Microsoft Azure: Enterprise Application Development

Table of Contents

Microsoft Azure: Enterprise Application Development

Credits

About the Authors

Acknowledgement

Acknowledgement

About the Reviewer

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Introduction to Cloud Computing

What is an enterprise application?

What is cloud computing?

Some benefits of cloud computing

Some downsides of cloud computing

Cloud computing infrastructure

Cloudy skies ahead

Is cloud computing enterprisey enough?

Summary

2. The Nickel Tour of Azure

Explaining Azure to the managers

Windows Azure

Compute service

Storage service

Blob Storage

Table Storage

Queue Storage

Azure Fabric Agent and Controller

SQL Azure

Windows Azure platform: AppFabric

Codename Dallas

Development Fabric

Considerations for the ASP.NET developer

How are Azure costs calculated?

Calculating Windows Azure pricing

Calculating SQL Azure pricing

Calculating AppFabric pricing

Summary

3. Setting Up for Development

Downloading the tools

Configuring the local machine for development

Installing Windows Azure tools and SDK

Summary

4. Designing our Sample Application

Project design

Integrating application with cloud features

Creating an Azure account

Summary

5. Introduction to SQL Azure

Overview of SQL Azure

Manageability

Managing SQL Azure

Similarities

Differences

High availability

Scalability

Relational data model

Familiar development model

What's the same in SQL Azure?

Data types

Database objects

Fully supported T-SQL commands

Partially supported T-SQL commands

SQL Server built-in functions

Multiple active result sets

What's different in SQL Azure?

Number of databases

Database objects

Service Broker, SQL Browser, and DTC

T-SQL commands

System functions

Data synchronization

Security

Development considerations

Managing maximum size

Management tools

SQL Azure portal

SSMS 2008 R2

Project Houston

Access 2010

Managing databases, logins, and roles in SQL Azure

Migrating schema and data

Manually scripting objects and data

SQL Azure Migration Wizard

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)

SQL Server Import and Export Wizard

Creating packages from scratch

DAC Packs

BCP

The Jupiter Motor's ERP system database and the Dealer Orders database

SQL Azure portal

Creating our database

Summary

6. Azure Blob Storage

Blobs in the Azure ecosystem

Creating Blob Storage

Windows Azure Content Delivery Network

Blob Storage Data Model

Blob Storage

Representational State Transfer

The Blob Storage API

Working with containers using the REST interface

Working with containers using the StorageClient library

Working with blobs

Summary

7. Azure Table Storage

Table Storage versus database tables

Some of the good stuff

Limitations of Table Storage

Adding Table Storage to an Azure account

Accessing Table Storage

Working with tables

Working with entities

Entity Group Transactions

Choosing a PartitionKey

Exception handling

Retry on exceptions

Exceptions on retry

Concurrency conflicts

Table errors and HTTP response codes

Summary

8. Queue Storage

The ins and outs of queues

Reasons to use a queue

Invisibility time and failover

Special handling for binary data

Working with queues

Listing queues

REST API

Client library

Creating queues

REST API

Client library

Deleting queues

REST API

Client library

Setting metadata

REST API

Client library

Getting metadata

REST API

Client library

Working with messages

Summary

9. Web Role

The role of the web

Web roles, déjà vu, and ASP.NET

Creating the solution and web role project

Application diagnostics and logging in the cloud

Jupiter Motors web role

How do we get there? Here's our code!

Additional stored procedures used by the web role

Summary

10. Web Services and Azure

Web services and WCF

Securing WCF

Jupiter Motors web service

Creating a new WCF service web role

Our WCF web services

ERP service interface — IERPService.vb

Service Contract

Operation Contract

Data Contract

Using ADO.NET datasets

ERP service implementation — ERPService.svc.vb

LoadStartupData service function

GetOrderStatusForOrder service function

AddOrderStatusUpdateToQueue service function

GetOrdersNotComplete, GetOrderStatuses, and CreateDataSetFromDataReader class functions

DataTable gotcha

Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) gotcha

Summary

11. Worker Roles

Worker role internals

Uses of worker roles

Externally facing worker roles

Thread-pool pattern

Managing worker roles

Best practices

The Jupiter Motors worker role

Building the Jupiter Motors worker role

Summary

12. Local Application for Updates

Brief overview of the application

JupiterMotorsERP local application

Adding App.config code

Testing our application

Summary

13. Azure AppFabric

Introduction to Azure AppFabric

Access Control

Authentication versus authorization

Basics of Access Control configuration

Requests and Simple Web Tokens

Configuring Access Control for Jupiter Motors

Configuring Azure AppFabric Portal

Configuration tools

Creating a Token Policy

Configuring a Scope

Configuring an Issuer

Configuring a Rule

Configuring a client application for Access Control

Requesting the Token

Using Access Control in a web service

Service Bus

Service Bus as message relay

Service Bus as connection broker

Summary

14. Azure Monitoring and Diagnostics

Azure Diagnostics­ under the hood

Enabling diagnostic logging

Changing the location of the logging configuration

Logging config data in our application

Transferring and persisting diagnostic data

Accessing stored data

Summary

15. Deploying to Windows Azure

Setting up hosted service in Windows Azure

Setting Hosted Service identifiers

Affinity Groups — geographically grouping services

Preparation application for deployment

Ready for deployment

Changing live configuration

Upgrading the deployment

Running the deployment

Summary

Conclusion

Index

Microsoft Azure: Enterprise Application Development

Microsoft Azure: Enterprise Application Development

Copyright © 2010 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: December 2010

