#Azure Talk – Working with Microsoft Azure Resources

Working with Microsoft Azure Resources

On September 22 2014, I had the pleasure of speaking to the MSDEVMTL community about working with Microsoft Azure Resources.

Microsoft Azure Resources include Blob Storage, Table Storage, Queue Storage, Service Bus, Virtual Machines, Cloud Services and SQL Database. During my talk, I introduced a couple of tools that allow us to work with these resources. Some tools are built by Microsoft others are built by companies like Cerebrata, Cloud Berry and Zudio.

Windows Azure Storage Explorer	Block Blob	Page Blob	Tables	Queues	Free?
Azure Explorer by Cerebrata	X	X			Y
Cerebrata Azure Management Studio	X	X	X	X	Trial
Windows Azure SDK Storage Explorer for Visual Studio 2013 (Developed by Microsoft)	X	X	X		Y
Azure Web Storage Explorer	X	X	X	X	Y
Azure Storage Explorer	X	X	X	X	Y
BestSync	X
Cloud Berry Explorer	X	X			Y/N
Cloud Combine	X				Trial
Clumsy Leaf AzureXplorer, TableXplorer, and CloudXplorer	X	X	X	X	Trial
Gladinet Cloud Drive	X				Y
Zudio	X	X	X	X	Trial

I compared and contrasted Azure Explorer by Cerebrata, Cerebrata Azure Management Studio and the Azure tools found in Visual Studio. I spoke about my personal experiences and about how I chose which tool I use based on what I need to do.

For example, Azure Management Studio has a great feature that allows me to export a storage table to CSV. Another great feature mentioned during my talk was the ability to copy a deployed package (cscfg and cspkg) to blob storage. This is an awesome feature! Imagine starting on a new project and being asked to redeploy a Cloud Service to a new Azure subscription. The catch, is that the person you’re replacing, used to deploy directly from Visual Studio. You have no historical Packages and absolutely no guarantee that the deployed package is the latest and greatest. Chances are that the package is a few weeks behind the source… The only option that you have, is pulling the deployed package from the Azure deployment and using it to deploy to the new Azure Subscription.

Tip: Importing Azure Subscriptions to Azure Management Studio is easily done by importing Publish Settings. To download your Publish Settings, log into manage.windowsazure.com and select your desired subscription. Then browse to http://bit.ly/getmyazurecert.

Talk Slides