KMac's Blog: My first Windows Azure application

So I started this a couple days ago, and finished the work on this today during lunch.

Following the lab guide, I used Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate and developed my first Windows Azure application. This was a very interesting road to travel down for me.

I chose to write this in the C# language to give me some exposure to it. I think I spent the majority of my time working through its inheritance model and getting my classes laid out appropriately. I am also pretty rusty in the developer space, but it all came back pretty quick. Here’s a screen shot of the IDE:

After I got the application to compile correctly I ran it on a local developers test environment using the “UseDevelopmentStorage” tag in the service configuration file.

At that point the application was tested (by me) and found to be adequate for cloud deployment! With the Azure tools for visual studio - Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio - this was as easy as “right-click->publish”.

They gave me a temporary Azure account (expires on Monday June 14th, 2010) in order to accomplish the labs. Azure was absolutely SIMPLE to configure for this. All I had to do was create a Project name, create a service (define the webapp URL in here), create the cloud storage group, define some affinity, reconfigure the application to use the new cloud storage credentials (instead of the local developer instance) and presto, I was in business.

Here’s a screenshot of the hosted service page:

and here is the cloud storage page:

I decided to go with some High Availability. That was soooooooooo terribly difficult (NOT!) All I had to do was modify the config file and set <Instances count="2" /> then restart the application server. The load balancers were already setup to handle this.

And ………….. here is my app! woot!

I chose the URL: http://kmac.cloudapp.net/ Feel free to sign my guestbook; it’ll be there until Microsoft shuts it down on Monday for not paying the bill. :P