Supporting Billions of entities/rows for Mobile – Android Series - Part 6–Reading and Writing to Windows Azure (Cloud-based) Tables using standard HTTP and Fiddler

Azure Storage Explorer is a useful GUI tool for inspecting and altering the data in your Windows Azure Storage storage projects including the logs of your cloud-hosted applications.

All 3 types of cloud storage can be viewed and edited: blobs, queues, and tables.

public partial class Form1 : Form
{
    const string uriTemplate = "http://{0}.table.core.windows.net/{1}";
    const string uriTemplate2 = "http://{0}.table.core.windows.net/{1}/{2}";
    string _sharedKey = "== your shared key from the portal goes here==";
    string _accountName = "fastmotorcycle";
    string _tableName = "fastbikes";

    public Form1()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
    }


    private void cmdMakeHeader_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        var account = _accountName;
        var sharedKey = Convert.FromBase64String(_sharedKey);


        this.txtAccountName.Text = account;
        this.txtSharedKey.Text = _sharedKey;
        this.txtTableName.Text = _tableName;


        // Fill datetime field
        string datetime = DateTime.UtcNow.ToString("R", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
        this.txtDate.Text = datetime;
            
        // Fill uri field
        string uri = string.Format(uriTemplate, _accountName, _tableName);
        this.txtURI.Text = uri;
            
        // Create request object
        WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(uri);

        // Add date header
        request.ContentLength = 0;
        request.Headers.Add("x-ms-date", datetime);

            
        // Get resource
        var resource = request.RequestUri.PathAndQuery;
    
        // Sign date, account and uri
        string stringToSign = string.Format("{0}\n/{1}{2}",
                request.Headers["x-ms-date"],
                account,
                resource
            );

        this.txtMessageToSign.Text = stringToSign;


        // Sign the string using shared key
        var hasher = new HMACSHA256(sharedKey);
        string signedSignature = Convert.ToBase64String(hasher.ComputeHash(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(stringToSign)));
        this.txtSignedMessage.Text = signedSignature;

        // Add authorization header
        string authorizationHeader = string.Format("{0} {1}:{2}", "SharedKeyLite", account, signedSignature);
        request.Headers.Add("Authorization", authorizationHeader);


        // Show the signed message
        this.txtSignedMessage.Text = request.Headers.Get(0).ToString() + "\r\n";
        this.txtSignedMessage.Text += request.Headers.Get(1).ToString() + "\r\n";

        // Show the entire header
        this.txtHttpHeader.Text = "x-ms-date:" + request.Headers.Get(0).ToString() + "\r\n";
        this.txtHttpHeader.Text += "Authorization:" + request.Headers.Get(1).ToString() + "\r\n";
        this.txtHttpHeader.Text += "Content-Type:" + "application/atom+xml" + "\r\n";

        if (this.txtPartitionKey.Text == String.Empty ||
            this.txtRowKey.Text == String.Empty)
            return;

        this.txtResponseBody.Text = string.Format(Strings.response_header,
                                                    this.txtPartitionKey.Text,
                                                    this.txtRowKey.Text);




    }

    private void cmdClip2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        Clipboard.SetData(DataFormats.Text, (Object)this.txtResponseBody.Text);
    }

    private void cmdClip1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        Clipboard.SetData(DataFormats.Text, (Object)this.txtHttpHeader.Text);
    }



}

Typically, you will access Azure Table Storage through the ADO.NET Data Services API, found inside the Azure SDK Download. But there may be situations where you want to access Azure table storage outside of a Windows environment, such as from Java or PHP or any other non-MS platform. Remember, Azure tables are incredibly scalable, cost-effective, and performant. And Azure tables are also available from a purely http world.