Bruno Terkaly - Developer Evangelist - bterkaly@microsoft.com

Cloud Applications and Application Lifecycle Management (Includes Azure)

BrunoTerkaly — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:05:22 GMT

Application Development in the cloud

Azure Application Lifecycle Management with Buck Woody	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2012/02/07/application-lifecycle-management-overview-for-windows-azure.aspx
ALM with Azure	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff803362.aspx
David Chappell	http://www.microsoft.com/global/applicationplatform/en/us/RenderingAssets/Whitepapers/What%20is%20Application%20Lifecycle%20Management.pdf
Northwest Cadance Can Help	http://itevent.net/application-lifecycle-management-alm-from-design-to-development
Microsoft MSDN – Application Lifecycle Management	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/ff625779

Azure Ports

BrunoTerkaly — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:03:11 GMT

Outbound ports that have to be opened for Azure development

The following list represents protocols and output ports needed by Azure developers.

Action

Domain

Protocol

Port

Description

Management Portal

HTTP/S (?)

Using the Silverlight Management App

RDP

*.cloudapp.net
Custom domain

This is the default for most RDP listeners.

RDP

3389

Remote Desktop connection to VMs

Publish from VS

*.blob.core.windows.net

Http/s + ?

Blob domain for package upload for access of management api

Webdeploy

*.cloudapp.net

Reference to Web Deploy on Port 8172

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8166922/is-iis7-web-deploy-management-service-accepting-requests-on-8172-or-port-80-or

Http/s

8172

Webdeploy from within Studio

SQL Management

*.database.windows.net

Port 8443

The Database Management API is a REST API. All operation requests are sent encrypted over the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and authenticated using X.509 v3 certificates.

Database Management API requests can be initiated from within Windows Azure, or directly over the internet from any application that can send HTTPS requests and receive HTTPS responses.

All requests are sent to the SQL Azure Database Management Service on port 8443 using the following base URL: https://management.database.windows.net:8443

TDS

1433

Manage SQL from Management Studio

Upload into Storage

*.blob.core.windows.net

Http/S

80/443

Push data into Azure Storage

Service Bus Relay TCP Mode

*.servicebus.windows.net

**EXCERPT**
from the developers guide below

“The relay service only requires a few outbound ports to be open, specifically ports 9350, 9351, 9352, 9353, depending on the features you choose to use, and the standard HTTP ports 80/443.

It uses ports 9350 for one-way TCP connections and port 9351 for one-way TCP/SSL connections.

They use ports 9352 and 9353 for bidirectional TCP connections and a more advanced connectivity mode we’ll discuss later.

It’s important to note that you don’t have to open any inbound ports on your firewall or perform any kind of port mapping on your NAT/router device in order to use the relay service.”

A Developer’s Guide to the Service Bus

http://download.microsoft.com/download/D/6/F/D6F4E54C-F6A7-48FA-AE03-4C543B14B41A/A Developer's Guide to Service Bus in Windows Azure AppFabric.docx#

SB over TCP

9350, 9351, 9352, 9353

Listeners on Service Bus Relay over TCP (requires 443 for Access Control token acquisition)

Service Bus Relay HTTP Mode

*.servicebus.windows.net

SB over HTTP

Listeners on Service Bus Relay over HTTP (requires 443 for Access Control)

Service Bus Publish Subscribe

*.servicebus.windows.net

SBMP over TCP

9354

Service Bus Queue and Topic clients over TCP (in CTP)

Service Bus Pubsub over REST

*.servicebus.windows.net

HTTPS

443

Service Bus Queue/Topic/Message Buffer over REST

Access Control

*.accesscontrol.windows.net

Illustrates Access Control Service and SharePoint and Port 443

http://blog.mikehacker.net/2011/04/21/sharepoint-authentication-using-windows-azure-access-controlpart-2/

What you can do with port 443

By using Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control with SharePoint I can allow users to authenticate not only by Windows Live ID and Active Directory but also Google, Yahoo! and Facebook!

HTTPS

443

Token acquisition and management for Access Control

AppFabric Cache

*.cache.windows.net

Session State Provider for Windows Azure Caching

The Windows Azure session state provider is an out-of-process storage mechanism for ASP.NET applications. This provider enables you to store your session state in an Windows Azure cache rather than in-memory or in a SQL Server database.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg185668.aspx

NETTCP

22233

Cache access (out-of-DC access makes sense for external replication into cache)

How to Configure a Windows Azure Port

How to Configure a Windows Azure Port	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg433064.aspx
Setting Up a Hosted Service for Windows Azure	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh124108.aspx#
Overview of Setting Up a Hosted Service for Windows Azure	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh124110.aspx#
How to Configure the Site Entry in the Service Definition File	http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg433080.aspx#

Cloud Architecture Series – CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation)– Part 01

BrunoTerkaly — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 03:20:43 GMT

Introduction

This content derives from an internal talk at Microsoft that Ricardo and I gave in February of 2012. The purpose of the talk was to reveal our discoveries in the field with respect to what real customers are doing when building cloud architectures.

Ricardo’s blog can be found here: http://blog.ricardovillalobos.com/

We discovered something interesting. Several ISVs were using slight variations of the same pattern.

When we considered the benefits and why these ISVs were using these architectures, the reasoning became apparent. Ricardo and I were immediately drawn to this pattern.

We will explain the architecture in the context of Windows Azure. But this isn’t a requirement. The techniques and approaches we discuss are applicable to any cloud vendor. The architectures presented even work for private cloud or on-premise scenarios as well.

Objectives for the next several posts

Evolutionary	Nothing is really new
Easier Today	Azure has built in abilities

We believe the patterns we are seeing today represent a natural evolution. The techniques illustrated have been in practice for decades. What makes these approaches really practical today is that there is direct support for the low-level frameworks in Windows Azure directly. Worker roles, web roles, Windows Azure Queues, Service Bus Queues, scalable and fast storage are available out of the box to jump start the major pillars of the needed architecture.

What you can expect to walk away with

Event Sourcing	Everyone loves Event Sourcing
Domain Driven Methodologies	Required or optional?

As with anything we learn, there is a vocabulary, a set of terms that you need to “talk the talk.”

A large part of this post is discussing CQRS. We will defer that until later. Let’s talk a little bit about event sourcing and domain driven methodologies.

What we find kind of interesting is that the technology of CQRS is often discussed alongside the concept of Event Sourcing and Domain Driven Design approaches.

Event Sourcing

For example, the concept of Event Sourcing is not formally a part of CQRS. But time and time again, almost universally, all ISVs seemed to implement Event Sourcing. And we’ve seen some ISVs depend on an event sourcing as the only valid store of important business data.

Domain Driven Design

Regarding Domain-Driven design approaches, Ricardo and I still debate whether they are an essential ingredient to CQRS. Most developers agree that the domain and domain logic is the primary focus of architecture. In Domain Drive Design approaches there are one or more team members that are experts in a specific sphere of knowledge, influence, or activity. They are the domain experts that develop and define a system of abstractions that help solve problems in the domain.

The outcome of theses posts is pretty simple.

Ricardo and I want to show architectures that include CQRS. The goal of the architectures is to be able to scale and to focus on providing the fastest possible support for client applications.

The Pre-Cloud and Post Cloud World

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last few years, you have seen this general tendency for asynchronous patterns and loosely coupled architectures. Of course these goals have always been at the forefront of developer minds. But we believe that the growth of cloud computing has brought asynchronous, loosely coupled application architectures to an even higher level of importance.

Asynchronous techniques are needed because input/output operations are normally slower that other processing operations. Typically, the client application will need to wait for a particular I/O routine to completed. Finding a way to

Asynchronous Techniques - Optimizing Compute and IO Bound Programming

If you look at the way Windows 8 applications will be developed, an asynchronous approach to writing code will be a requirement. End users expect a lot from their software today. They want to be able to use web based applications which run in a disconnected fashion, but also want highly responsive experiences.

Write and Read operations are parallelized in CQRS

As we dive deeper into CQRS, you’ll see that read and write operations are fully de-coupled, supporting asynchronous reads and writes.

Horizontal Decoupling

I give Ricardo credit for coining the term horizontal de-coupling.

Later, we will talk about vertical de-coupling. Vertical de-coupling typically involves a separating read operations from write operations. More on that later.

DTOs

DTOs, or data transfer objects has been a common approach to de-coupling the service layer from the presentation layer.

A DTO is simple container for a set of aggregated data that needs to be transferred across a process or network boundary. Some developers use the Assembler pattern [Fowler], which creates DTOs from business objects and vice versa. This pattern is a specialized instance of the Mapper pattern and lets you convert between your domain objects and the data being serialized across the network.

ORMs

Closer to storage, ORMs have been a popular approach to de-coupling the business data layer from the actual physical database or storage type. ORMs often introduce a little bit of performance overhead. They often implement their own caching mechanism to somewhat make up for extra latency they introduce.

Your typical cloud architecture

This is typically are plain vanilla and cloud based architecture. It works pretty well for most cases and does lend itself to some degree of scaling.

Keeping the presentation layer from being too chatty with the service layer, we typically employ some sort of the session state as a caching service to the presentation layer, so that it does not have to go back to the service layer every time a user takes an action.

What is interesting about the middle green boxes is that we are combining three layers into one web role or worker role. The three layers we are talking about are the service, business, and data layers.

The key point here is that all write and read operations happen on the same worker or web instance/role up in the cloud, limiting scale.

Data synchronization issues often come about as read and write operations conflict about blocking strategies. This normally results in slower reads for client applications.

In short, the architecture below does not attempt to optimize read operations as a separate scalable activity.

Why we need new patterns – The next post

So given the basic architecture above, how do we improve on it?
What exactly is CQRS and how can it help?
There is no silver bullet. What are the limitations of CQRS?
Why Domain Driven Design?
Why Event Sourcing?
Walk through of CQRS in action
Sample code implementation

Stay tuned for the next post…

Web Cast - Building a Massively Scalable Platform for Consumer Devices on Windows Azure

BrunoTerkaly — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:43:12 GMT

Welcome to our first web cast

This morning on http://livestream.com/clouduniversity Bret Stateham and I delivered our first pilot webcast. We’re very proud about the way it went. Pretty much went without a hitch. Must be beginner’s luck.

The webcast is based on a talk I did at the ATT developer summit in Las Vegas last week. If you’ve been following the previous posts, this represents the live presentation of that material, where I illustrate how to build a restful service and deploy it to the Microsoft cloud. I also illustrate how to consume this restful service from multiple clients, including mobile clients , such as Windows Phone.

Because REST is an open standards based on http, almost any device can consume and interact with this restful service, including jQuery, HTML 5, WPF, Java - you name it.

Building a Massively Scalable Platform for Consumer Devices on Windows Azure

http://livestre.am/1e63E

Live Webcast–January 19th, 8 am to 9 am (Pacific Time)–Introduction to Cloud Computing

BrunoTerkaly — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:04:21 GMT

When and Where – Learn the future, learn cloud computing

These are virtual camps. You will be able to ask questions and participate almost like this were a live event – except you can do it from the comfort of your own home or desk.

Building a Massively Scalable Platform for Consumer Devices on Windows Azure

http://livestre.am/1e63E

The Date and Time	The Place
Thursday January 19th, from 8AM -9AM	http://www.livestream.com/clouduniversity

The Event - Windows Azure DevCamp

This virtual DevCamps are free, fun, no-fluff online events for developers, by developers. Attendees learn from experts in a low-key, interactive way.

Why get on a plane and waste time and money traveling, when you can learn from experts from the comfort of your home.

So you've decided to head to the Cloud and find out what all the buzz is about. You've got a machine that's primed and ready but don't know where do you start? Well you've come to the right place.

Windows Azure is an open cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework.

We will cover the following topics:

Getting Started with Windows Azure
Using Windows Azure Storage
Understanding SQL Azure
Securing, Connecting, and Scaling Windows Azure Solutions
Windows Azure Application Scenarios

Being Prepared

Getting Ready for Cloud University

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/11/28/being-prepared-for-windows-azure-camp-setup-guide.aspx

Part 1-Cloud Architecture Series-Durable Messages using Windows Azure (Cloud) Service Bus Queues–Establishing your service through the Portal

BrunoTerkaly — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:32:10 GMT

Introduction

The purpose of this post is to explain and illustrate the use of Windows Azure Service Bus Queues.

This technology solves some very difficult problems. It allows developers to send durable messages among applications, penetrating network address translation (NAT) boundaries, , or bound to frequently-changing, dynamically-assigned IP addresses, or both. Reaching endpoints behind these types of boundaries in extremely difficult. The Windows Azure Service Bus Queuing technologies makes this challenge very approachable.

There are many applications for this technology. We will use this pattern to implement the CQRS pattern in future posts.

Topics

Windows Azure also implements the concept of "Topics." In a topic-based system, messages are published to "topics" or named logical channels. Subscribers in a topic-based system will receive all messages published to the topics to which they subscribe, and all subscribers to a topic will receive the same messages. The publisher is responsible for defining the classes of messages to which subscribers can subscribe.

Topics are one-to-many (pub-sub model)	In contrast to Service Bus queues, where each message is processed by a single consumer, topics and subscriptions provide a one-to-many form of communication. Topics represent the publish/subscribe pattern.
One to many	It is possible to register multiple subscriptions (or listeners/receivers) to a topic.
Pub-Sub	When a message is sent to a topic, it is then made available to each subscription to handle/process independently.

Well known pattern in computer science

These technologies reflect well known patterns in computer science, such as the "Pub-Sub" or publish-subscribe pattern. This pattern allows senders of messages (Publishers) to send these messages to listeners (Subscribers) without knowing anything about the number of type of subscribers. Subscribers simply express an interest in receiving certain types of messages without knowing anything about the Publisher. It is a great example of loose coupling.

