Getting Started with Windows Azure

With my recent move to Windows Azure I had to learn bunch of new things. As with everything else the hard part is to find out where to start from. Of course the usual start nowadays is the Web – you just type http://www.windowsazure.com and voila – you are there. If you are developer you can certainly skip the marketing messages and jump directly to the Developers section, however I would recommend to glance through Products one so at least you can get some idea what Windows Azure is and how the branding is done (I may write a bit more about the Windows Azure branding in another post).

 

Installing Windows Azure Tools and SDK

Now, getting back to the developers part. Clicking on the Get Tools & SDK button will send you to Microsoft Download Center – at this time the only available download is Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio July 2009 CTP (CTP stands for Customer Technology Preview). Next version will be released at PDC09. If you are like me you will click on the download button and select Run immediately. Don’t do that – the installer will stop and tell you that you miss some prerequisites! There are certain prerequisites that you need to install and configure before you will be able to install the Tools and the SDK. Scroll down the page and read those – here listed for convenience:

• Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or 2010 Beta 1 (of course you need that)
• SQL Server Express Edition (or above)
• Enable IIS 7 with ASP.Net and WCF HTTP Activation
• Install couple of other hotfixes

The one I had most trouble with was enabling IIS 7 with ASP.Net and WCF Activation. In general the issue I was hitting was the one described in the following post Enabling WCF HTTP Activation After Uninstalling Microsoft .Net Framework 4.0 Beta. Once I had this issue behind, the rest of the installation was matter of minutes.

Note: Windows Azure doesn’t support .Net Framework 4.0 yet.

Windows Azure Samples

Windows Azure SDK comes with a set of samples that can help you ramp up faster. Once you unpack the samples you can use the provided build scripts to build the samples. Because I was interested in the storage functionality initially the two samples I’ve build were CloudDrive and StorageClient.

Of course, in order to run the StorageClient I had to have the local storage running. Everything was fine, except that I couldn’t start the Table Service. Selecting the service and clicking on the Start button didn’t change the status of the service, and there was no error message either. The reason for that was the lack of schema configuration for the Table Service. If you are more familiar with the SDK you may be able to create your own schema and use DevtableGen.exe to generate the database. I discovered that the schema is missing after clicking on Tools –> Table service properties in Development Storage UI. I wasn’t familiar how to build my own schema, however after building CloudDrive project the sample schema was automatically generated and applied to Development Storage.

 

Now, I think I have my environment set up and I can get to my first project.