Check out this great article about how the DinnerNow.net application was ported to Windows Azure – Article.

Don’t forget to listen to the DotNetRocks #471 podcast about this whole process.

Thanks for all the attendees. You’ve made this event a success! Thanks to all the organizers – without you this would have never happened.

You can find all the pictures are on Flickr and all the the presentations are hosted on the on Architect Factory collateral page (hosted on Azure Cloud).

You can access my presentation directly on the Slide Share:

Note: check out the price analysis article of “True Cost of Hosting” of a big web application deployments on Amazon AWS infrastructure – HotPads

Prerequisites: make sure that you have all the Azure SDK tools installed for your VS2008.

(1) Start by creating a new “Web Cloud Service” project in the Visual Studio. Give it a nice name.

(2) Add a new “WCF Service” to the WebRole project.

(3) Define a required contract:

The most important part here is to put attributes that will tell the WCF in what format to send/receive the message body (XML or JSON) …

[ServiceContract(Name = "service", Namespace = "http://www.igorshare.com")]
public interface IContactManagerService
{
    [OperationContract]
    [WebGet(UriTemplate = "/contacts", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare,
       ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)]
    List<Contact> GetAllContacts();

    [OperationContract]
    [WebGet(UriTemplate = "/contacts/{filter}", BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Bare,
       ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json)]
    List<Contact> GetContacts(string filter);
}

[DataContract]
public class Contact
{
    [DataMember]
    public string FirstName { get; set; }

    [DataMember]
    public string LastName { get; set; }

    [DataMember]
    public string Company { get; set; }
}

(4) Implement the service logic:

public class ContactManagerService : IContactManagerService
{
    private static readonly List<Contact> Contacts = new List<Contact>() { ... };

    public List<Contact> GetAllContacts()
    {
        return Contacts;
    }

    public List<Contact> GetContacts(string filter)
    {
        string f = filter.ToLower();

        var contacts = from contact in Contacts
                       where contact.FirstName.ToLower().Contains(f)
                            || contact.LastName.ToLower().Contains(f)
                            || contact.Company.ToLower().Contains(f)
                       select contact;

        return contacts.ToList();
    }
}

(5) Configure it to be exposed as a RESTful service:

To make it REALLY, REALLY simple for you, do this trick:

a) Comment out the system.serviceModel section in the Web.config file

b) Add the Factory attribute to the .svc file

<%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Debug="true"
Service="ContactManagerCloudService_WebRole.ContactManagerService"
CodeBehind="ContactManagerService.svc.cs"
Factory="System.ServiceModel.Activation.WebServiceHostFactory" %>

(6) Build the service

You’re interested in 2 artifacts of the build:

1. .cscfg file – configuration for the Cloud Service deployment
2. .cspkg file – all the bits packaged (zipped)

At this moment you have 2 choices:

1. Run your project in the local Development Fabric (for testing and debugging), or …
2. Deploy it to the Azure Cloud (for staging or production)

To deploy your application to the cloud, do right-click on the CloudService project and select “Publish”.

Visual Studio will launch the Azure Service Developer Portal page. Log-in to your account, create a project and deploy your bits to the staging environment:

This is it!  You’re good to go.

BTW: make sure that your application works in the staging environment and then you can push it to Production by just switching it with the Staging.

Note: Check out a great explanation about the difference between the WCF REST Configuration for ASP.NET AJAX and plain REST Services by Rick Strahl.

Stay tuned …

This Saturday I’ve held a “Best Practices” Zen-style discussion during the CodeCamp #11 in Waltham.

Some people were great, but I really expected to have more heated discussions and interesting “war” stories.

You can find the slide deck on the SlideShare

It was a lot of fun to present last Saturday at the very first Data Camp that was held in Waltham.

Almost every company I worked with needed some ways to store and process huge amounts of data on the cloud – that includes Intel, ICQ/AOL, Symantec and Broadserve. The latter was the worst case scenario – it was an online multimedia streaming on demand.

So, as you can guess, I’ve learned a great deal about this “trade” and, after release of Amazon AWS and, now, Azure, I’ve become a happy man – no more need in setting up and managing your own infrastructure.

In my view, the “DATA in the Cloud” is actually a mix of the following 3 main aspects (“pillars”):

1. Data Storage
2. Data Processing
3. Data Delivery
4. Access Control (Authentication + Authorization)

Yes, I know – it’s four, but where can you go without mentioning the last one? Nowhere – you’ll be eaten alive

In this presentation I’ve tried to distill all the different ways that Azure Fabric (Platform and Services) helps you to address all the (first) 3 aspects of working with the “Data in the Cloud”.

Enjoy the presentation!        (URL is here) 

While at this: I’d like to thank the organizers of the Waltham Data camp and Microsoft for providing support and the great location!!!