Tin Isles

The article you are reading has moved! It is now available at: http://blog.tinisles.com/2009/04/windows-azure-slashview/

Update (18-Sept-2009): Hot off twitter: Introducing the Windows Azure Service Management API - my wish (below) has been granted. :)

Here's my first attempt playing around with Azure: SlashView

The idea behind the site is pretty simple - I've got a worker process scraping all the comments off Slashdot every 10 minutes. I get all the stats off the comments, and display the results in a Silverlight graph.

The learning curve for Azure isn't too steep if you are already an ASP.NET developer. The only new technology I've had come up to speed with is the deployment process, and the table/blog storage services.

Some indispensable resources I've discovered along the way:

• Azure Storage Explorer - From the codeplex description: "Azure Storage Explorer is a useful GUI tool for inspecting the data in your Azure cloud storage projects including the logs of your cloud-hosted applications. All three types of cloud storage can be viewed: blobs, queues, and tables."
• Windows Azure Walkthrough: Blob Storage Sample - good introduction to blob storage
• Azure Storage Services Test Harness: Table Services 1 – Introduction and Overview - contains some info on paging table storage data (which I'm yet to implement)
• REST API Reference for Windows Azure Storage Service - rather than totally relying on the StorageClient library that comes with all the samples.
• Interesting tidbit - all the azure domains appear to have unique IPs. I just assumed everything would be going thru host headers. This makes it possible to use your own domain for an Azure app: Custom Domain Names in Windows Azure.
• I would assume this also makes it possible to add an SSL cert to as Azure app (Enabling SSL Connections on Windows Azure). The MSDN article is a bit light on details, it sounds like you go thru the CSR/purchase cert process away from Azure. Then ensure you can export the cert to have to included in a deploy?

Wish list: an automated deploy. It can take a long while to 'Suspend', 'Delete', 'Deploy' from the developer portal..

Labels: asp.net, azure