Publish-Subscribe Pattern

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish/subscribe

Getting Started at the portal

The next few screens will walk you through establishing a namespace at the portal.

Essential Download

To create a Service Bus Queue service running on Azure you’ll need to download the Azure SDK here:

Establishing a namespace for the service bus endpoint

Select “Service Bus, Access Control & Caching” as seen below.

Creating a new service bus endpoint

Click “New”

Providing a namespace, region. Selecting services.

The end result

Summary of information from portal

Namespace	dataevents
Service Gateway	https://dataevents.servicebus.windows.net
Management Endpoint	https://dataevents-sb.accesscontrol.windows.net
Default Issuer	owner
Default Key	xzjyCn3ZHOgIsmavht5Xhsb9ZATZcmn5jdakLMN/ffc= [typically you would keep this secret but is included to help explain the process.] Thank you Valery for making this clear.

The Visual Studio Team Will Reward You for Feedback

BrunoTerkaly — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:17:17 GMT

Introduction

The Microsoft Visual Studio Design Research Team is looking for participants to give us direct feedback on our development tools, languages and libraries! Opportunities include usability studies of upcoming features, focus groups where we explore new ideas, as well as 1:1 interviews.

What do you get out of it?

When you are selected to participate in one of our research studies, benefits include a combination of the following:

A chance to see and use upcoming tools, features, and language/library enhancements

Interact directly with members of our development teams to discuss your requirements for efficient and effective tools,

Directly influence future design decisions, and

Receive a choice of a Microsoft product from our gratuity list - ranging from Visual Studio Pro thru Xbox games!

We have a brief enrollment form that will ask you a few questions about your company, your job, and the software and languages you actively use. We will contact you as soon as we have a research study that matches your specific background and/or interests.

Enrollment Form

How to get involved:

The Enrollment form

https://illumeweb.smdisp.net/collector/Survey.ashx?Name=VSParticipantRecruitingEnrollment

Your involvement is much appreciated

This enrollment should only take 3-5 minutes to complete. For more information about the program feel free to email us at vsdr@microsoft.com. Please note that the Enrollment link originates from Microsoft User Research and is hosted by our survey software provider. Visit http://www.microsoft.com/userresearch/studies.aspx if you have any concerns. Please note that regrettably government employees and non-U.S. residents are not eligible for a Microsoft gratuity – but we would still welcome your feedback.

Bruno Knows Cloud

BrunoTerkaly — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:36:12 GMT

Welcome to my blog

I am a Developer Evangelist employed at Microsoft, living in the Silicon Valley area, focused on cloud computing, namely Windows Azure, the Microsoft cloud.

Why you should read my blog posts

My posts are focused on Windows Azure and provide hands-on guidance to not only write applications hosted in a Microsoft data center, but also provide guidance on writing applications that connect to the Microsoft cloud.

Mobile and Cloud
I am a big believer in interoperability and scale because of the huge growth in mobile computing. I have written many posts that illustrate how to create RESTful Web services that expose massively scalable data to Android, iOS, and Windows Phone devices.

I provide videos, source code and detailed guidance for all these diverse platforms using Eclipse, Xcode. I provide code in Java and Objective-C that consumes cloud hosted services and data.

Table of contents of a few posts

Description	Link
Part 1 - Why Scale Matters	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/27/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-1-why-scale-matters.aspx
Part 2 - What are some high level cloud offerings?	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/27/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-2-what-are-some-high-level-cloud-offerings.aspx
Part 3 - Architecture and Data Options	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/28/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-3-architecture-and-data-options.aspx
Part 4 - Building a Cloud-based RESTful service for our Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7 Clients	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/28/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-4-building-a-cloud-based-restful-service-for-our-android-ios-and-windows-phone-7-clients.aspx
Part 5 - Using the Portal and Setting up your Azure Account (Microsoft Cloud)	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/05/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-5-using-the-portal-and-setting-up-your-azure-account-microsoft-cloud.aspx
Part 6 - Reading and Writing to Windows Azure (Cloud-based) Tables using standard HTTP and Fiddler	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/05/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.aspx
Part 7 - Migrating your Azure (Cloud RESTful Service) to be Hosted in a Microsoft Data Center	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/07/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-7-migrating-your-azure-cloud-restful-service-to-be-hosted-in-a-microsoft-data-center.aspx
Part 8 - Writing an Android Client to consume RESTful data from Azure (Microsoft Cloud)	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/10/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-8-writing-an-android-client-to-consume-restful-data-from-azure-microsoft-cloud.aspx
Part 9 - Writing an iOS (iPhone/iPad/MacOS) Client to consume RESTful data from Azure (Microsoft Cloud)	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/24/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-9-writing-an-ios-iphone-ipad-macos-client-to-consume-restful-data-from-azure-microsoft-cloud.aspx
Part 10 - Writing a Windows Phone 7 Client to consume RESTful data from Azure (Microsoft Cloud)	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/26/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-mobile-to-cloud-series-part-10-writing-a-windows-phone-7-client-to-consume-restful-data-from-azure-microsoft-cloud.aspx
Source Code to Azure RESTful Service, Android Mobile Client, iOS/iPhone Mobile Client, and Windows Phone 7 Mobile Client	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/11/11/source-code-to-azure-restful-service-android-mobile-client-ios-iphone-mobile-client-and-windows-phone-7-mobile-client.aspx#

More about my history

I’ve been coding since the mid-80s, involved in a multitude of platforms, languages, frameworks, SDKs, libraries, and APIs.

I’ve been employed at Microsoft for over 7 years, starting as a Rapid Response Engineer, helping customers in remote locations on a moment's notice to help with extreme troubleshooting scenarios, including problem isolation and correction, live and post-mortem debugging, on-the-fly application design and code reviews, performance tuning (IIS, SQL Server, .NET), application stability, porting / migration assistance, configuration management, pre-rollout testing and general development consulting I am the founder of Bay Area Azure Meetup, where I engage with developers around cloud computing topics. I have given seminars all over the US, Europe, and Asia.

I have appeared on TV and radio many times, showcasing interesting innovations. I am graduate of University of California at Berkeley.

My amazing family

Little Bruno just started walking. Having him has been the most amazing experience of my life.

Video Tutorial - How to install and run Node.js on Windows

BrunoTerkaly — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 19:52:49 GMT

What this post is about

This post is about getting Node.js up and running on a Windows Platform. This step will be followed by some guidance on how to host Node.js in a Microsoft Cloud Data Center, called Windows Azure.

Node.js is a software system designed for writing highly-scalable internet applications, notably web servers.

What makes Node.js compelling is the fact that is is based on the JavaScript language, opening the door for developers to not only write client side JavaScript put also server side.Node.js is built for scale, using event-driven, asynchronous I/O to minimize overhead and maximize scalability.

Video Content

This content shows 3 basic steps:

Step 1	Install Node.js to run under Windows.
Step 2	Use an editor to write some JavaScript
Step 3	Run the application and a browser to test with.

Source Code

// JScript source code
var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
    res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' });
    res.end('Hello World\n');
}).listen(1337, "127.0.0.1");
console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/');

Watch the video

Video of Install and Running for Node.js

http://brunoblogfiles.com/videos/Node_js_Install.wmv

Conclusions

Future content will explain more complex topics, like using Socket.IO and Express. Migrating applications to the Microsoft Cloud (Windows Azure) will also be explained and demonstrated.

Being Prepared for Windows Azure DevCamp–Setup Guide

BrunoTerkaly — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:42:40 GMT

Azure DevCamp - How to make sure you are setup

Windows Azure DevCamps - Redmond Campus - 12/13/2011	https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032496972&%3bCulture=en-US
Windows Azure DevCamps - Phoenix - 12/15/2011	https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032496972&%3bCulture=en-US

This post is about coming prepared to the Azure DevCamps. The Santa Monica event is already sold out.

Please come prepared.

You don’t want to waste your time at an Azure DevCamp downloading and installing files. Setting up can take quite some time and will interfere with productivity.   I will also provide some posts for those that could not attend.

This post includes:

1.	Hardware	Minimum Hardware configurations.
2.	Software	Windows, Visual Studio
3.	SDKs	Azure SDK
4.	Labs	Labs and Powerpoint downloads
5.	Video Verification	The video you should watch to verify you are setup (less than 2 minutes)

Azure DevCamp - Hardware - minimum

The following hardware is needed to install the needed software:

CPU	1.6 GHz or faster non-Mac CPU
Memory	2+ GB RAM
Storage	20 GB Hard Disk

Important Note
Running Macintosh computers is not recommended. Storage and Compute emulators do not always work properly.

Azure DevCamp - Software

Supported Operating Systems

Don’t expect Windows XP to work. Here are the supported OS’s.

1.	Windows Server 2008
2.	Windows Server 2008 R2
3.	Windows Vista
4.	Windows 7

Visual Studio and SQL Server Express

Various versions of Visual Studio will work. Please be sure you have one of the following:

Visual Studio

Visual Studio 2010 Professional

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate

Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional

Visual Studio Express

SQL Server Express

Azure SDK

You will need the Azure SDK

If the link above

Labs and PowerPoints

You are about to install Windows Azure Camps Kit.

The Windows Azure Camps Training Kit includes the hands-on labs and presentations that are used for the Windows Azure Camp events.

Installer for Azure Web Camps

http://www.contentinstaller.net/Install/ContentGroup/WAPCamps

Video – to prepare you are ready

The main thing to remember is that most of the labs can be done with emulators. This means you don’t necessarily need to deploy your app to the cloud (Microsoft Data Center). You can run most of these labs all on your local computer. This is important as there is not often enough network bandwidth at large events.

Currently, there is no audio. But it should be easy to follow.

Video to verify setup

http://brunoblogfiles.com/videos/PrepareForAzureDevCamp.wmv

Conclusion

Please verify you can run the sample demonstrated in the video above. This will give you a huge headstart once you attend the boot camp.

People only see what they are prepared to see.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Presentation and Training Kit: Android Consuming Cloud Data – Powered By Windows Azure

BrunoTerkaly — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:12:12 GMT

Goal of this post – To teach you how to demo and Android Application consuming standards-based RESTful Web Services

This post has a simple goal – to prepare you to give a presentation on how you would communicate to the cloud from an Android phone. The presentation can be given a time range of 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the level of detail you wish to provide. This talk has been given at the Open Android Conference. Details can be found here:

O'Reilly Open Android Conference

http://androidopen.com/android2011/public/schedule/detail/22308

This is developer-centric – hands-on coding

This is designed to be a hands-on demo, meaning that there are working samples to demonstrate key concepts. Source code, PowerPoint slides, and videos are all part of this package. All the material is available on my blog posts.

Resources are publicly available

All of the materials for this talk are publicly available. This dramatically simplifies follow up with audience members, who frequently ask for the presentation materials

A flow has been defined for this talk

There are 4 main sections in this talk. Each section can take from 10 to 15 minutes. Following parts 1-4 below will allow you to give a deep, hands-on code demo of connecting Android mobile applications to the Microsoft Cloud – Windows Azure.

Part	Title	Abstract
Part 1	Introduction to Mobile and Cloud	Mobile and Cloud are 2 technologies that go together. The meteoric rise of mobile computing has created the need for elastic scale. Part 1 will provide facts and figures to support this view.
Part 2	Cloud Vendors – What are your options?	There are many cloud vendors that offer various cloud technologies. Many offer specialized services. Part 2 is about understanding the landscape. Windows Azure is the technology of choice for this section. This is a presentation and a talk. 10 minutes can easily be extended to dive deep in options available to mobile users.
Part 3	Building a RESTful Web Service – Hosted in the MS Cloud	This is a hands-on section that guides an audience to actually building a RESTful implementation in Windows Azure. This demo is useful because it gives you all the basics to expose a RESTful service that is highly scalable. The RESTful service is based on open standards and can be consumed by not only Android, but also iOS and Windows Phone 7.
Part 4	Building the Android Client.	This hands-on code demo builds and Android Application from scratch. An extensive video demo is available that guides you through every step of the process. Learn how to consume RESTful data that is in JSON format.

Part 1

Introducing Mobile and Cloud

Blog Post - Introduction – How to speak to Cloud and Mobile Development	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/11/16/presentation-how-to-introduce-cloud-and-mobile-development.aspx
Gartner Study	http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1455314
PowerPoint	http://brunoblogfiles.com/ppts/AndroidTalkForBlog.pps
Blog Post - Why scale matters	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/27/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-1-why-scale-matters.aspx

Part 2

The cloud landscape. What are some of the other offerings?

Blog Post - What are some high level cloud offerings?	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/27/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-2-what-are-some-high-level-cloud-offerings.aspx
Blog Post - Azure Pricing	http://blogs.technet.com/b/webtech/archive/2011/09/15/plug-in-your-numbers-for-windows-azure-pricing.aspx

Part 3

Building an Azure-hosted RESTful web service

Video - Building RESTful Service	http://brunoblogfiles.com/videos/BuildRestfulServicePart01.wmv
Blog Post - Video Building an Azure RESTful Service	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/11/08/video-building-a-restful-service-in-azure.aspx
Blog Post - Building your RESTful Service - Deep walkthrough from File/New Project	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/28/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-4-building-a-cloud-based-restful-service-for-our-android-ios-and-windows-phone-7-clients.aspx
Utility - Clipboard Viewer - Building a RESTful Service	http://brunoblogfiles.com/clipboard/buildRestfulService.zip
Blog Post - Setting up your Portal- Using the Portal and Setting up your Azure Account (Microsoft Cloud)	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/05/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-5-using-the-portal-and-setting-up-your-azure-account-microsoft-cloud.aspx
Blog Post - Deploying your app to the portal	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/07/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-7-migrating-your-azure-cloud-restful-service-to-be-hosted-in-a-microsoft-data-center.aspx

Part 4

Building the Android Mobile Application in Eclispse

Video - Building an Android Application	http://brunoblogfiles.com/videos/BuildAndroidApplicationThatConsumesCloudHostedREST.wmv
Blog Post - Building the Android Client	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/10/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-8-writing-an-android-client-to-consume-restful-data-from-azure-microsoft-cloud.aspx

Extra Credit

If you would like material to go over an hour, here is a good place to start.

