Windows Azure Programming

Discover Windows Azure websites, a cloud hosting platform that supports .NET, PHP, Python, and more for rapid site creation and deployment in Azure data centers.

Explore publishing, monitoring, and scaling features of Windows Azure Web sites, including deployment options via Visual Studio and other tools, SSL and custom domains, and multi-tenant hosting.

Explore deploying popular web apps in the Azure Web Site Gallery, link databases and resources, and configure WordPress with ClearDB in the portal for rapid, fully functional sites.

Understand how Windows Azure Web Sites run via a stateless IIS 8 worker process, with files in Azure Blob Storage and config in a hosting database behind the load balancer.

Create and manage a durable, scalable Windows Azure storage account using REST-based endpoints, with automatic three-copy replication and geo redundancy, billed per gigabyte and per transaction.

Explore Windows Azure blob storage, including containers, block and page blobs, and how to use shared access signatures to grant time-limited access.

Demonstrates blob storage in action by building a dropbox-like app, uploading and deleting files to a blob container, and generating a time-limited shared access signature for secure sharing.

Explore Windows Azure table storage fundamentals—entities, properties, partitions, partition keys and row keys; learn no schema, scalability, durability, and how REST or SDKs query data.

Build a Twitter-like app called chirp using Azure Table Storage, creating chirps by user and by tag tables, posting messages, and querying by user or tag.

Understand how cloud services fit the Azure compute strategy, focusing on cloud service roles, role instances, and the fabric controller that manages lifecycle.

Package the cloud service as a cspkg with its service definition and configuration files, then deploy to staging and production, scaling and updating with swap or in-place upgrades.

Explore advanced Azure cloud services features, including configuration settings and service configuration files, endpoints, and startup tasks, to manage storage, monitoring, and dynamic VM customization.

Learn about Azure SQL Database as a service, featuring service and platform layers, primary and two secondary replicas for built-in redundancy and high availability.