Production Reference: 1231110

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

32 Lincoln Road

Olton

Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.

ISBN 978-1-849680-98-1

www.packtpub.com

Cover Image by Vinayak Chittar (<[email protected]> )

Credits

Authors

Richard J. Dudley

Nathan A. Duchene

Reviewers

Ruslan Konviser

Anton Staykov

Acquisition Editor

James Lumsden

Development Editor

Dhwani Devater

Technical Editor

Gaurav Datar

Indexer

Rekha Nair

Editorial Team Leader

Gagandeep Singh

Project Team Leader

Lata Basantani

Project Coordinator

Rebecca Sawant

Proofreader

Ting Baker

Graphics

Geetanjali Sawant

Production Coordinator

Shantanu Zagade

Cover Work

Shantanu Zagade

About the Authors

Richard J. Dudley has experience in the field of computers, going all way back to PC-DOS 1.1 (of which the original box still sits in a closet), with 128K and dual floppies. He began programming in GW-BASIC, and has used nearly every BASIC variant along the way. He was very active in the Louisville BBS community in the 1980s.

Richard holds a BS in Environmental Science from Allegheny College, and an MS in Biological Sciences from The University of Alabama. He developed his programming skills as a way to record and analyze his data, and later collaborate with other labs as the World Wide Web slowly came into being. Eventually, the dot com boom was too tempting, and Rich left science to be become a full-time developer. Rich spent 10 years as an Enterprise Developer, building and supporting everything from consumer websites to several mission-critical systems integrations, to Crystal-and SSRS-based BI tools, to a number of internal line-of-business applications.

Rich is now a Technology Evangelist for ComponentOne, where his job is to support the user community by working with all the latest Microsoft technologies.

Rich's past employers include The University of Alabama-Birmingham (Research Assistant V), The University of Pittsburgh (Research Specialist II), Spang & Co. (e-Commerce Developer), and Armada Supply Chain Solutions (Senior Application Developer).

Acknowledgement

You always see an author thank his or her family, and until you write a book, you can't really understand why. Writing a book is time consuming–you spend a lot of time looking out of a window watching the seasons pass by, wishing you were kayaking on the nearby lake, or going for a bike ride, or anything other than being inside staring at a glowing rectangle hoping the words start flowing soon. We've made almost one complete turn around the sun since we started this book, and it is the culmination of a great deal of work.

So, at the risk of sounding clichéd, I have to thank my wife Kathy, and daughter Anna Claire, who can now have her daddy back.

The impetus to write a technical book doesn't come from money–there's a small advance, and if you're really lucky, maybe some royalties. Fame? Not really–if you're popular, maybe a dozen people will tweet about you. The urge to write a book comes from something more fundamental, something our parents instilled in us and we try and instill in our children–sharing. Share your experiences, share what you know, as doing so builds a stronger community. I hope you find what we've done to be useful.

Nathan A. Duchene has been developing in the .NET Framework since 2005, starting with ASP.NET 2.0. He found a need for a website with the features available in ASP.NET, and with some guidance from Richard J. Dudley, quickly developed and published his web application to the world. After experiencing the ease and flexibility offered by .NET to developers, he decided to learn more features, best practices, and tricks to enhance his web application, build new web applications, write and maintain some console applications, and much more.

In 2008, Nathan and Richard developed and entered a web application into a coding contest, which was voted by the community as the second best of all submissions, losing only by a few votes. Winning an MSDN Premium subscription, it allowed Nathan to play with a number of systems and tools, strengthening his knowledge in the development world.

Nathan, along with Richard, was part of a group that gave a presentation on Silverlight 2 in the Windows Azure cloud in 2009. Both technologies were in beta or pre-beta phases, which caused unexpected issues. Even though the application would not work, the talk was a great success in explaining Windows Azure and Silverlight 2 before they were released to the world.

Nathan is currently an Application Developer for a supply chain solutions company based in Pittsburgh, PA. Along with some .NET development, he also develops and administers solutions using Microsoft SQL Server 2000/2005/2008, Microsoft Biztalk Server 2009, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

This is Nathan's first book and has been a tremendous experience from front to back. After being given the opportunity to pass on some knowledge back to the community, he hopes to have the opportunity in the future to write more books for the community. After observing how quickly technology changes, he feels it's important to release up-to-date information for others to make use of. While Nathan and Richard had to re-write numerous chapters along the way to include new features or changes to existing features, the experience was amazing.