Blog Post - Fiddler and Storage Explorer - Going deep on tables	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/05/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.aspx
Blog Post - Extra Credit - Windows Phone 7	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/26/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-mobile-to-cloud-series-part-10-writing-a-windows-phone-7-client-to-consume-restful-data-from-azure-microsoft-cloud.aspx
Blog Post - Extra Credit - Building iOS Client connecting to Windows Azure	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/11/08/video-building-a-restful-service-in-azure.aspx

Appendix

Here are some miscellaneous links that might help with your demo.

Source Code - Full Source Code: 8.5 mb download to Azure RESTful Service, Android Mobile Client, iOS/iPhone Mobile Client, and Windows Phone 7 Mobile Client	http://brunoblogfiles.com/SourceCode/UploadedSourceCode.zip
Utility - It is the Clipboard Viewer for Android- Easy access to source code	http://brunoblogfiles.com/clipboard/android.zip

You will need to download the Azure SDK

Video Tutorial - How to add identity to mobile applications – Windows Phone 7 and the Access Control Service – Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Live ID

BrunoTerkaly — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 22:02:38 GMT

What this post is about

Before diving into this post, special thanks to Wade Wegner for posting this:

http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/11/nuget-packages-for-windows-azure-and-windows-phone-developers/

His post introduced me to NuGet, which is an amazing step forward in application development. You simply enter a single text command and you get huge amounts of powerful functionality.

With this post and Wades, you should be able to quickly and easily add code and references to your Visual Studio 2010 project that includes a mobile application that externalizes such identity providers as Facebook, Google, Live ID, Yahoo and Active Directory.

This post describes the easiest possible way to add identity to your Windows Phone 7 application. Nuget is a breakthrough approach to writing applications. Nuget dramatically simplifies adding functionality to existing projects. We will use Nuget to add the needed functionality to our mobile application so that we can integrate identity from Facebook, Yahoo , Google, Live ID, and Active Directory.

A demonstration version of the Access Control Service is also provided for your convenience. Your own mobile applications will require an Azure subscription. The adoption of claims-based identity is increasing. It is becoming the preferred way of securing business applications. A key advantage is that it permits the reuse of existing identity stores.

Claims based approaches are known to abstract away the complexities associated with including identity management code inside of your mobile application. It is a great example of loose coupling since the entire credential submission/management and token generation mechanism is in one of 6 places:

1.	Facebook
2.	Google
3.	Yahoo!
4.	Live ID
5.	Active Directory
6.	Windows Azure Access Control Service

Your mobile application will simply receive a simple web token. A simple web token is just a dictionary that contains attributes of a user. It is a list of attributes for a user.

The great news is that this Simple Web Token is standardized. The developer doesn’t care which identity provider was used. The token format is the same.

Remember this – if you didn’t have the Windows Azure Access Control Service, the developer would have to write all this painful custom code for each identity provider (Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, Live ID, A/D). Moving forward, the developer would need to keep close tabs on how the various identity providers evolve their token format.

The Windows Azure Access Control Service helps do this magical task, saving a developer from creating this Simple Web Token based on the huge differences between Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, Live ID, A/D.

Here is a link to some more mobile resources and connecting to cloud and multiple device types:

What the link is about	Link
Table of Contents – Mobile to Cloud Series	http://bit.ly/MobileToCloud

Remember, you will need the Azure SDK.

l

Clipboard Viewer

Clipboard viewer gives you all the code snippets that are used to build the application. Downloading this tool will make it trivial to find the right source code. A zip file contains your code snippets. You can easily add your own snippets as well.

This application holds the code snippets used in my demo.

There are files inside the zip – put them in the same folder once you extract the zip file

Here is the zip file that contains clipboard viewer, including the editable data file. This download will help you build your application easily.

What the download does	Link
It is the Clipboard Viewer - Easy access to source code	http://brunoblogfiles.com/clipboard/wp7ACS.zip

What is Clipboard Viewer?

Clipboard Viewer is composed of two files:

What it does?	File Name
It loads code into the clipboard. You run this application.	wp7ACS.exe
The data file that holds the source code. Should be same folder as wp7ACS.exe	wp7ACS.xml

Video

Here is the video of using NuGet to retrofit an existing Windows Phone 7 application to leverage identity provisioning in Facebook, Google, Live ID, and Yahoo.

Video using NuGet to externize identity to Facebook, Google, Live ID, and Yahoo.

http://brunoblogfiles.com/videos/WP7PlusAcs.wmv

Adding Identity to your mobile/cloud application

A video is available at the end of this post. Be sure to read to the end of this post.

When creating mobile/cloud applications, the goal is to externalize as much of the authentication and authorization functionality as possible. Modern applications let users choose a specific identity provider, such as Facebook, LiveID, Google, and Yahoo, even Active Directory within an organization.

This sample will use the Access Control Service (ACS) to perform the authentication functionality. The workflow is quite simple. The mobile application typically uses a web browser control to login to Facebook or one of the other identity providers.

Viewing the Simple Web Token

As explained earlier, the user will authenticate with on of the identity providers (Facebook. Yahoo, Google, Live Id, Active Directory). After this process is complete (including the interaction with the Access control Service), a Simple Web token will be sent to the mobile application.

The mobile application we build will simple display the contents of the Simple Web Token.

The developer ha a variety of choices here with various trade-offs. This token can be encrypted and sent back to the cloud application. The claims inside the token (information about the user) can be used to make application decisions, such as offering less or more application functionality.

Simple Web Token (SWT) and the Open Authentication (OAuth) 2.0 protocol

Using Simple Web Token (SWT) and the Open Authentication (OAuth) 2.0 protocol is based on open standards. This protocol offers many advantages:

The authentication process is managed externally from your mobile application.

The authentication process uses established standards.

The mobile/cloud application can use a claims-based approach to handle any future authorization requirements.

How to consume RESTful Services using jQuery and/or Javascript

BrunoTerkaly — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 01:11:06 GMT

Using jQuery against RESTful Web Services powered by Windows Azure

The diagram below illustrates a browser accessing a cloud-hosted RESTful service powered by Windows Azure.

The purpose of the post is to illustrate how Javascript from within a browser can consume RESTful web services hosted in Windows Azure.

Links to previous posts

http://bit.ly/MobileToCloud

To create a RESTful service running on Azure you’ll need to download the Azure SDK here:

Here is the diagram about what we are going to build.

How to consume REST from a browser

All modern browsers are capable of RESTful calls. Here we can see Internet Explorer making a RESTful web service call and populating <select..> html control using jQuery.

After migrating my Azure Project to the cloud, everything worked as expected across the 3 browsers that I tested with.

jQueryCallRESTful.htm

Here is the project right before I deployed it. Previous videos illustrate this step. Essentially, you need to “Package” the application, then go to the portal to upload the package and configuration files.

All that is required is adding an html file. HTML + Javascript is all that is needed to consume RESTful data.

Include jQuery, add HTML controls and some Javascript

Our web page is very simple. You start by including some jQuery. Next, you write some Javascript that makes Ajax calls after clicking the button. The Javascript (using jQuery framework) will retrieve the data and then populate a drop down list control.

Notice the warning from Internet Explorer. That is because I am running locally, as “localhost,” which is a cross-domain scripting violation. By answering “yes” you are allowing the cross-domain Ajax call.

A select and and button control

cboFastBikes gets loaded with data after making AJAX calls to the Azure hosted RESTful web service.

The jQuery call to an Azure-hosted web service

The code below uses jQuery to retrieve RESTful data. If successful, the Javascript will populate an HTML <select /> control, which is essentially a combo box.

<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.js" 
            type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function () {

        $('#butCallAjax').click(function () {
            jQuery.support.cors = true;


            $.ajax(
                {
                    type: "GET",
                    url: 'http://fastmotorcycleservice.cloudapp.net/FastMotorcycleListService.svc/list/Bruno',
                    data: "{}",
                    contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
                    dataType: "json",
                    success: function (data) {

                        //alert('success');
                        $.each(data, function (i, theItem) {
                            var combo = document.getElementById("cboFastBikes");
                            var option = document.createElement("option");
                            option.text = theItem.toString();
                            option.value = theItem.toString();
                            try {
                                //alert('success add combo');
                                combo.add(option, null); // Other browsers
                            }
                            catch (error) {
                                alert('error found');
                                combo.add(option); // really old browser
                            }

                        });
                    },
                    error: function (msg, url, line) {
                        alert('error trapped in error: function(msg, url, line)');
                        alert('msg = ' + msg + ', url = ' + url + ', line = ' + line);

                    }
                });


            //alert('button click');

        });
    });
</script>

Full Source Code for jQueryCallsRESTful.htm

Here is the full listing.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<head>
<title>jQuery calling RESTful Services</title>
<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type" />
<style type="text/css">
body {
    font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    font-size: 12px;
}
p, h1, form, button {
    border: 0;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}
.spacer {
    clear: both;
    height: 1px;
}
.myform 
{
   
    margin: 0 auto;
    width: 400px;
    padding: 14px;
}
#stylized 
{
   
    border: solid 2px #b7ddf2;
    background: #ebf4fb;
}
#stylized h1 {
    font-size: 14px;
    font-weight: bold;
    margin-bottom: 8px;
}
#stylized p {
    font-size: 11px;
    color: #666666;
    margin-bottom: 20px;
    border-bottom: solid 1px #b7ddf2;
    padding-bottom: 10px;
}
#stylized label {
    display: block;
    font-weight: bold;
    text-align: right;
    width: 140px;
    float: left;
}
#stylized .small {
    color: #666666;
    display: block;
    font-size: 11px;
    font-weight: normal;
    text-align: right;
    width: 140px;
}
#stylized input, select {
    float: left;
    font-size: 12px;
    padding: 4px 2px;
    border: solid 1px #aacfe4;
    width: 200px;
    margin: 2px 0 20px 10px;
}
#stylized button {
    clear: both;
    margin-left: 150px;
    width: 246px;
    height: 31px;
    background: #666666 url(img/button.png) no-repeat;
    text-align: center;
    line-height: 31px;
    color: #FFFFFF;
    font-size: 11px;
    font-weight: bold;
}
</style>
</head>

<body>

<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.js" 
            type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    $(document).ready(function () {

        $('#butCallAjax').click(function () {
            jQuery.support.cors = true;


            $.ajax(
                {
                    type: "GET",
                    url: 'http://fastmotorcycleservice.cloudapp.net/FastMotorcycleListService.svc/list/Bruno',
                    data: "{}",
                    contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
                    dataType: "json",
                    success: function (data) {

                        //alert('success');
                        $.each(data, function (i, theItem) {
                            var combo = document.getElementById("cboFastBikes");
                            var option = document.createElement("option");
                            option.text = theItem.toString();
                            option.value = theItem.toString();
                            try {
                                //alert('success add combo');
                                combo.add(option, null); // Other browsers
                            }
                            catch (error) {
                                alert('error found');
                                combo.add(option); // really old browser
                            }

                        });
                    },
                    error: function (msg, url, line) {
                        alert('error trapped in error: function(msg, url, line)');
                        alert('msg = ' + msg + ', url = ' + url + ', line = ' + line);

                    }
                });


            //alert('button click');

        });
    });
</script>


<div id = "stylized" class = "myform">
    <form
        id = "form"
        action = "#"
        name = "form">
        <h1>How to retrieve RESTful Data with jQuery</h1>
        <p>This is a basic example</p>
        <label>
            Fast Motorcycles
            <span class = "small">RESTfully Retrieved</span>
        </label>
        <select id = "cboFastBikes" name = "cboFastBikes"></select>
        <button id = "butCallAjax" type = "button" >
            Call Azure-hosted RESTful Service</button>
        <div class = "spacer"></div>
    </form>
</div>


</body>

</html>

Presentation–How to introduce Cloud and Mobile Development

BrunoTerkaly — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 23:50:17 GMT

Introduction – How to speak to Cloud and Mobile Development

This slide deck is based on a talk I did at OpenAndroid in San Francisco.

The purpose of this post is to replay the talking points. I will discuss one of the big influences on pushing cloud computing forward - mobile computing.

The actual slide deck is at the end of this post.

What to expect from this talk

There is a lot of evidence that mobile is driving the need for elastic resources. Popular apps can easily have millions of users. The cloud here is to support and scale mobile traffic. Architectures are needed that help mobile devices leverage cloud resources. Companies and startups are faced with the prospect of having to write 3 versions of mobile applications, supporting iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7.

At a minimum, cloud resources need to be available to any device. Open standard web services are needed to be available to divergent mobile platforms. This post is part of a larger series that illustrate how to build Azure-hosted RESTful web services.

Pew Research / Cisco Study

There are many sources of research. The Pew Research center is one place to get some interesting numbers.

Cisco recently released a big study about global internet usage patterns.

IT is Changing

These numbers are quite interesting. Mobile devices will be capable of so much more than today. Better speeds, more applications, more form factors will move the mobile industry dramatically forward, given this rate of innovation and growth.

