TechEd Session Takeaways - Using Visual Studio to build Windows Azure Applications

Thank you to all of you who attended my session at TechEd 2010 - COS307 | Using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 to Build Applications That Run on Windows Azure

Here are some of the key takeaways and links from the session:

Lots of New Tools

The June 2010 release of the Windows Azure Tools has now includes:

• Support for .NET 4
• Deploy from Visual Studio
• IntelliTrace debugging in the cloud
• Windows Azure Storage and Compute integration in the Server Explorer
• Windows Azure Activity Log window in VS to watch long running operations

Getting Started

The Web Platform Installer automates a number of the steps to install Windows Azure or to install IIS prior to installing the Windows Azure Tools for VS 2010.

Get the patches - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cc974146.aspx

Samples

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuresamples

ASP.NET Web Roles vs ASP.NET Web Applications

The 3 differences are:

• References to the Windows Azure specific assemblies: Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime, and Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient
• Bootstrap code in the WebRole.cs/vb file that starts the DiagnosticMonitor as well as defines a default behavior of recycling the role when a configuration setting change occurs.
• The addition of a trace listener in the web.config file: Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener.

NerdDinner

The NerdDinner sample code can be found at: http://nerddinner.codeplex.com/

ASP.NET Provider scripts for SQL Azure

To use the ASP.NET providers with SQL Azure, you can use these scripts: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/2006191 to setup the database.

Using IntelliTrace

Using IntelliTrace to debug services / applications that are running in the Cloud