I just want to relay Microsoft’s new offer to everyone. Windows Azure is now offered for free for a limited time. This is an introductory offer to get more people to use new cloud platform from Microsoft. Please see this link for details.
Speaking at Atlanta .NET Users Group
I spoke at Atlanta.NET Users Group yesterday, My topic was Azure Step-by-Step.
I talked about why someone would use Windows and SQL Azure, then I built a Silverlight application from scratch. The application was designed to run in Windows Azure and use SQL Azure as database. I demonstrated how to get maximum code re-use between traditional .NET web application and the same application developed for Azure. At the end, I had an application that could run on either platform with just web.config change.
You can download the zip file with PowerPoint slides with useful links as well as the sample project I built here.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Talk at GGMUG
As always I had fun presenting at Gwinnett Georgia Microsoft Users Group on Thursday. The subject of my talk was “Getting started with SQL Azure”. I documented all the steps in this blog post. There are also useful links that I mentioned in this post to help you get started.
There are many advantages to use SQL Azure. Number of reason is probably the fact that one can eliminate the need to house expensive hardware and software on premises. As long as you are fine with living with certain limitations of SQL Azure compared to SQL Server 2008, you can take advantage of this great technology. The primary limitation is probably the size of the database. You cannot have a database bigger than 10 GB.
Feel free to ask any questions on the topic.
Windows Azure Application
This is purely a bragging post
I just deployed a test application to the cloud (Microsoft Azure): http://rolodex.cloudapp.net/
Here is the technology stack for it:
- Windows Azure
- SQL Azure
- CSLA 3.8.1
- Silverlight
- Entity Framework
- WCF
- Prism (Composite Application Guidance)
- Silverlight Toolkit
I promise to write a blog entry in the near future, the steps one has to follow through to create an Azure application.