Azure Coding.Net Blogs

This cloud solution is designed to help your fellow developers. There are many components that would be useful to run in the cloud, but there are few ready built solutions that I can just click deploy and have it ready for me.

Azure Recipes solves this problem. This would be a hosted application that provides a list of services that developers can leverage as a ready deployed solution. For example, I want to use RavenDB, but I don't want to figure out what it takes to create a worker role that loads up RavenDB and exposes it on the correct ports, nor do I want to figure out how to get sharding working in Azure. I can go to Azure Recipes, register for an account, and select the RavenDB service. I'd then answer a few questions about how I want the service to be configured (how large/how many instances, what data center, etc. etc.). A few minutes later, I have Raven DB accessible to me on my account. I can browse to the administrative UI, and I can move on to using my application.

Naturally, you have to negotiate hosting licenses with various vendors. But, you're doing the hard work, and developers will appreciate (and pay for)  that convenience.

No I'm not talking about the Alanis Morrissette brand of Ironic where it really isn't. The irony I speak of here is that Azure Coding .NET, a site ostensibly dedicated to using Windows Azure for your cloud infrastructure, has to date (three years and counting) not leveraged Windows Azure for its hosting.

As of today that atrocity has been rectified. Through a partnership with Telerik, Azure Coding .NET is officially running on Windows Azure using the Sitefinity CMS. The only problem is that the existing content from our previous platform needs to be migrated here. Never fear. Sitefinity has a robust API. I tried to find an existing plugin for importing blogml exports; my search was fruitless. So my first task in bringing Azure Coding .NET to Azure will be creating a blogml importer for Sitefinity. This should be a fun adventure. Look for the details of my journey in upcoming posts.

While you're waiting for the old content to pop up, I will be writing new content targeted specifically at taking advantage of the cloud with Windows Azure and the associated services. The first series, RESTful Cloud Services with Azure, will show you how to build a cloud-based service for mobile apps.

Please accept my humblest apologies for the short absence. I look forward to rebuilding Azure Coding .NET as the premiere site for the Microsoft Cloud Stack.