DavidAiken
Windows Azure Development
Windows Azure Development
Apr 12th
As part of my firestarter talk on building applications from the cloud, I talked about decoupling the tasks worker roles had to perform using Queues.
Here is the basic pattern:

This is a pattern you should follow when building new applications and services for the cloud.
Why should you think this way?
There are several reasons:
This has to be the first rule of building cloud apps, but what about a sample that shows it?
If you look at the Bid Now sample app, you will see that although we have a single worker role – the app is in fact implemented using the strategy above. We use a single worker as I didn’t figure you would want to run 6 worker roles for a sample app!
If you want to walk through an example of this, take a look at the following places in Bid Now:
You can grab the latest Bid Now Sample from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/BidNowSample.
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Apr 9th
A couple of folks have asked about my deck from this weeks event, so
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Apr 9th
The latest episode of Cloud Cover is now live on Channel 9 at http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Cloud+Cover/Cloud-Cover-Episode-8-Shared-Access-Signatures/, or watch it below.
The guys are taking a 2 week mid-season break, but will be back soon.
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Apr 8th
I’ve just posted the latest version of Bid Now on code gallery at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/BidNowSample! On code gallery you will find the code, as well as some guidance on how to get Bid Now running on your machine, as well as how you can deploy it to the cloud.
A few days back I presented at the Windows Azure fire starter event here in Redmond. (More on that in a few days when the videos are posted.) This is one of the demos I showed during my talk.
The demo is built on Windows Azure, and uses Windows Azure table and blob storage for data. There are some great things to look at in the code, such as the decoupling of functionality and use of Windows Azure Queues. It is also a great example of how you can build complex data applications using Windows Azure table storage. Think nosql here.
If you look at the homepage you can see there are several “views” of the data. As an example the boots below are shown in both the “Bids ending soon!” and “Hottest” sections. This data is pulled from different Windows Azure tables as all the data has been de-normalized.

Over the next few days I’ll be posting more details on how we built this app, some of the do’s and don’ts as well as how you can use it for your own demos/projects.
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Apr 2nd
Cloud Cover Episode 7 is now available on C9 at http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Cloud+Cover/Cloud-Cover-Episode-7-Dallas/, or watch it below.
In this episode Dunn & Marx cover:
THIS POSTING IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITH NO WARRANTIES, AND CONFERS NO RIGHTS