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 Service Bus & Web API a Match Made in Heaven?

A little while ago the Windows Azure team introduced the message pump pattern to Service Bus Message Bus SDK and it got me thinking about how I could leverage this from any web enabled client.

I wanted to create a long polling REST service that would allow me to extend the message pump pattern over a protected REST service. This is my proof of concept and should not be used in production without a little exploration.

A long poll means that a client makes a request to the server. The server then delays the response until an event occurs. Keep in mind that this is especially useful when you want to communicate events to clients through firewalls. Furthermore, this is a great way to reduce the number of requests made by clients. On the other hand, long poll requests eat up resources, therefore you will need to load test your endpoints in order to identify their limits.

Visual Studio – Working With Multiple Windows Azure Subscriptions

Like me, you probably work on multiple Windows Azure projects and have to deal with many Windows Azure Subscriptions.

Working in Visual Studio with many Windows Azure Subscriptions can be messy, overwhelming and error prone. Fortunately, Microsoft added a new feature that allows us to filter the Server Explorer in order to show only the resources for a particular Windows Azure subscription, only the resources that are hosted in a particular region, or both.

Released in August 2013 as part of the Windows Azure SDK, this feature really helps me make sense out of all the subscriptions connected to my Microsoft Account.

How to: Filter Windows Azure Resources in Server Explorer

Filtering resources is achieved by right clicking on the Windows Azure node In Server Explorer and by choosing Filter Services.

You can Store 10 Petabytes in a Single Windows Azure Subscription

Using Windows Azure Storage Services, It’s possible to create up to 20 Windows Azure Storage Accounts. Each account has a limited capacity of 200 TB. The number of Windows Azure Accounts per Windows Azure Subscription is a soft limit that can be raised by politely asking the Windows Azure Support Team to bump it up.