PeterKellner.net

Tonight, at the Microsoft office (see this announcement for more details: http://www.meetup.com/The-San-Francisco-NET-User-Group/events/21982451/?a=cr1p_grp&rv=cr1p ) I’m going to be talking about what it is really like to build a full service application using Microsoft’s Windows Azure Cloud Computing Platform.

For those that don’t know what I’m going to talk about, here is a prelude.

First, I’m going to go through about 10 slides talking briefly about what is azure.  That is, Azure is basically a family of hosted services that Microsoft provides in the cloud.  I’m going to talk about:

• Compute
• Storage
• Cache
• Service Bus
• SqlAzure

Then, I’m going to got through and actually show all the things I do on a daily basis while I’m doing my development work.  That includes using their development environment (called the dev fabric) as well as how I deploy and test.  The product I developed can be found at http://connectionroad.com if you are interested.  It’s basically Microsoft SyncToy to Cloud Storage.

Bring your questions!  This could be very fun.

OK, I think this is the longest post title I’ve ever made, but if you understand it, you’ll know why it needs to be so long.  I discovered this totally by accident.  I would never ever have pressed F11 (step into) from a client side proxy and expect to get into anything but a bunch of ugly machine generated proxy code (especially with Azure).  To my total surprise, I landed right inside my WCF service as if I had started the Windows Azure Developer fabric in debug mode and set a break point.

So, I’ll step through the process an show screen shots on the outside chance I was dreaming and can’t reproduce it. If I can, now I will have proof so I can do it again.  Sorry for the work in progress code you will see.  The point here is really the debugger and not the code I’m showing so try and ignore that.

OK, here we go.

Let’s assume you have a completely configured azure web role that is hosting a simple WCF service.  When you start that web role and point at the service, you’ll get something like this: (just a note that I started the app fabric by deploying directly from Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 with the start/run.  I am using a debug profile but am NOT running in debug mode.  If I do run the app fabric in debug mode, this does not work.

I’ve been slowly building up my Azure experience over the past few months and actually plan to release a product using Azure during the next month or two.  Programming Windows Azure has been a huge value to me in learning both the basics of the Azure platform as well as the details.  It has a great balance of theory verses practice.  I strongly recommend this book if you are new to Azure or even if you have experience with Azure.  I often find myself going back and re-reading sections to better understand things.

Two of the sections I feel are particularly well written or the ones that talk about Storage and Tables (chapters 7 and 8).  The application I’ve been working on heavily uses blob storage and I spend lots of times re-reading those sections.  Azure tables is a hard topic to get a sql server programmer like me to get my head wrapped around.  Sriram does a great job of talking directly to someone like me to help me understand how and when to use tables.

Again, I whole heartedly recommend this book.

Just a quick shout out to the makers of Cloud Storage Studio Cerebrate Software.   Thanks for a great product offering!  I’ve been doing quite a bit of work recently with Microsoft Windows Azure Blob Storage and have really appreciated the insight into that storage Cloud Studio gives me.  I had been using another product to do the same thing which I had though was easier and faster, but after just a couple hours of working with Cloud Studio, I’m finding I’ve really been missing out. 

I’m attaching a screen shot below which shows viewing what is actually in the storage (not a hierarchical false view) as well as a display of all the meta data.  Either of those two features are show starters for me and enough to switch.

If you have not used it, give it  try (and have some patience, it takes a little bit of practice to find the true value).

Good luck!

Understanding how Azure Blob Storage can be used to simulate directory structures is a little tricky to say the least.  I’ve got a long forum thread on the Windows Azure Community site  now discussing the details.  As always, Steve Marx has been a big help here with a bunch of code. Steve’s got a great blog where he provides lots of examples and insights.  Neil Mackenzie has also contributed here to getting to the answer.

Just so we now have an example, I’ve put together a simple windows form app that let’s you set a few variables in your app.config to point at your azure storage and container, let you view your app as a tree as well as see the code how it can be done.  I have not commented the code much, just thought it would be good to get it out there.  The running application shows you the data as follows.

I just spend about 2 hours wrestling with what turned out to be an invalid blob storage container name.  I named a container “MyTest1” which did not meet the criteria.  For your information, the criteria is as follows:

1. 3 to 63 Characters
2. Starts With Letter or Number
3. Letters, Numbers, and Dash (-)
4. Every Dash (-) Must Be Immediately Preceded and Followed by a Letter or Number

So, I decided to hunt for a regular expression to do this and I found one on the web. I’m not sure if it’s correct, but here is what I found at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-GB/windowsazuredata/thread/d364761b-6d9d-4c15-8353-46c6719a3392 from Gaurav Mantri (method that includes the regex).

internal static bool IsBlobContainerNameValid(string name)
    {
      if (name.Equals("$root"))
      { 
        return true; 
      }
      string validBlobContainerNameRegex = @"^([a-z]|\d){1}([a-z]|-|\d){1,61}([a-z]|\d){1}$";
      Regex reg = new Regex(validBlobContainerNameRegex);
      if (reg.IsMatch(name))
      {
        return true;
      }
      return false;
    }

I’m just starting to use Windows Azure for a project and plan on using the Azure Blob Storage part.  I won’t go into the details here, but let’s say I figured it out far enough so that I have pushed some piles of data into the blog storage.   Now, I want to see them.  I assumed that from the Azure portal, there would be some interface where I could see what I actual did and am being billed from.  I posted to the forums and basically was told that’s not really the case.  Here is the post with the answer saying you need some other software to do it (details below).

My friend RobinDotNet suggested I look at his article about how to use Visual Studio 2010 to view the blob storage.  Sure enough, in VS, I can set my account and key in server explorer and see the blob storage!  Thanks Robin.