Developer: Building Cloud Applications for Windows Azure

Building cloud applications for Windows Azure

Azure development will become a part of Visual Studio 2010 to be released soon. Until then, you can download Azure SDK and Azure tools & use them in Visual Studio. Here we will create and deploy a Cloud application on Win Azure

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

BANGALORE, INDIA: Windows Azure platform is created to help developers write, distribute and manage Web application and Web services on the Internet. Azure provides on-demand computation and storage services that allows Web applications to scale them on Internet simply by changing the configuration parameters. Azure is an operating system for the cloud, using which developers can host and manage their applications as services on Windows Azure platform.

Windows Azure supports both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments -developers can use Ruby, PHP, and Python to develop Azure Services. Azure supports a seamless development experience and is well integrated with Visual Studio.

Setting up development environment in Visual StudioYou can download the Azure SDK and Azure tools and use them in Visual Studio. In order to create an Azure application, the pre-requisite operating systems are Windows Vista with SP1, Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7. You would also need .NET framework 3.5 with SP1 installed. Additionally, the development machine should be configured with IIS 7 (with ASP.NET and WCF HTTP Activation). Also it requires Microsoft SQL Server (or express) 2005 or 2008.

To develop Windows Azure application you would need either of the following: MS Visual Studio 2008 SP1, MS Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 or MS Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition with SP1.

Once you have the required IDE, you will need Azure SDK and Azure tools for Visual Studio to start developing your first Azure application.

Clicking on 'File->New Project' in Visual Studio will display Project Template for creating Cloud Application.

Windows Azure Tools for MS Visual Studio extends Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 to enable creation, building, debugging, and running of applications on Azure. To obtain this SDK and the tools, go to www.microsoft .com/download and search for 'Windows azure tools'. The file to be downloaded is VSCloudService.exe that will install both Azure SDK as well as Azure tools in your Visual Studio Shell. Once you have installed the tools, you will see that a new project type has been added to your Visual Studio. See the image below.


A Cloud solution consists of two projects. Here, 'forPCQuest' and 'WebRole1' are two projects added to Visual Studio Solution file.	Clicking on 'File->New Project' in Visual Studio will display Project Template for creating Cloud Application.