Internet Traffic	Cisco has predicted a 26-fold increase in Internet Traffic by 2015, according a Cisco study.
Connection Speeds	Connection speeds are expected to by 10-fold by then to support all this traffic.
Number of Devices	There will probably be over 7 billion mobile Internet-connected devices by 2015. The Cisco study estimates that by 2015, there will be a mobile connected device for nearly every member of the world's population (7.2 billion people per United Nations' population estimate) and more than 7.1 billion mobile connections to handsets, other devices and machine-to-machine nodes (excluding Wi-Fi connections, per Cisco Visual Networking Index methodology).
Mobile Bandwidth	Typical monthly bandwidth usage is about 65 megabytes of traffic per month. In 2015 it will be 1,118 megabytes of traffic per month, equivalent to about 260 MP3 music files.
The Effect of Mobile	Mobile traffic may one day soon exceed fixed Internet Traffic. Smartphones, laptops, and other portable devices will drive more than 87 percent of global mobile traffic by 2015. Tablet devices are expected to grow 205-fold from 2010 to 2015. Mobile video is forecast to represent 66 percent of all mobile data traffic by 2015, increasing 35-fold from 2010 to 2015. Global mobile traffic will be 75 exabytes, by 2015. That amount is the equivalent of 19 billion DVDs.

Todays Mobile device has 256,000,000 bytes of RAM
The Apollo Spacecraft had 4,096 bytes of erasable memory

75 of these M.I.T. Apollo Guidance Computer were created. These computers were used during space missions to the moon. There were restart buttons, even then

If you think about the pace of hardware innovation, it is no surprise that today’s handheld devices can run very powerful applications. The processing power of modern Smartphones dwarfs the technology used to send man to the moon.

It is about the apps

The trend is clearly about running specialized apps on mobile devices. There are countless mobile applications available to purchase or install for free from multiple mobile application marketplaces.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft all have marketplaces where you can buy mobile applications. It turns out, however, that the languages and tools are all radically different for each vendor. While there are some transferable skills, most are not – the developer is faced with learning Objective-C, Java, and C#, or Visual Basic.

Code demos that accompany this presentation will illustrate an app of each type being created. The code demos also demonstrate the building of a RESTful service, powered by Microsoft Cloud Offering, Windows Azure.

This is the Table of Contents for more posts	Link
A list of blog posts that show you how to build RESTful services hosted in Windows Azure, iOS/Xcode demo, Android/Eclipse demo, Windows Phone 7/Visual Studio demo.	http://bit.ly/MobileToCloud

1 in 4 adults in the US uses apps

Companies and startups are scrambling to best understand how to monetize this craze around mobile applications. There are every conceivable type of application available. Many offerings are absolutely free and make their money through advertising. The amount of money spent on apps is expected to grow to incredible heights.

Gartner expects a trillion dollar industry by 2014.
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1455314

There are a wide range of additional services related to mobile applications, such as context, advertising, application and service sales, and so on. Each of these will be a significant business worth several tens of billions of dollars per year.

Daily use means your cloud offering better have an SLA

Uptime and the replication of data is critical. Durability of customer data is paramount. Mobile users are relying on your application performance on a daily basis.

Social Networks Also Push the Cloud

If you look at various social sites, including LinkedIn, Twitter, and MySpace, you also have scenarios where elastic scale is needed. As more and more business leverage user profile targeted marketing techniques, content can go viral. A business needs to be able to scale services if a promotional giveaway results in heavy traffic.

This is the Table of Contents for more posts	Link
Blog posts that show you how to build RESTful services hosted in Windows Azure, iOS/Xcode demo, Android/Eclipse demo, Windows Phone 7/Visual Studio demo.	http://bit.ly/MobileToCloud

Conclusion

The purpose of this slide deck is get you thinking about scale. Skeptics to cloud computing should easily be able to see that the cloud is here to stay. The cloud will need to grow and evolve to meet the needs of mobile developers.

This post is connected to a much larger group of posts that show you how to build RESTful services using Visual Studio and Windows Azure.

This series also uses Eclipse and Xcode to build Android and iOS applications.

This series programs in C#, Java, and Objective-C.

Video tutorials are also available.

What this is	Link
A Powerpoint presentation that will help you get the conversation started about mobile and cloud	http://brunoblogfiles.com/ppts/AndroidTalkForBlog.pps

You will need to download the Azure SDK

Video–Building an Android Application that consumes consumes cloud-hosted RESTful Web Services

BrunoTerkaly — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:21:08 GMT

Video Tutorial - How to connect Android to the Cloud RESTfully

This post contains a video that walks you through a step by step process of building an Android application. But there are a few things you should do before watching the video. First, you should install Eclipse, the Java Runtime, and the Android SDK. This alone can take some time. The installation is correct once you can do a “File, New Project” and be able to run a simple “Hello World” in the emulator. This video assumes you have implemented your RESTful Web Service and deployed it to Windows Azure. The table of contents link connects you to all the material to guide you through all this:

What the link is about	Link
Table of Contents - All my posts	http://bit.ly/MobileToCloud

Remember, you will need the Azure SDK.

Clipboard Viewer

Clipboard viewer gives you all the code snippets that are used to build the application. Downloading this tool will make it trivial to find the right source code.

This application holds the code snippets used in my demo.

There are files inside the zip – put them in the same folder once you extract the zip file

Here is the zip file that contains clipboard viewer. This download will help you build your application easily.

What the download does	Link
It is the Clipboard Viewer - Easy access to source code	http://brunoblogfiles.com/clipboard/android.zip

What is Clipboard Viewer?

A quick and dirty tool to give you source code when you need it.

What it does?	File Name
It loads code into the clipboard. You run this application.	android.exe
The data file that holds the source code. Should be same folder as android.exe	android.xml

Video

Here is the video of building the Android Application consuming a cloud-hosted RESTful web service:

Video of Building an Android Application

http://brunoblogfiles.com/videos/BuildAndroidApplicationThatConsumesCloudHostedREST.wmv

Table of Contents–Supporting Billions of Rows/Entities–Mobile to Cloud Series

BrunoTerkaly — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:33:51 GMT

Table of Contents

To do these labs, you will need the Azure SDK.

Description	Link
Part 1 - Why Scale Matters	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/27/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-1-why-scale-matters.aspx
Part 2 - What are some high level cloud offerings?	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/27/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-2-what-are-some-high-level-cloud-offerings.aspx
Part 3–Architecture and Data Options	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/28/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-3-architecture-and-data-options.aspx
Part 4–Building a Cloud-based RESTful service for our Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7 Clients	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/28/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-4-building-a-cloud-based-restful-service-for-our-android-ios-and-windows-phone-7-clients.aspx
Part 5–Using the Portal and Setting up your Azure Account (Microsoft Cloud)	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/05/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-5-using-the-portal-and-setting-up-your-azure-account-microsoft-cloud.aspx
Part 6–Reading and Writing to Windows Azure (Cloud-based) Tables using standard HTTP and Fiddler	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/05/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.aspx
Part 7–Migrating your Azure (Cloud RESTful Service) to be Hosted in a Microsoft Data Center	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/07/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-7-migrating-your-azure-cloud-restful-service-to-be-hosted-in-a-microsoft-data-center.aspx
Part 8–Writing an Android Client to consume RESTful data from Azure (Microsoft Cloud)	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/10/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-8-writing-an-android-client-to-consume-restful-data-from-azure-microsoft-cloud.aspx
Part 9– Writing an iOS (iPhone/iPad/MacOS) Client to consume RESTful data from Azure (Microsoft Cloud)	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/24/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-9-writing-an-ios-iphone-ipad-macos-client-to-consume-restful-data-from-azure-microsoft-cloud.aspx
Part 10 – Writing a Windows Phone 7 Client to consume RESTful data from Azure (Microsoft Cloud)	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/26/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-mobile-to-cloud-series-part-10-writing-a-windows-phone-7-client-to-consume-restful-data-from-azure-microsoft-cloud.aspx
Source Code to Azure RESTful Service, Android Mobile Client, iOS/iPhone Mobile Client, and Windows Phone 7 Mobile Client	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/11/11/source-code-to-azure-restful-service-android-mobile-client-ios-iphone-mobile-client-and-windows-phone-7-mobile-client.aspx#

Source Code to Azure RESTful Service, Android Mobile Client, iOS/iPhone Mobile Client, and Windows Phone 7 Mobile Client

BrunoTerkaly — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 00:58:09 GMT

Here is the source code

Source Code: 8.5 mb download

http://brunoblogfiles.com/SourceCode/UploadedSourceCode.zip

You are going to need this to do the AzureRESTful service:



The source code and explanation:

Folder	Contents
AndroidMobileClient	Source Code in Java of Android Client Application
AzureRESTfulService	Source Code in C# of Azure RESTful Service
iOSMobileClient	Source Code in Objective-C of iPhone Client Application
WP7MobileClient	Source Code in C# of WP7 Client Application

Video–Building a RESTful Service in Azure

BrunoTerkaly — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 16:59:07 GMT

Start by downloading my Clipboard Helper

Remember, you will need the Azure SDK.




This application holds the code snippets used in my demo.

Clipboard Viewer - Building a RESTful Service

http://brunoblogfiles.com/clipboard/buildRestfulService.zip

Inside the zip are 2 files. Both of these files need to be in the same folder.

Executable that loads code into the clipboard	buildRestfulService.exe
The data file that holds the source code	buildRestfulService.xml

Video

Here is the video of building the RESTful service:

Video of Building RESTful Service

http://brunoblogfiles.com/videos/BuildRestfulServicePart01.wmv

Office 365–The finest office suite ever created

BrunoTerkaly — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:42:36 GMT

I have been an Office user forever

I remember starting with Lotus and WordPerfect. They were fine products. But Office re-defined word-processing and spreadsheets. There are thousands of man-years of development in building the Office. And it shows.

No other product even comes close, in terms of the level of sophistication, flexibility, and functionality. I am about to do my 4th interview on the Computer Outlook radio show, which is found here - http://computeroutlook.com/.

The awesome host is John Iasiuolo and I look forward to discussing Office 365 and a few other interesting topics. Here is what I plan to cover.

Many questions about Office 365

Office is cloud-based, meaning you don't need to manage onsite deployments. And this means you can be a business of any size to take advantage of the power of Office. The beauty of a cloud-based offering is that you don't need an IT staff to manage all the Office installations. Some of the most successful companies in the world use Office 365 - DuPont, Hyatt Hotels, McDonalds, Starbucks and thousands of others. Even a 2 person company can have access to as much of the power of Office as the biggest companies. In the past, world-class collaboration tools were simply out of reach of most of them. Office 365 changes that.

In a nutshell

Office 365 provides the following:

Best enterprise-grade e-mail in the industry	Exchange
Shared documents	SharePoint
Instant messaging	Lync
Video and web conferencing	Lync
Word Processing	Word
Spreadsheets	Excel
Free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration	OneNote

Important features that people want have been added or improved

Create your own website	Create a website using a custom domain name with tools as easy as MS Word.
Even with the incredible information sharing capability, your company information is safe	Stay in control of their company’s IT and sensitive information with robust security, privacy, and management controls.
Support for multiple clients/devices	One advantage of Office 365 over on-premise Office is that you can use Office 365 with a browser and a mobile device.

More productivity while lowering costs

The ability to collaborate online can make you productive while lowering costs. Travel is expensive and you can avoid travel costs to hold formal or informal meetings. The Lync component of Office 365 allows you to organize virtual meetings with co-workers, customers, and partners, whether they are around the corner or across the globe. Productivity can be improved by allowing you to work on files and documents simultaneously. Finally, knowing everyone's schedule allows you to find pockets of time to get work done as a team. Shared calendars makes that possible.

Economical - Only pay for what you need

Customers get just the capabilities they want from a range of service plans for a predictable monthly price from $2 to $27 per user per month. Early customers are reporting impressive results – estimating cost savings of up to 50% while boosting productivity and competitiveness.

Office 365 comes in a variety of flavors that satisfy any appetite

Office 365 for small businesses is designed specifically for smaller businesses and professionals who are looking for cloud-based productivity tools without the IT hassles. Includes Office Web Apps, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and an external Web site for $6 per user per month – the Web site alone is a screaming value.

Office 365 for enterprise is for organizations that require more, we have a range of options to meet the needs of different kinds of workers – from $2 for basic e-mail to $27 per user per month. This includes an option to get the full power of Office Professional Plus desktop software, along with Office Web Apps; the most advanced versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Lync Online; 24/7 phone support; advanced IT controls; on-premises use rights and more for roughly $24 per user per month.

Lync is an amazing product – it does so much

I'd like to re-iterate the significance of Lync.

Lync provides a single interface that unites voice communications, IM, and audio, video, and Web conferencing into a richer, more contextual offering.

Lync makes it easy to collaborate. You can reach contacts which are based on Microsoft Outlook calendars stored in a Microsoft Exchange Server. Lync also can show if other people are working on the same document.

Lync is secure. Messages do not need to leave the corporate intranet, freeing companies from the installation of extra software at the client side.

Some of the features I personally enjoy

Lync does so much. At Microsoft we use the following:

Collaboration through Whiteboard documents, where the LYNC participants can share text, drawing and graphical annotations.

Conduct real time, virtual meetings with co-workers, customers, and partners, whether they are around the corner or across the globe.

As stated before, LYNC allows you to work together on files and documents simultaneously

Users can add and connect with users on Public IM services such as Windows Live, AOL, and Yahoo! and communicate with them using their single work identity.

You can share your calendar with team members and access mail and calendars on virtually all the devices they use across their work and home lives

Desktop sharing, usually by allowing participants to see and collaborate on your windows screen. This is a really useful feature if you want to let someone remotely use your computer, perhaps showing you how to do something or install some application.

Free Trial

Want to see for yourself? Sign up for a free trial offer.

