Windows Azure Development Fabric and Develoment Storage

The Develoment Fabric
The Development Fabric comprises these executables : DFLoadBalancer.exe, DFAgent.exe, DFService.exe and DFMonitor.exe which the SDK setup program installs by default. The task manager’s process tab will show all these four process in the list as soon as you start the development fabric.
The Development Storage
The Azure platform supports three types of scalable storage

• unstructured data (blobs)
• structured data (tables)
• messages between apps, services or both (queues)

execute rundevstore.exe or building and running the Azure user code in VS starts all three services even if your project requires only one of these three services.
For protection against data loss, Azure Cloud will store blobs, tables and queues in atleast three separate containers in a Single data center. You can duplicate this data any time using geolocation feature to the data center of your choice.
Azure service Definition and Service Configuration Files
An Azure project’s ServiceDefinition.csdef file defines a set of standard input endpoints and configuration settings whose values are stored in this file.
A sample code of an Azure ServiceDefinition.csdef file
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition">
  <WebRole name="WebRole1">
    <Sites>
      <Site name="Web">
        <Bindings>
          <Binding name="Endpoint1" endpointName="Endpoint1" />
        </Bindings>
      </Site>
    </Sites>
    <Endpoints>
      <InputEndpoint name="Endpoint1" protocol="http" port="80" />
    </Endpoints>
    <Imports>
      <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" />
    </Imports>
  </WebRole>
  <WebRole name="WCFServiceWebRole1">
    <Sites>
      <Site name="Web">
        <Bindings>
          <Binding name="Endpoint1" endpointName="Endpoint1" />
        </Bindings>
      </Site>
    </Sites>
    <Endpoints>
      <InputEndpoint name="Endpoint1" protocol="http" port="8080" />
    </Endpoints>
    <Imports>
      <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" />
    </Imports>
    <LocalResources>
      <LocalStorage name="WCFServiceWebRole1.svclog" sizeInMB="1000" cleanOnRoleRecycle="false" />
    </LocalResources>
  </WebRole>
  <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1">
    <Imports>
      <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" />
    </Imports>
  </WorkerRole>
  <WebRole name="WebCgiRole1" enableNativeCodeExecution="true">
    <Sites>
      <Site name="Web">
        <Bindings>
          <Binding name="Endpoint1" endpointName="Endpoint1" />
        </Bindings>
      </Site>
    </Sites>
    <Endpoints>
      <InputEndpoint name="Endpoint1" protocol="http" port="8081" />
    </Endpoints>
    <Imports>
      <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" />
    </Imports>
  </WebRole>
  <WebRole name="BusinessApplication1.Web">
    <Sites>
      <Site name="Web">
        <Bindings>
          <Binding name="Endpoint1" endpointName="Endpoint1" />
        </Bindings>
      </Site>
    </Sites>
    <Endpoints>
      <InputEndpoint name="Endpoint1" protocol="http" port="8082" />
    </Endpoints>
    <Imports>
      <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" />
    </Imports>
  </WebRole>
</ServiceDefinition>

To be continued...

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Writing and running projects in Azure Development Platform

Windows Azure Cloud Fabric and Azure storage services don’t support Cloud based development and the debugging operations, and hence the Azure SDK provide on-premise clones in the form of Development Fabrics and the Development storage applications which are installed with the Windows Azure SDK. SDK also installs a collection of sample apps and libraries of wrapper classes to help simplify app development.

.NET 3.5 SP1 and SQL Express 2005 or later must be present on your machine and ASP.NET and WCF HTTP Activation for IIS 7.0 under Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7 or later to install and run the SDK. SDK isn’t mandatory but using SDK.NET APIs and libraries for applications makes it far simpler than working on HTTP directly.

Installing Windows Azure SDK and tools for Visual Studio

Having installed Azure SDK, one must download and install Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio to add templates for Web Cloud Service, Worker Cloud Service, Web and Worker Cloud Service, and Workflow Service Projects. Current version of SDK can be downloaded from here http://bit.ly/no4AYV