and libraries of wrapper classes to help simplify app development.

.NET 3.5 SP1 and SQL Express 2005 or later must be present on your machine and ASP.NET and WCF HTTP Activation for IIS 7.0 under Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7 or later to install and run the SDK. SDK isn’t mandatory but using SDK.NET APIs and libraries for applications makes it far simpler than working on HTTP directly.

Installing Windows Azure SDK and tools for Visual Studio

Having installed Azure SDK, one must download and install Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio to add templates for Web Cloud Service, Worker Cloud Service, Web and Worker Cloud Service, and Workflow Service Projects. Current version of SDK can be downloaded from here http://bit.ly/no4AYV

Info graphic: Different PaaS providers and their services

2011-09-01T11:59:00.001-07:00

Just a look at different features offered by various Platform as a Service providers

Understanding Azure Platform Architecture

2011-09-01T10:56:00.001-07:00

Windows Azure is Microsoft’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering by Microsoft that runs on servers and network infra located in Microsoft Data Centers which is connected to the public internet. The platform is delivered by physical or logical (virtualized) Windows Server 2008 instances.
According to Microsoft, primary uses of Azure include

Adding web service capabilities to the current packaged applications
Build, modify, and distribute apps to the web with minimal on premise resources
create, test, debug and distribute web services quickly
Reduce the efforts and cost incurred on managing the IT Infra

Unlike other offerings such as Iaas and the SaaS, the PaaS is the easiest to operate. Take a look at the picture below
The picture clearly indicates the problems that the user has to mange on his own if he opts for IaaS to deploy his web application.
Microsoft designed the Azure platform in such a way that enables the .NET developers to use their experience of coding in Visual Studio ASP.NET and WCF services. The Windows Azure supports development in almost all popular languages. The Windows Azure SDK built in Visual Studio offers support for various languages. There is also a Java SDK for Windows Azure for Java lovers. This flexibility of Windows Azure makes it so popular among the coders.