Free Trial Office 365 - No credit card required

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/online-software.aspx#fbid=7h8SejJrqz_

Download Toolkits for iOS and Android to connect to the Microsoft Cloud (Windows Azure)

BrunoTerkaly — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 23:07:27 GMT

Jump-Starting your iOS and Android Development for Windows Azure

The Windows Azure Toolkit for Android is a toolkit for developers to make it easy to work with Windows Azure from native Android applications. The toolkit can be used for native Android applications developed using Eclipse and the Android SDK.

The Windows Azure Toolkit for iOS is a toolkit for developers to make it easy to access Windows Azure storage services from native iOS applications. The toolkit can be used for both iPhone and iPad applications, developed using Objective-C and XCode.

The toolkits works in two ways – the toolkit can be used to access Windows Azure storage directly, or alternatively, can go through a proxy server. The proxy server code is the same code as used in the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone and negates the need for the developer to store the Windows Azure storage credentials locally on the device.

First, download the Windows Azure SDK.

Toolkits for Android and iOS

https://github.com/microsoft-dpe/

Supporting Billions of entities/rows for Mobile – Mobile to Cloud Series - Part 10 – Writing a Windows Phone 7 Client to consume RESTful data from Azure (Microsoft Cloud)

BrunoTerkaly — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 15:53:17 GMT

This is the last post in a long series.

This is a post about connecting Windows Phone 7 applications to a RESTful service hosted in the Microsoft cloud, aka Windows Azure.

Before moving on into this particular post, I’m making a few assumptions about what you’ve already done.

First, I expect that you have already created a RESTful service, which was explained in detail in previous posts. Complete source code was provided as well as guidance about building the service itself.

Second, I will assume that you follow the guidance about what operating systems and developer tooling you are running.

Supported Operating Systems

Before you commit writing Windows Phone 7 applications you need the right operating system. I am a super big fan of Windows 7. I've had the same instance loaded (in and out of sleep mode) for weeks. It is incredible how stable and efficient Windows 7 is. I am not saying this because I work for Microsoft. I've been using MS operating systems since DOS 3.0. Windows 7 rocks. 'Nuf said.

Supported Operating Systems

Windows 7, Windows Vista (x86 and x64) with Service Pack 2, all editions except Starter Edition

Windows 7 (x86 and x64) - all editions except Starter Edition

Installation requires 4 GB of free disk space on the system drive.

3 GB RAM

Windows Phone Emulator requires a DirectX 10 or above capable graphics card with a WDDM 1.1 driver

Windows Phone SDK

The Windows Phone SDK includes a number of powerful tools, in addition to Visual Studio. Let's talk about what is included.

The Windows Phone SDK includes Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, Windows Phone Emulator, XNA Game Studio, Expression Blend for Windows Phone, samples, and documentation.

If Visual Studio 2010 Professional or higher is already installed on your development computer, an add-in for Visual Studio 2010 Professional is automatically installed as well.

In case you don't know there are two types of applications you can write for Windows Phone 7 - Silverlight and XNA. Silverlight is a great approach because the GUI design and construction part is done with XAML, which is a powerful declarative markup language, much like what HTML5 is aiming to be. XNA is all about an animation engine that facilitates game programming. After all, most of the big apps today on mobile platforms are all about gaming. Expression Blend is a tool to help you write XAML code using a WYSIWYG editor. It is very powerful and even plays a big role in the future of MS application construction.

I also encourage you to download and install "Clipboard Loader," which is a Windows application which contains the source code for this application. Remember that both WP7.exe and WP7.xml need to be in the same folder or directory.

Finally, I have also provided the download link for the entire Windows Phone 7 application.

Important Downloads for this post

Clipboard Loader Executable [ put in the same folder as wp7.xml below]	http://brunoblogfiles.com/clipboard/wp7.exe
Clipboard Loader XML file [ put in the same folder as wp7.exe above]	http://brunoblogfiles.com/clipboard/wp7.xml
Source Code to Windows Phone 7 Code application in this post	http://brunoblogfiles.com/cloudclient/CloudClient.zip

Download Link for the Windows Phone SDK

This is the download link for the Windows Phone 7 SDK. Everything I talked about earlier in this post, is included. It is your one-stop-shopping link.

You will need the Azure SDK

Starting Visual Studio and Creating Your Project

I always like to start from the very beginning. So be sure to start Visual Studio as "administrator." This can be done with a simple right-mouse click.

Once Visual Studio is loaded, select "File / New / Project."

Silverlight for Windows Phone 7

Select "Silverlight for Windows Phone 7" in the left template pane. Next select "Windows Phone Application" in the middle pane. Finally, specify a "Name" and "Location" for your project.

Version 7.1 – Mango – Windows Phone 7

For the Phone OS version, choose 7.1. You could select an earlier version, but I will select 7.1 here. This version represents the "Mango" release, the release with over 500 new features.

The files we will modify – Only 2

This is what the generated solution looks like. We will only need to modify two files. We will modify these 2 files:

MainPage.xaml	The visual interface
MainPage.xaml.cs	The code behind (C# code)

Modifying MainPage.xaml

The red box represents the page title. The next screen will demonstrate how we can modify the page title by changing the XAML markup.

Changing the Page Title

You can see the XAML code here. Notice I changed the "Text" property to "Fast Bikes" and it shows up in the designer on the left. You could have also changed this through a "Properties Window." But I did it directly with XAML just to illustrate the point. Notice the "PageTitle" is of type "<TextBlock />."

Implementing the ListBox

You can see here that I've dragged a ListBox control into the Grid control. You can see that it generated the XAML tag "<ListBox />." You could have also typed the XAML in directly and not use the "Toolbox" on the left. It is up to you. I like doing both. Typically, after I drag the control from the tool box to the designer surface, I modify the dragged control direclty in XAML code.

Modifying Code Behind – MainPage.xaml.cs

Code behind is where developers provide C# code to do things. In this case we want to connect to the RESTful service and get a list of fast motorcycles. To write code behind, right-mouse click on MainPage.xaml.cs and select "View Code."

Adding code to MainPage Constructor

To keep things simple I decided to load the list box in the MainPage constructor. Notice I typed in the method, "LoadListBox." But I haven't implemented "LoadListBox()" yet. That is the next step.

Generating LoadListBox()

I love this feature in Visual Studio. After typing in "LoadListBox();" I right-mouse click and select "Generate / Method Stub." This will actually create an empty method called "LoadListBox()," where I will add my code.

Erasing Code Not Needed

Here is what the empty method looks like. I will erase "throw new NotImplementedException()" with the real code that I want to execute.

Pointing to the RESTful Service – the URI

Notice that I added a property called "_baseServiceAddress." You will need to go to the Windows Azure Portal to get the address of your hosted service. This was covered in detail in previous posts. See Step 3 - DNS name below.

Also note I've added some code that builds the URI that will access our RESTful service. See "LoadListBox()."

Adding References

Adding a reference gives our Windows Phone 7 application access to additional functionality not provided with the default Windows Phone 7 project. In this case we will add "System.Servicem odel.Web." This assembly will let us parse the JSON code that comes back from the Azure-hosted RESTful service.

See Step 3 - DNS Name

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/07/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-7-migrating-your-azure-cloud-restful-service-to-be-hosted-in-a-microsoft-data-center.aspx

Adding using statements to Code Behind

Return back to the code-behind for "MainPage.xaml.cs." There are a few using statements we will need to add. Don't add them right now - I'm just showing them to you. They are somewhat self explanatory. "using" statements allow us to abbreviate our code, essentially.

Loading our Clipboard – Using WP7.exe

Start the previously mentioned "WP7.exe" application. To populate your clipboard with the previously mentioned "using" statements, click on "WP7 References." Return back to Visual Studio.

Pasting code from the Clipboard – adding the “using” statements

Right-mouse click just below the last "using" statement and select "Paste."

Implementing all the code in LoadListBox()

We will now finish implementing "LoadListBox()." Don't type in this code. The next section will help you load your clipboard. Notice a few things here:

Notes about code

The object WebRequest is how we make RESTful calls

GET is used because we are doing a query

The code is asynchronous as evidensed by AsyncCallback

A List<string> is created from the JSON data using (List<string>)jsonDeserializer.ReadObject(webResponse.GetResponseStream());

We loop through the list of strings and populate the listbox.

Loading our Clipboard – Using WP7.exe

Start the previously mentioned "WP7.exe" application. To populate your clipboard with the code for "LoadListBox()", click on "LoadListBox()." Return back to Visual Studio.

Pasting code from the Clipboard – adding code to LoadListBox()

Highlight the entire method "LoadListBox()," right-mouse click, and select "Paste." Congratulations. We are done. You are ready to compile and run the application.

Explained earlier in the post. Be sure that you put wp7.exe and wp7.xml in the same folder.

Clipboard Loader Software

http://brunoblogfiles.com/clipboard/wp7.zip

Highlight the entire method "LoadListBox()," right-mouse click, and select "Paste." Congratulations. We are done. You are ready to compile and run the application.

Compile our Application

To compile your application, go to the menu and select "Build / Rebuild Solution." The output window should indicate "O failed."

Run our application

You are ready to run the application in the emulator. Go to the menu system and select "Debug / Start Debugging."

MainPage.xaml

<phone:PhoneApplicationPage
    x:Class="CloudClient.MainPage"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:phone="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"
    xmlns:shell="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Shell;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"
    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
    xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
    mc:Ignorable="d"
    d:DesignWidth="480"
    d:DesignHeight="768"
    FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyNormal}"
    FontSize="{StaticResource PhoneFontSizeNormal}"
    Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}"
    SupportedOrientations="Portrait"
    Orientation="Portrait"
    shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="True">
    <!--LayoutRoot is the root grid where all page content is placed-->
    <Grid
        x:Name="LayoutRoot"
        Background="Transparent">
        <Grid.RowDefinitions>
            <RowDefinition 
                Height="Auto"/>
            <RowDefinition 
                Height="*"/>
        </Grid.RowDefinitions>
        <!--TitlePanel contains the name of the application and page title-->
        <StackPanel
            x:Name="TitlePanel"
            Grid.Row="0"
            Margin="12,17,0,28">
            <TextBlock
                x:Name="ApplicationTitle"
                Text="Cloud RESTful Client"
                Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextNormalStyle}"/>
            <TextBlock
                x:Name="PageTitle"
                Text="Fast Bikes"
                Margin="9,-7,0,0"
                Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}"/>
        </StackPanel>
        <!--ContentPanel - place additional content here-->
        <Grid
            x:Name="ContentPanel"
            Grid.Row="1"
            Margin="12,0,12,0">
            <ListBox x:Name="fastBikeListBox"
            FontSize="32" />  
        </Grid>
    </Grid>
    <!--Sample code showing usage of ApplicationBar-->
    <!--<phone:PhoneApplicationPage.ApplicationBar>
    <shell:ApplicationBar IsVisible="True" IsMenuEnabled="True">
    <shell:ApplicationBarIconButton IconUri="/Images/appbar_button1.png" Text="Button 1"/>
    <shell:ApplicationBarIconButton IconUri="/Images/appbar_button2.png" Text="Button 2"/>
    <shell:ApplicationBar.MenuItems>
    <shell:ApplicationBarMenuItem Text="MenuItem 1"/>
    <shell:ApplicationBarMenuItem Text="MenuItem 2"/>
    </shell:ApplicationBar.MenuItems>
    </shell:ApplicationBar>
    </phone:PhoneApplicationPage.ApplicationBar>-->
</phone:PhoneApplicationPage>

MainPage.xaml.cs

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Documents;
using System.Windows.Input;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Media.Animation;
using System.Windows.Shapes;
using Microsoft.Phone.Controls;

using System.IO;
using System.Threading;
using System.Windows.Data;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.Phone.Shell;

using System.Runtime.Serialization.Json;


namespace CloudClient
{
    public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage
    {
        // Constructor
        private string _baseServiceAddress = 
            "http://[**GET THIS FROM THE PORTAL**].cloudapp.net/FastMotorcycleListService.svc";
        
        public MainPage()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            LoadListBox();
        }

        private void LoadListBox()
        {
            string uri = string.Format("{0}/list/{1}", _baseServiceAddress, "Bruno");
            var webRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(uri);
            webRequest.Method = "GET";
            try
            {
                webRequest.BeginGetResponse(new AsyncCallback((result) =>
                {
                    var webResponse = (HttpWebResponse)webRequest.EndGetResponse(result);

                    if (webResponse.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK)
                    {
                        var jsonDeserializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(List<string>));
                        List<string> items = (List<string>)jsonDeserializer.ReadObject(
                                                                    webResponse.GetResponseStream());

                        fastBikeListBox.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(new Action(() =>
                        {
                            fastBikeListBox.Items.Clear();
                            foreach (var item in items)
                            {
                                fastBikeListBox.Items.Add(item);
                            }
                        }));
                    }
                }), null);
            }
            catch
            { // ignored 
            }
        }

    }
}

Supporting Billions of entities/rows for Mobile – Mobile to Cloud Series - Part 9– Writing an iOS (iPhone/iPad/MacOS) Client to consume RESTful data from Azure (Microsoft Cloud)

BrunoTerkaly — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 16:16:13 GMT

This is a post about connecting iOS applications to a RESTful service hosted in the Microsoft cloud, aka Windows Azure.

Before moving on into this particular post, I’m making a few assumptions about what you’ve already done.

First, I expect that you have already created a RESTful service, which was explained in detail in previous posts. Complete source code was provided as well as guidance about building the service itself.

Second, I’m also assuming that you are part of the apple developer program. Being part of this program gives you access to Xcode, which is the integrated development environment you use to create applications on Apple’s platform, which include iPhone, iPad, and MacOS.

Below you will find pointers to the previous posts – they really aren’t that difficult to find. The assumption is also that you have a Windows Azure account. Although you have to provide your credit card, you can leverage the trial offer and do these block posts for free.