Acknowledgement

I'd like to thank my family and friends for all the support throughout the book process. Not only did they support me, but the encouragement helped me through some rough times when I thought it to be a difficult task to be physically able to write the book with everything else going on at the time. Without my friends and family, I couldn't have made it through this journey. Most importantly, I'd also like to thank my co-author, Richard Dudley. He has been a colleague, a friend, and a mentor over the last eight years. He's shown me opportunities that no one else has and I'm really happy to have him around as a partner in everything we've done. Richard's enthusiasm to help me flourish personally and professionally has had the most meaning in my life recently, and I look forward to working side-by-side with him over the next decades.

About the Reviewer

Anton Staykov has over nine years of solid experience in developing dynamic software solutions (corporate web portals, rich media sites, e-commerce sites, internal software solutions covering specific business needs), using the latest technologies, including Microsoft .NET, MS SQL Server, PHP, MySQL. Currently he is Technical Evangelist for a world leader in the field of User Interface Development Tools and User Experience services. He is User Group Lead for Windows Azure User Group Bulgaria. Anton is an Engineer in Telecommunications and Master of Science in Internet Software Technologies.

You can visit his blog at: http://blogs.staykov.net/.

Preface

Microsoft's Azure platform is an exciting offering in the cloud services market space. Designed to compete with Google AppEngine and Amazon Web Services, Azure stresses a familiar development environment (primarily .NET, SQL Server, and Visual Studio) with a rich set of capabilities. In addition to using Windows Azure to host web applications and services, SQL Azure provides a relational database in the cloud, and Access Control can be utilized to integrate user accounts with identity providers. We can leverage our skills to build powerful applications on Azure with relative ease.

The aim of this book is to gain an understanding of the process, advantages, and challenges of building an application on Azure. We do this by providing in-depth discussion of the platform as we build a sample application.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to Cloud Computing, provides an introduction to cloud computing and enterprise applications.

Chapter 2, The Nickel Tour of Azure, is an overview of the service offerings in the Microsoft Azure Platform.

Chapter 3, Setting Up for Development, shows us the tools required for developing applications for Azure and how to set up our development environments.

Chapter 4, Designing our Sample Application, provides the overview of the sample application that will be built throughout the rest of this book.

Chapter 5, Introduction to SQL Azure, provides an introduction to SQL Azure and discusses the differences between SQL Azure and SQL Server 2008. We also create the database objects for our sample application in this chapter.

Chapter 6, Azure Blob Storage, discusses the Blob Storage service and how to interact with blobs using either a .NET client library or REST services. We also create the containers and blobs for our sample application in this chapter.

Chapter 7, Azure Table Storage, discusses the Table Storage service and how to interact with tables using either a .NET client library or REST services.

Chapter 8, Queue Storage, speaks about the Queue Storage service and how to interact with queues using either a .NET client library or REST services. We also create the queues needed for our application in this chapter.

Chapter 9, Web Role, gives an overview of what a web role is, and some of the similarities and differences between a web role and a traditional web application. We also build the portal web role for our sample application in this chapter.

Chapter 10, Web Services and Azure, discusses WCF web services and provides an overview of building a web service. We also build the web service needed for our sample application.

Chapter 11, Worker Roles, speaks about worker roles and many of the functions they can perform. We also build the worker roles for our sample application in this chapter.

Chapter 12, Local Application for Updates, teaches us how to build a Windows Forms application that interacts with our web services.

Chapter 13, Azure AppFabric, provides an overview of the Azure AppFabric, and discusses the capabilities of Access Control and Service Bus. We also configure Access Control for our sample application.

Chapter 14, Azure Monitoring and Diagnostics, discusses the diagnostic monitoring services available in Microsoft Azure, along with how to enable these services in our sample application.

Chapter 15, Deploying to Windows Azure, teaches how to deploy our sample application to Windows Azure and how to change our application's configuration once it is deployed.

What you need for this book

For this book, we need a PC running Windows XP or 7. We also need either Visual Studio 2008 or 2010, or if both are not available, we can go for Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition. SQL Server 2008 Express also needs to be installed. We need to install the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio, and depending on the OS and Visual Studio used, there may be some additional hotfixes. A complete list of requirements can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsazure/cc974146.aspx.

Who this book is for

If you are a developer or architect who wants to build enterprise-level applications with Azure, but needs to understand more about Azure's capabilities first, this book is for you. As the examples are in .NET, the book will skew to MS-oriented developers. But a lot of what is discussed will be applicable to anyone wanting to work with Azure. No matter what language you use, you provision the application fabric the same way, and all the underlying concepts will be the same.