Develop ASP.NET Solutions with Windows Azure

Frameworks, standards and tools are constantly evolving and emerging. To build highly scalable applications, high capability servers, high bandwidth network and dedicated infrastructure are required. These add significant cost overhead.

One of the simplest solutions to this challenge is to move such applications and their infrastructure to the Cloud! Organizations are increasingly shifting from traditional on-premise and hosting environments to the emerging public and private cloud.

The most popular cloud platform today is the Windows Azure offered by Microsoft. It enables developers to quickly build, deploy and manage applications using Microsoft-managed data centers. Moreover, applications can be built using any operating system, language or tool! ASP.NET is emerging as a popular framework that allows programmers to build dynamic Web sites, Web applications and Web services. When web applications are deployed in the Windows Azure data centers, the storage services are readily available and easily accessible from the application.

Developing an ASP.NET solution that will run in the cloud has certain pre-requisites. The application needs to be coded in a way that it can be scaled easily. After the web application is developed, it should be published to the cloud (Microsoft data centers).

Windows Azure now supports .Net Framework 4.5. This gives developers the freedom to use all kinds of new features while developing their web app. The most important feature that ASP.NET 4.5 offers web developers is the new asynchronous methods. This asynchronous support enables developers to easily build highly scalable and high performing web applications minus all the hassles that are normally associated with asynchronous programming.

Preparing the Development Environment

Microsoft’s developer centers offer all the required tools for developers looking to take advantage of Windows Azure. The .NET Developer Center offers all necessary tools in one download. The Microsoft Web Platform Installer will install the Windows Azure SDK for .NET that contains Windows Azure SDK, Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio and Windows Azure Client Libraries for .NET.

An important tool that developers will require to develop ASP.Net Solutions with Windows Azure is the Windows Azure Developer Emulator. It is one of the core tools in the Windows Azure SDK that enables development of cloud applications on local workstations. ASP.NET developers will experience seamless integration with Visual Studio using this tool.

Developing ASP.NET solutions

Talentica is well known for .Net Development. Getting started with development is simple and hassle free once developers have an understanding of the emulator, roles and instances in Windows Azure. The Windows Azure service project consists of configuration files that configure the roles and number of instances that the hosted service will use in the datacenter. It also contains links to the Visual Studio projects that contain the ASP.NET application. The Windows Azure service project also enables developers to seamlessly test and debug their ASP.NET application in the Windows Azure Developer Emulator using the standard “F5” debug experience.

The Windows Azure cloud service can provide many capabilities that are unavailable with on-premise or traditional hosting. For example, Azure blob storage when combined with CDN capabilities brings fault tolerance and distributed performance. It offers geo replication of data at two data centers hundreds of miles apart at no extra cost. There are various advantages of Windows Azure that can be leveraged by ASP.NET developers to build highly scalable and well architected web applications.