This is part of an ongoing series of posts about writing a RESTful service hosted in the Microsoft cloud (Windows Azure). There are 8 posts on this topic that discuss, in detail, how to build out a RESTful service. They address Azure Table Services which allow you to host billions of rows of data in a secure and scalable manner.

Blog Post

Link

Part 8 (This Post) –Writing an Android Client to consume RESTful data from Azure (Microsoft Cloud)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/10/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-8-writing-an-android-client-to-consume-restful-data-from-azure-microsoft-cloud.aspx

Free download link for Azure SDK and tooling. This is the best link to use.

You will need to download the SDK to execute on these blogs.

Download	Link
Azure SDK	http://www.microsoft.com/click/services/Redirect2.ashx?CR_CC=200060656

Starting Xcode

The first step is to create a project. Start Xcode and choose the following menu selections, "File / New / New Project." The next screen will allow you to select the type of project you would like for your iPhone. We will select a "Navigation-based Application."

Navigation-based Application

We are choosing a "Navigation-based Application" because it makes it easy to use the TableView control. The TableView control is what will display our fast motorcycle data, as shown in previous posts. The TableView control is used by iOS developers because it has a lot of powerful, built-in capbilities (graphics, sorting, master/detail, etc).

Providing a Project Name

The "Product Name" represents the "Project Name." CloudClient will be used because it reflects what we are building - a client application that connects to the cloud.

A location for your code

A location is needed for our project and the corresponding code. For purposes of this demo it really doesn't matter that much where you store your code. Note your can select the "New Folder" button as well. Finally, you can add your project to a "git repository."

The project has been generated by Xcode

You can now see the project has been created. The files that we will modify include:

-MainWindow.xib
-RootViewController.h
-RootViewController.m

We will also add a couple of files:

-JSONKit.h
-JSONKit.m

Code to Parse JSON data from the RESTful Service

I have included the code to be available from my utility, "ClipboardLoader." This utility makes it easy to build the project during a live demo.

If you would like the actual source code, you can download it here:

Download the JSON Kit

https://github.com/johnezang/JSONKit

This code allows us to easily parse the JSON data coming back from our Azure RESTful service. The data coming back from the RESTful service will need to an "NSArray" from JSON so that the TableView control can display it easily. The TableView control cannot display JSON data directly. When you go to the site for downloading JSONKit you will notice that it offers dramatically better performance than similar frameworks or libraries.

I have provided a utility that makes getting this code much easier.

ClipboardLoader can be downloaded here:

http://brunoblogfiles.com/clipboard/ClipboardLoader.zip

Adding the JSONKit code

We will add two files, as previously stated. There files are important because they will save us all the trouble of writing the code that downloads from the RESTful service.
-JSONkit.h and JSONKit.m

Right mouse click on "CloudClient" and select "New / File."

Adding an Objective-C Class

Typically, when adding code to an iOS application, you choose "Objective-C class" as the file template. Classes are reusable pieces of code that perform a specific function. In Objective-C a class is split into two files. A header file which has a file extension of .h and an implementation file with a file extension of .m. The reason for the split is to simplify how you use an existing class. If you are an iOS newbie, you can see this post: http://timroadley.com/2011/06/28/ios-newbie-part-1-getting-started/.

Specifying a base class to your Objective-C class

Whenever you choose an "Objective-C class," you specify the class you need to inherit from. In this case, it doesn't really matter because we will overwrite all the code that is generated. You can simply click "Next" on this screen.

Naming your new class

A name for our "Objective-C class" is needed. We will use "JSONKit." Two files will be added once you do this:

-JSONkit.h and JSONKit.m

We will replace the contents of both these files in the next couple of steps.

Noting that your “empty” class has been added

Notice the two files have been added. There is code inside of them but we will completely replace that code with our own code from my "ClipboardLoader" tool. Once again, you can download the code yourself if you wish here:

Download the JSON Kit. Contains the code above.	https://github.com/johnezang/JSONKit
ClipboardLoader also provides the code very easily, a well as the other code needed for this project.	http://brunoblogfiles.com/clipboard/ClipboardLoader.zip

Download Clipboard Loader & the SDK

Before continuing you will need to download the "ClipboardLoader" application from here:
http://brunoblogfiles.com/clipboard/ClipboardLoader.zip

Once you download and uncompress the file, you will start the application. Next, you will click on the button "Clip - JSONKit.h." Doing so will fill the clipboard with *all* the code you will need for JSONKit.h.

Remember, to complete this series of posts, you will need:

SDK

Clipboard Loader

After downloading and running ClipboardLoader, click on “Clip – JSONKit.h”

Pasting code into JSONKit.h

On the left pane, select JSONKit.h then select Command-A, which will highlight all the text. Next, right-mouse click and "Paste" the code from the clipboard into JSONKit.h. Essentially, we are replacing all the code in JSONKit.h with code from the clipboard. After that, we will do the same with JSONkit.m.

Getting JSONKit.m from ClipboardLoader

Go back to ClipboardLoader. This time we are going to select "Clip - JSONKit.m." This is a lot of code, over 1mb. The original source can be found here: https://github.com/johnezang/JSONKit. After doing so you will have a lot of code in the clipboard. Now back to Xcode and select JSONKit.m.

Pasting code into JSONKit.m

On the left pane, select JSONKit.m then select Command-A, which will highlight all the text. Next, right-mouse click and "Paste" the code from the clipboard into JSONKit.m. Essentially, we are replacing all the code in JSONKit.m with code from the clipboard. At this point we have loaded our JSONKit code. I leave it as an excercise to the developer to dive into the details of JSONKit. It is beyond the scope of this post. In a moment you will be **using** this library to actually make RESTful calls.

Sanity Check – Compiling / Building our project

At this point I recommend doing a sanity check by compiling. After adding JSONKit to our project we can make sure everything compiles correctly. Select the following from the menu: "Project / Build." There should be no errors.

Getting the code for RootViewController.h

Return back to ClipboardLoader. There are two more files we want to paste code into. The first file (seen below) is RootViewController.h. Select "RootViewController.h" from ClipboardLoader. Your clipboard now has the needed code.

Pasting code into RootViewController.h

On the left pane, select RootViewController.h then select Command-A, which will highlight all the text. Next, right-mouse click and "Paste" the code from the clipboard into RootViewController.h. Essentially, we are replacing all the code in RootViewController.h with code from the clipboard. We are almost finished with the coding.

Getting the code for RootViewController.m

Go back to ClipboardLoader. This time we are going to select "RootViewController.m" This is where the important work is being done. This is where we make RESTful calls to our service and where we populate the TableView control with data.

Pasting code into RootViewController.m

On the left pane, select RootViewController.m then select Command-A, which will highlight all the text. Next, right-mouse click and "Paste" the code from the clipboard into RootViewController.m. Essentially, we are replacing all the code in RootViewController.m with code from the clipboard. We are almost finished with the coding.

Connecting to our RESTful Endpoint

At the top of RootViewController.m take note of "serviceUri." This is represents our Azure RESTful endpoint that we are calling into to get data. You can get the exact URI from the Azure Portal at http://windows.azure.com. You will log in, find your "hosted service" and then in the right pane take note of "DNS Name."

Here is what the code looks like:

NSString *serviceUri =
@"http://[* YOU GET THIS FROM THE PORTAL*].cloudapp.net/FastMotorcycleListService.svc/list/";

See Appendix A for more explanations on the actual RESTful calls.

I’ve added some liberal commenting so you can see what the JSONKit is doing to make the JSON data “attachable” to the TableView control.

Building the final project

It is time to build the final project before running it. Simply go to the menu and select "Product / Build." If you copied everything well, you should see no errors.

Running the finished solution

It is time to build the final project before running it. Simply go to the menu and select "Product / Build." If you copied everything well, you should see no errors.

This is the best part - running the application. It is as easy as hitting the menu "Product / Run."

Viewing the finished application as it runs

Assuming you have network connectivity, this is the actual emulator up and running. Clearly it is working and data is coming back.

Congratulations!

You consumed RESTful data from an iOS client. By the way, this will require hardly any modifications to run on an iPad.

Appendix A - Understanding how TableView gets populated by the RESTful calls

------------------------------------------------
Understanding the method cellForRowAtIndexPath
------------------------------------------------

// This method is about customizing the appearance of table view cells.
// This method fills the TableView with some contents.
// Cells contain the actual contents of data.
// Each cell is part of a larger hierarchy.
// "Index Path" is how we access individual cells and populate them with data.
// Returns a a pointer to a UITableViewCell object.

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    
    // Standard code for cell identification
    static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell";
    
    // Standard to code to get a cell so we can put data into it
    UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];
    if (cell == nil) {
        cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier] autorelease];
    }
    
    // These two lines make the fastmotorcycle visible in the TableView control
    NSString *fastbikeString = [self.fastbikes objectAtIndex: [indexPath row]];
    cell.textLabel.text = fastbikeString;
    
    // Configure the cell.
    return cell;
}

RootViewController.h

//
//  RootViewController.h
#import <UIKit/UIKit.h>
@interface RootViewController : UITableViewController {
    NSMutableArray * fastbikes;
}
@property(retain, nonatomic) NSMutableArray * fastbikes;
@end

RootViewController.m

//  RootViewController.m
//

#import "RootViewController.h"
#import "JSONKit.h"

@implementation RootViewController

@synthesize fastbikes;


////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// username - (1) Used in the restful service as part of the "where" clause
//            (2) This allows you to support multiple users and becomes part of the 
//                  partitionkey/rowkey. It also allows for scaling your data across 
//                  multiple servers or partition nodes.
//  
NSString *username = @"Bruno"; // Gets passed to the RESTful service

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Your get "YOUR SERVICE" from the portal
NSString *serviceUri = @"http://[**YOUR SERVICE GOES HERE**].cloudapp.net/FastMotorcycleListService.svc/list/";


////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// Called at the right time for us to populate the control
- (void)viewDidLoad
{
    // Give a title to the TableView
    self.title = username;
    
    // Build the service uri (will point to our RESTful service
    NSString *url = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@%@", serviceUri, username];
    
    // Retrieve the data in the form of a JSON array
    NSData *json = [NSData dataWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:url]];
    
    // Convert from JSON array to NSArray. Allows us to populate the table view
    // more easily
    NSArray *itemArray = [json objectFromJSONData];
    
    // Assign the array to the TableView
    self.fastbikes = [[NSMutableArray alloc] initWithArray:itemArray];
    
    [super viewDidLoad];
}

// Boilerplate - added by Xcode
- (void)viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated
{
    [super viewWillAppear:animated];
}

// Boilerplate - added by Xcode
- (void)viewDidAppear:(BOOL)animated
{
    [super viewDidAppear:animated];
}

// Boilerplate - added by Xcode
- (void)viewWillDisappear:(BOOL)animated
{
    [super viewWillDisappear:animated];
}

// Boilerplate - added by Xcode
- (void)viewDidDisappear:(BOOL)animated
{
    [super viewDidDisappear:animated];
}

/*
 // Override to allow orientations other than the default portrait orientation.
 - (BOOL)shouldAutorotateToInterfaceOrientation:(UIInterfaceOrientation)interfaceOrientation {
 // Return YES for supported orientations.
 return (interfaceOrientation == UIInterfaceOrientationPortrait);
 }
 */

// Customize the number of sections in the table view.
- (NSInteger)numberOfSectionsInTableView:(UITableView *)tableView
{
    return 1;
}

- (NSInteger)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView numberOfRowsInSection:(NSInteger)section
{
    // fastbikes is the TableView so return its count
    return [fastbikes count];
}

// Customize the appearance of table view cells.
// This fills the TableView with some contents.
// Cells contain the actual contents of data.
// Each cell is part of a larger hierarchy.
// "Index Path" is how we access individual cells.
// Returns a a pointer to a UITableViewCell object.

- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    
    // Standard code for cell identification
    static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell";
    
    // Standard to code to get a cell so we can put data into it
    UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier];
    if (cell == nil) {
        cell = [[[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier] autorelease];
    }
    
    // These two lines make the fastmotorcycle visible in the TableView control
    NSString *fastbikeString = [self.fastbikes objectAtIndex: [indexPath row]];
    cell.textLabel.text = fastbikeString;
    
    // Configure the cell.
    return cell;
}

- (void)dealloc
{
    [fastbikes release]; // cleanup and deallocate
    [super dealloc];
}

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//********************  This is all boilerplate installed by Xcode ******************** 

/*
 // Override to support conditional editing of the table view.
 - (BOOL)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView canEditRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
 {
 // Return NO if you do not want the specified item to be editable.
 return YES;
 }
 */

/*
 // Override to support editing the table view.
 - (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView commitEditingStyle:(UITableViewCellEditingStyle)editingStyle forRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
 {
 if (editingStyle == UITableViewCellEditingStyleDelete)
 {
 // Delete the row from the data source.
 [tableView deleteRowsAtIndexPaths:[NSArray arrayWithObject:indexPath] withRowAnimation:UITableViewRowAnimationFade];
 }
 else if (editingStyle == UITableViewCellEditingStyleInsert)
 {
 // Create a new instance of the appropriate class, insert it into the array, and add a new row to the table view.
 }   
 }
 */

/*
 // Override to support rearranging the table view.
 - (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView moveRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)fromIndexPath toIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)toIndexPath
 {
 }
 */

/*
 // Override to support conditional rearranging of the table view.
 - (BOOL)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView canMoveRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
 {
 // Return NO if you do not want the item to be re-orderable.
 return YES;
 }
 */

- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    /*
     <#DetailViewController#> *detailViewController = [[<#DetailViewController#> alloc] initWithNibName:@"<#Nib name#>" bundle:nil];
     // ...
     // Pass the selected object to the new view controller.
     [self.navigationController pushViewController:detailViewController animated:YES];
     [detailViewController release];
     */
}

- (void)didReceiveMemoryWarning
{
    // Releases the view if it doesn't have a superview.
    [super didReceiveMemoryWarning];
    
    // Relinquish ownership any cached data, images, etc that aren't in use.
}

- (void)viewDidUnload
{
    [super viewDidUnload];
    
    // Relinquish ownership of anything that can be recreated in viewDidLoad or on demand.
    // For example: self.myOutlet = nil;
}

@end

Leveraging Windows Azure to provide highly-scalable streaming video content–Windows Media Services-Building your own Netflix streaming server or TV web channel

BrunoTerkaly — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 15:17:53 GMT

Building your own Netflix streaming solution

I have been going over Dmitri Martynov blog project on CodePlex. I am so inspired by this technology that I want to start presenting it to the world.

