Marcel de Koster

TechEd 2008: Introduction to the Azure platform

As an introduction, James Conard provides us with four demos that use the Azure platform.

The first demo shows a ASP.NET application that will be deployed on the azure .NET Services component of the Azure platform. To deploy the ASP.NET application, there is a special “Azure” deployment project provided in the Azure SDK for Visual Studio 2008. The project builds a package that can be uploaded to the Azure platform. The package exists of a zip file with ASP.NET application bits and a package configuration file. Within the platform the package is deployed on one or more Windows Server Virtual Machines. For what I have seen this is very simple to achieve. It is easy to scale out the application (more instance of the virtual machine is simply a matter of configuration).

In the second demo James retrieves data from the SQL Data Services with a LINQ query through WCF. Programming against the SQL Data Services looks like the same as programming against the ADO.NET Data Services (on-premises)…

In the service bus demo, a on-premises (local) service is consumed by a client through the Service Bus (alias the Internet Service Bus; previous named BizTalk Services). Here we should trust MS to not examine the message send through the service bus. But, this could be resolved by using WS-Security to encrypt the message.

The last demo is about the Live Services. Live Services provide a way to share user’s data between devices.