Windows Azure - Getting Started
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The article you are reading has moved! It is now available at: http://blog.tinisles.com/2009/02/windows-azure-getting-started/ |
Windows Azure - so where do you get started? Some links:
- Dare Obasanjo's Windows Azure from a Developer's Perspective - cuts though all the info that is out there and spells out exactly what a developer can expect from Azure.
- Katrien De Graeve Windows Azure – installing SDK, tools and creating a first cloud project - has the link to request a evaluation token. Two days after after filling out the survey I got an "Invitation Code to Microsoft .NET Services and Microsoft SQL Services", a day after this I got an "Invitation Code to Windows Azure". Katrien's article also contains links to the SDK and Visual Studio tools you will need to get started.
- Maarten Balliauw's - CarTrackr on Windows Azure.
- First road block - trying to run an Azure project in Visual Studio requires 'elevated privileges'. So (at least in Vista) you'll need do a right-click 'run as administrator' when you fire up Visual Studio. The issue is described in : Microsoft Virtual Earth on Windows Azure
- Getting Table Storage to work: Windows Azure Walkthrough: Simple Table Storage
I've done articles on Amazon's EC2 and Google's AppEngine - so I guess I'm obligated to do an Azure article, right? :)
I do have an Azure idea in the works. It's not very exciting to write an app that is barely different to something I could do on my cheap ASP.NET hosting. Something that cheap hosting doesn't offer is an easy way to write a background processing application such as the Azure worker role. So I've revived a 'shelved' screen scraping application. The idea is to pull down all the comments on Slashdot articles, and generate some visualization of the comments growing over time.