In 2 sentences this is why this post is important.

Most individuals and businesses dream about the idea of being able to provide low-cost, yet scalable video services on demand. This talk is about leveraging Windows Azure as a highly-scalable media delivery vehicle.

Some background – The big picture

Conceptually, you can think of it this way. There are two web roles. The first web role provides an endpoint that I can send to be re-broadcasted to the world. That is the Video Injesting Web Role. The second web role is the Video Streaming Web Role. This role has an endpoint that clients will connect to retrieve a video stream and play it on their device.

Streaming provided by Windows Media Services

Windows Media Services (WMS) allows you generate streaming media (audio/video), supporting WMV, JPEG, and MP3 formats.

Additional features include: (1) caching and recording streams (2) enforcing authentication, connection limits (3) supporting a high number of concurrent connections (4) providing unicast or multicast streams

The most 64-bit version offers almost double the scale by including a built-in WMS Cache/Proxy plug-in which can behave as a cache/proxy server or as a reverse proxy server.

Here are some installation commands

Step

High Level

Detail

Start Server Manager

Add Roles, Streaming Media Services

If Media Services Already running

net stop wmserver, do your copy then, net start wmserver

Command Oriented Install

How to install the Streaming Media Services role on a Server Core installation of Windows Server 2008 R2

Download the Windows6.1-KB963697-x64.msu file.

Run the MSU file for the Streaming Media Services role. To do this, type the following command at a command prompt:

start /w wusa /quiet Windows6.1-KB963697-x64.msu

To install the Streaming Media Services role, type the following string at a command prompt:

start /w ocsetup MediaServer

To start the Windows Media Services service, type the following string at a command prompt:

net start wmserver

Some installation Links

Description	Link
Installed IIS Media Services 3.0 64-bit	http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=21C12A04-7E36-4B63-B4EF-EEDB6273CF54&displaylang=en#
Install IIS Media Services for 32-bit also	http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=DC4E95B0-E4DE-456E-8254-A5047EABCD01&displaylang=en#
Install it from the Web Platform Installer directly	http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9689670#

Smooth Streaming Capabilities

Smooth Streaming is not proprietary	The Smooth Streaming File Format is based on the ISO-standardized Base Media File Format, better known as the MP4 file format. It is client-agnostic and can be implemented on any client platform that supports VC-1/WMA/H.264/AAC decoding and HTTP transport.
Smooth Streaming needs decent bandwidth	If you want to deliver 720p/24 video you neeed more than a 2 Mbps encoded bitrate
Sample of Smooth Streaming in action	Visit SmoothHD.com

Using Silverlight for Smooth Streaming

Description	Link
Silverlight Media Framework	http://smf.codeplex.com/#
Silverlight Media Framework Downloads	http://smf.codeplex.com/releases/view/51263#
Silverlight Media Framework Documentation	http://smf.codeplex.com/documentation#
Support for mobile Windows Phone Developer portal	http://developer.windowsphone.com/#

Smooth streaming players

You essentially have two choices:

Adobe Flash

Adobe’s Flash Player is a browser plug-in that can act as a standalone or with your default browser in order to play the flash multimedia files. All the playable flash files have an SWF extension. SWF file contains the ActionScripting, audio, image and video data, which are required to play the file and displays any interactive controls.

Microsoft Silverlight

Core Silverlight	The Smooth Streaming Client is a core component of the broader open source Silverlight Media Framework.
Designed for smooth streaming	For most scenarios, the Silverlight Media Framework is the simplest, most robust way to build a new Silverlight player that supports the full set of Smooth Streaming functionality.
To get started quickly...	A sample Smooth Streaming Player is provided on the Silverlight Media Framework Downloads page.

Things that HTML5 Video can't do, but Silverlight or Flash can

Important list to note about HTML5.

1.	Digital Rights Management (DRM) - Cannot protect video content over HTML5
2.	No Smooth Streaming or Adaptive Streaming
3.	No Standard Video Codecs for HTML5
4.	No Full Screen Support
5.	No Standard Conventions/Look and Feel

Description	Link
Great blog on HTML5 limitations	http://www.silverlighthack.com/post/2011/04/16/Five-Things-that-HTML5-Video-Currently-will-not-do-but-Silverlight-and-Flash-will.aspx

More Smooth Streaming information

Description	Link
Experience Smooth Streaming page	http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming#
Smooth Streaming Technical Overview	http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/626/smooth-streaming-technical-overview/#
Smooth Streaming Deployment Guide.	http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/689/smooth-streaming-deployment-guide/#

Much more coming

Work in progress

Supporting Billions of entities/rows for Mobile – Android Series - Part 8–Writing an Android Client to consume RESTful data from Azure (Microsoft Cloud)

BrunoTerkaly — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:57:05 GMT

Past Posts in this Series

Blog Post

Link

Part 1 - Why Scale Matters

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/27/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-1-why-scale-matters.aspx

Part 2 - What are some high level cloud offerings?

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/27/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-2-what-are-some-high-level-cloud-offerings.aspx

Part 3–Architecture and Data Options

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/28/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-3-architecture-and-data-options.aspx

Part 4–Building a Cloud-based RESTful service for our Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7 Clients

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/28/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-4-building-a-cloud-based-restful-service-for-our-android-ios-and-windows-phone-7-clients.aspx

Part 5–Using the Portal and Setting up your Azure Account (Microsoft Cloud)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/05/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-5-using-the-portal-and-setting-up-your-azure-account-microsoft-cloud.aspx

Part 6–Reading and Writing to Windows Azure (Cloud-based) Tables using standard HTTP and Fiddler

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/05/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.aspx

Part 7–Migrating your Azure (Cloud RESTful Service) to be Hosted in a Microsoft Data Center

Part 8 (This Post) –Writing an Android Client to consume RESTful data from Azure (Microsoft Cloud)

Free download link for Azure SDK and tooling. This is the best link to use.

Download	Link
Azure SDK	http://www.microsoft.com/click/services/Redirect2.ashx?CR_CC=200060656

This Post is About Android Client

Finally, we are ready to talk about Android development. Yes, that means we are going to take out the Eclipse IDE and code in Java. Our Android client will make JSON calls against cloud data.

Setting up Eclipse and Android for Development

You obviously need to setup your Android development environment. These links will get your started. You will need to learn about downloading and installing Eclipse, the Android SDK, the Java runtime, etc. Everything that follows here assumes you have a properly configured Eclipse environment and associated Android tooling.

Download	Link
Download the Android SDK	http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
Setting up Eclipse and Android	http://insanitydesign.com/wp/projects/nehe-android-ports/setting-up-eclipse-and-android/
Installing the SDK	http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing.html
Setting up your Android Environment	http://fyi.oreilly.com/2009/02/setting-up-your-android-develo.html

Creating the Android Project in Eclipse

Select File / New / Android Project.

Fill in the following information:

1.	Project Name
2.	Build Target
3.	Application Name
4.	Package name
5.	The rest will auto-fill

CloudClientActivity.java

We are now ready to start adding our java code. Notice we have already been provided CloudClientActivty.java.

Replace the existing code in CloudClientActivity.java with the following:

package com.bruno.cloudclient;

import java.io.IOException;

import com.bruno.cloudclient.R;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.app.Dialog;
import android.content.Context;
import android.content.SharedPreferences;
import android.graphics.LightingColorFilter;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.view.Gravity;
import android.view.KeyEvent;
import android.view.LayoutInflater;
import android.view.View;
import android.view.ViewGroup;
import android.widget.AdapterView;
import android.widget.ArrayAdapter;
import android.widget.Button;
import android.widget.EditText;
import android.widget.ImageView;
import android.widget.ListView;
import android.widget.TextView;
import android.widget.Toast;
import android.widget.AdapterView.OnItemClickListener;

public class CloudClientActivity extends Activity {
    
    /** Called when the activity is first created. */
    ArrayAdapter<String> adapter = null;  // 
    String listName;
    SharedPreferences settings;
    /***************************************************************
    *  Purpose      - Startup routine. Configures view and accesses
    *                 xml file that is your view. Set the file system
    *                 sharing mode.
    ****************************************************************/
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) 
    {
        try 
        {
            super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
            setContentView(R.layout.main);

            // Set file sharing mode to private
            settings = getPreferences(Context.MODE_PRIVATE);
            listName = settings.getString("listName", "Bruno");


            // Get some data. Create an adapter and attach to our listview 
            // control.
            final Data data = new Data();
            // This is a key call. It retrieves the dat from the web service.
            // The data is in JSON originally, then converted to simple strings.
            adapter = new ArrayAdapter<String>(this, R.layout.list_item,
                    R.id.listItem, data.getItems(listName));

            // Attach the data to the ListView
            final ListView myList = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.list);
            myList.setAdapter(adapter);

            // Create an "Add" button. This button will allow users to
            // add data stored in web service.
            Button btnAdd = (Button) findViewById(R.id.btnAdd);
            // Manage button color for a black screen
            btnAdd.getBackground().setColorFilter(
                    new LightingColorFilter(0xFFFFFFFF, 0xFFAA0000));

            // Add a textbox the user can use to enter new data to be added
            // to the web service.
            final EditText txtItem = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.txtItem);

            // Setup the button listener
            btnAdd.setOnClickListener(new Button.OnClickListener() {
                public void onClick(View v) {
                    settings = getPreferences(Context.MODE_PRIVATE);
                    listName = settings.getString("listName", "Bruno");
                    // Passing true to modifyData, which will add a new record
                    // in the cloud
                    data.modifyItem(listName, txtItem.getText().toString(), true);
                    // Clear the textbox
                    txtItem.setText("");
                    try {
                        refresh();
                    } catch (IOException e) {
                        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                        e.printStackTrace();
                    }
                }
            });

            // If you click on a ListItem in the ListBox you will
            // pass "false" to modifyItem() which will delete
            // a record in the cloud
            myList.setOnItemClickListener(new OnItemClickListener() 
            {
                public void onItemClick(AdapterView<?> a, View v, int position,
                        long id) 
                {
                    String s = myList.getItemAtPosition(position).toString();
                    settings = getPreferences(Context.MODE_PRIVATE);
                    listName = settings.getString("listName", "Bruno");
                    data.modifyItem(listName, s, false);
                    try 
                    {
                        refresh();  // Refresh the listbox to reflect the deleted entry
                    } 
                    catch (IOException e) 
                    {
                        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                        e.printStackTrace();
                    }
                    // Notify user that record was just deleted
                    makeToast(s);
                }
            });
        } 
        catch (Exception e) 
        {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
 
    /***************************************************************
    *  Purpose      - Notify user that we just deleted a record
    *                 Pops a little message
    ****************************************************************/
    public void makeToast(String item) 
    {
        LayoutInflater inflater = getLayoutInflater();
        View layout = inflater.inflate(R.layout.toast_layout,
                (ViewGroup) findViewById(R.id.toast_layout_root));
        ImageView image = (ImageView) layout.findViewById(R.id.image);
        image.setImageResource(R.drawable.icon);
        TextView text = (TextView) layout.findViewById(R.id.text);
        text.setText(item + " deleted.");
        Toast toast = new Toast(getApplicationContext());
        toast.setGravity(Gravity.CENTER_VERTICAL, 0, 0);
        toast.setDuration(Toast.LENGTH_SHORT);
        toast.setView(layout);
        toast.show();
    }

    /***************************************************************
    *  Purpose      - Get latest data. Fill the view, attach view and
    *                 adapter, tell adapter to refresh view. 
    ****************************************************************/
    public void refresh() throws IOException 
    {
        Data d = new Data();
        settings = getPreferences(Context.MODE_PRIVATE);
        listName = settings.getString("listName", "Bruno");
        adapter = new ArrayAdapter<String>(this, R.layout.list_item,
                R.id.listItem, d.getItems(listName));
        // Attach adapter and view, then refresh with the
        // notifyDataSetChanged event
        ListView myList = (ListView) findViewById(R.id.list);
        myList.setAdapter(adapter);
        adapter.notifyDataSetChanged();
    }

}

 Data.java

Add a java module and insert code.

Call it Data.java.

You should see this:

You will need to take note of the URL for your Azure service. See “YOUR_AZURE_SERVICE” below.

It should correspond to:

Open Data.java and insert this code:

package com.bruno.cloudclient;


import java.io.BufferedInputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.net.HttpURLConnection;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLConnection;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import org.apache.http.HttpEntity;
import org.apache.http.HttpResponse;
import org.apache.http.client.ClientProtocolException;
import org.apache.http.client.HttpClient;
import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpDelete;
import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpGet;
import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpPost;
import org.apache.http.entity.ByteArrayEntity;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient;
import org.json.JSONArray;
import android.os.AsyncTask;

public class Data {
    private ArrayList<String> items;

    /***************************************************************
    *  Purpose      - Populate or list view control. Makes a call
    *                 the web service using a hard-coded address.
    *                 
    * 
    **************************************************************** 
    *  Assumptions  - RESTful service available with data
    * 
    **************************************************************** 
    *  Effects      - none, simply reads data
    * 
    **************************************************************** 
    *  Inputs       - A list (represents an android user) to 
    *                 that is looked up from the RESTful service
    **************************************************************** 
    *  Returns      - A populated array (will fill the adapter
    *                 which is mapped to our listbox
    * 
    ****************************************************************/
    public ArrayList<String> getItems(String listName) throws IOException 
    {

        // ArrayList will be populated from the JSON data coming from
        // the web server
        items = new ArrayList<String>();
        
        JSONArray ja = new GetShoppingListData()
           .doInBackground("http://fastmotorcycleservice.cloudapp.net/FastMotorcycleListService.svc/list/"+listName);
        
        // Loop through json array and return results to be used in 
        // the listbox via the adapter object
        for (int i = 0; i < ja.length(); i++) 
        {
            try 
            {
               items.add(ja.getString(i));
            } 
            catch (Exception e) 
            {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
        return items;
    }
    /***************************************************************
    *  Purpose      - Does a delete or add asynchronously. If pass
    *                 true, then an add is done. Else do delete.
    ****************************************************************/
    public void modifyItem(String listName, String item, boolean operation) 
    {
        if (operation == true) 
        {
            HttpResponse response = new AddShoppingListData()
                .doInBackground(
                        "http://YOUR_AZURE_SERVICE.cloudapp.net/FastMotorcycleListService.svc/list/"+listName,
                    item);
        } 
        else 
        {
            HttpResponse response = new DeleteShoppingListData()
                    .doInBackground(
                            "http://YOUR_AZURE_SERVICE.cloudapp.net/FastMotorcycleListService.svc/list/"+listName,
                    item);
        }

    }
    
    /***************************************************************
    *  Purpose      - A private class to allow:
    *                 Asynchronously retrieve data from the RESTful
    *                 service hosted in the cloud
    **************************************************************** 
    *  Assumptions  - RESTful service up and and running
    * 
    **************************************************************** 
    *  Inputs       - A url to look up data
    * 
    **************************************************************** 
    *  Returns      - A JSON array full of data
    * 
    ****************************************************************/
    private class GetShoppingListData extends
            AsyncTask<String, Void, JSONArray> {
        @Override
        protected JSONArray doInBackground(String... urls) 
        {
            // HttpClient used to talk to web service.
            HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
            
            // This will be the array we need to convert. We
            // get the data from the web service.
            JSONArray listItems = null;
            String jason = null;
            
            // Setup the RESTful call to 'GET' the data
            HttpGet request_http_get = new HttpGet(urls[0]);

            
            // Read the JSON data and return
            try 
            {
                // Fill a response object using a request
                HttpResponse response_http_get = httpclient.execute(request_http_get);
            
                // Length represents the number of data items returned
                // by RESTful service
                long length = response_http_get.getEntity().getContentLength();

                // "entity" ends up being the data coming back from web server.
                HttpEntity entity = response_http_get.getEntity();

                // Read the bytes, one byte at a time.
                InputStream stream = entity.getContent();
                
                // Allocate a series of bytes
                byte[] buffer = new byte[(int) length];
                
                // Read bytes from RESTful service.
                // After this loop, we end up with -> ["busa","gxr1000","ninja250"]
                for (int i = 0; i < length; i++) 
                {
                    buffer[i] = (byte) stream.read();
                }
                // The string "buffer" looks something 
                // like this -> ["busa","gxr1000","ninja250"]
                jason = new String(buffer);
                // Convert to Json array for Android ListBox.
                // This ends up being a 3 element json array (see "busa" above)
                listItems = new JSONArray(jason);
            } 
            catch (Exception e) 
            {
                System.out.println(e);
            }
            return listItems;
        }
    }
 
    /***************************************************************
    *  Purpose      - A class used to Post data to the RESTful service (Microsoft
    *                 cloud, Azure) using Http 'POST'
    **************************************************************** 
    *  Inputs       - (1) The service address
    *                 (2) The data to be posted (what the user types in)
    **************************************************************** 
    *  Comments     - (1) Using HttpPost for "Add" operations
    *                 (2) Using UTF8 because default Android is UTF-16
    ****************************************************************/
    private class AddShoppingListData extends
            AsyncTask<String, Void, HttpResponse> {
        HttpResponse response_http;

        @Override
        protected HttpResponse doInBackground(String... params) 
        {
            HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
            HttpPost request_add = new HttpPost(params[0]);

            try {
                request_add.addHeader("Content-Type", "application/json");
                String postData = "\"" + params[1] + "\"";
                request_add.setEntity(new ByteArrayEntity(postData.getBytes("UTF8")));

                response_http = httpclient.execute(request_add);

            } catch (ClientProtocolException e) {
                // TODO
            } catch (IOException e) {
                // TODO
            }
            return response_http;
        }
    }

    /***************************************************************
    *  Purpose      - A class used to Post data to the RESTful service (Microsoft
    *                 cloud, Azure) using Http 'POST'
    **************************************************************** 
    *  Inputs       - (1) The service address
    *                 (2) The data to be posted (what the user types in)
    **************************************************************** 
    *  Comments     - (1) Using HttpPost for "Delete" operations
    *                 (2) Fixing up spaces with s.replace()
    ****************************************************************/
    private class DeleteShoppingListData extends
            AsyncTask<String, Void, HttpResponse> {
        @Override
        protected HttpResponse doInBackground(String... params) 
        {
            HttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
            String s = params[1];
            // Fix up spaces
            String charEscaped = s.replace(" ", "%20");
            HttpDelete request_delete = new HttpDelete(params[0] + "/" + charEscaped);
            HttpResponse response_delete = null;
            try 
            {
                // Do the RESTful delete command
                response_delete = httpclient.execute(request_delete);
            } 
            catch (ClientProtocolException e) 
            {
                e.printStackTrace();
            } catch (IOException e) 
            {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
            return response_delete;
        }
    }
}

 Main.xml

The next 4 files represent the user interface. Lets start with Main.xml. It is already provided.

Open the text editor. Right-mouse click and choose Open With / Text Editor.

Insert the following xml code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<RelativeLayout
  xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
  android:layout_width="fill_parent"
  android:layout_height="fill_parent">
  <ListView
    android:layout_alignParentTop="true" android:id="@+id/list" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent">  </ListView>
  <LinearLayout
    android:layout_below="@+id/ListView01" android:id="@+id/LinearLayout01" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_alignParentBottom="true">    <EditText
      android:id="@+id/txtItem"
      android:layout_width="fill_parent"
      android:layout_height="wrap_content"
      android:layout_weight="1"
      android:layout_alignParentBottom="true">
    </EditText>
    <Button
      android:id="@+id/btnAdd"
      android:layout_alignRight="@id/txtItem"
      android:layout_width="fill_parent"
      android:layout_height="wrap_content"
      android:layout_weight="1"
      android:text="Add"
      android:layout_alignParentBottom="true">
    </Button>
  </LinearLayout>
</RelativeLayout>

 Dialog.xml

Add a new xml file by right-mouse clicking on layout. Choose New / Android XML File.

Insert the following xml code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout
  xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
  android:id="@+id/layout_root"
  android:orientation="horizontal"
  android:layout_width="fill_parent"
  android:layout_height="fill_parent"
  android:padding="10dp">
  <EditText
    android:id="@+id/listName"
    android:layout_width="100dp"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent"
    android:layout_marginRight="10dp"/>
  <Button
    android:id="@+id/btnCreateList"
    android:layout_width="100dp"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent"
    android:textColor="#FFF"/>
</LinearLayout>

 list_item.xml

Add a new xml file by right-mouse clicking on layout. Choose New / Android XML File.

Insert the following xml code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout
  xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
  android:id="@+id/layout_root"
  android:orientation="horizontal"
  android:layout_width="fill_parent"
  android:layout_height="fill_parent"
  android:padding="10dp">
  <EditText
    android:id="@+id/listName"
    android:layout_width="100dp"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent"
    android:layout_marginRight="10dp"/>
  <Button
    android:id="@+id/btnCreateList"
    android:layout_width="100dp"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent"
    android:textColor="#FFF"/>
</LinearLayout>

 toast_layout.xml

Add a new xml file by right-mouse clicking on layout. Choose New / Android XML File.

Insert the following xml code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout
  xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
  android:layout_width="wrap_content"
  android:layout_height="wrap_content">
  <TextView
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="fill_parent"
    android:padding="10dp"
    android:textSize="16sp"
    android:id="@+id/listItem">
  </TextView>
</LinearLayout>

 Modify AndroidManifest.xml

We need to tell the application that an connecting to the internet is possible from within the application. This is done by modifying the XML inside of AndroidManifest.xml.

We need to add the following line:

<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />

This is what AndroidManifest.xml should look like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
      package="com.bruno.cloudclient"
      android:versionCode="1"
      android:versionName="1.0">
    <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="10" />

	<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET" />



    <application android:icon="@drawable/icon" android:label="@string/app_name">        <activity android:name=".CloudClientActivity"
                  android:label="@string/app_name">
            <intent-filter>
                <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
                <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
            </intent-filter>
        </activity>

    </application>
</manifest>

Ready to compile and run !

Close your Android emulators, if they are open. Save and close all the java and xml files.

Select the following command: Project / Clean.

There should be no errors.

We are ready to run our Android application. Right-mouse click on the CloudClient project and choose Run As / Android Application.

Unlock the client.

If everything was coded correctly (and assuming you used Azure Storage Explorer to add data), you should see the following:

This corresponds to our Azure Storage Explorer version of the data:

Conclusion

This concludes this 8-part series on constructing a RESTful Azure (Microsoft Cloud) and performing CRUD operations from an Android client application. This has demonstrated the whole process from start to end, complete with source code. Hope you found value in it!
-Bruno

Supporting Billions of entities/rows for Mobile – Android Series - Part 7–Migrating your Azure (Cloud RESTful Service) to be Hosted in a Microsoft Data Center

BrunoTerkaly — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 17:51:07 GMT

Past Posts in this series

Post Topic	Link
Part 1 - Why Scale Matters	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/27/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-1-why-scale-matters.aspx
Part 2 - What are some high level cloud offerings?	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/27/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-2-what-are-some-high-level-cloud-offerings.aspx
Part 3–Architecture and Data Options	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/28/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-3-architecture-and-data-options.aspx
Part 4–Building a Cloud-based RESTful service for our Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7 Clients	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/09/28/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-4-building-a-cloud-based-restful-service-for-our-android-ios-and-windows-phone-7-clients.aspx
Part 5–Using the Portal and Setting up your Azure Account (Microsoft Cloud)	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/05/supporting-billions-of-entities-rows-for-mobile-android-series-part-5-using-the-portal-and-setting-up-your-azure-account-microsoft-cloud.aspx
Part 6–Reading and Writing to Windows Azure (Cloud-based) Tables using standard HTTP and Fiddler	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/05/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.aspx
Free download link for Azure SDK and tooling. This is the best link to use.	http://www.microsoft.com/click/services/Redirect2.ashx?CR_CC=200060656

What this post is about

We are getting closer to getting our Android client to connect up and read Azure Table data from a Microsoft data center.

This post will take two parts:

Part 1

Prepare our local developer version of our RESTful service to be ready for deployment. This means it should point to the storage account hosted in the Chicago Microsoft data center you saw in the last post.

Part 2

We will deploy our RESTful service to the Hosted Service created in the last post.

Post	Link
Part 6–Reading and Writing to Windows Azure (Cloud-based) Tables using standard HTTP and Fiddler	http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brunoterkaly/archive/2011/10/05/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.aspx

Part 3

We will test our deployment before actually connecting to it from a client application.

Part 1 – Prepare our RESTful Service for Deployment – Getting the Access Keys

The current Visual Studio project does not utilize storage in the cloud. It uses the local storage emulator instead. The reason is simple – it allows the developer to do all their development and testing locally, without being forced to deploy their application to the cloud while it is still being developed.

The first thing we will need is our storage access keys.

This access key will be placed into our project. Copy this key to the clipboard and prepare to import into our Visual Studio Project.

Part 1 – Prepare our RESTful Service for Deployment – Adding the Access Keys to Visual Studio

This step is about notifying our FastMotorcycleService to

Highlight the web role and then right-mouse click. Click Properties.

Click Settings, followed by the ellipsis (“…”).

Enter in the Account name and Account key.

Do the same for the diagnostics connection string.

We are now ready for deployment.

Part 2 - We will deploy our RESTful service to the Hosted Service created in the last post.

We will start by creating a deployment package from Visual Studio. Right mouse click and select Package.

Verify the following dialog box as follows. Click Package.

The following window will pop up. Notice that we have both a configuration file and a package file. Both of these will now be uploaded to the portal.

Return back to the Windows Azure Portal. Select Hosted services, followed by FastMotorcycleService, followed by New Production Deployment.

At this point we will provide a Deployment name, a package location (created in a previous step), and a configuration file (created in a previous step).

You may get a warning about having only 1 deployment instance. We can scale to more instances later. It is very easy to have 2, 3 and more instances.

We can just go back to the web role properties and change the Instance Count.

It may take a few minutes for the deployment to complete. You may see various status messages at the portal.

Part 3 - We will test our deployment before actually connecting to it from a client application

After a few minutes of waiting you can see that the portal indicates our Azure Instance is up and running. You can see the Ready status. You can also notice the DNS Name where our RESTful service resides.

If we navigate there, we can see that service is up and running.

But the above screen shows default.aspx. What we really want to see is the RESTful service. The RESTful service is covered in my next post.