James Chambers - Windows Azure Web Sites

Contents

Windows Azure Web Sites

Published by

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Copyright 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-1-118-67864-0 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-118-74979-1 (ebk)

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ACQUISITIONS EDITOR

Mary James

SENIOR PROJECT EDITOR

Ami Frank Sullivan

TECHNICAL EDITORS

Bruce Johnson

Cory Fowler

SENIOR PRODUCTION EDITOR

Kathleen Wisor

COPY EDITOR

Luann Rouff

EDITORIAL MANAGER

Mary Beth Wakefield

FREELANCER EDITORIAL MANAGER

Rosemarie Graham

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF MARKETING

David Mayhew

MARKETING MANAGER

Ashley Zurcher

VICE PRESIDENT AND EXECUTIVE GROUP PUBLISHER

Richard Swadley

VICE PRESIDENT AND EXECUTIVE PUBLISHER

Neil Edde

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER

Jim Minatel

PROOFREADER

Nancy Carrasco

COVER DESIGNER

Ryan Sneed

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JAMES CHAMBERS is a presenter, long-time blogger, and geek who loves the craft and the tools that he works with. He works on open source projects such as Twitter.Bootstrap.Mvc4 and AngelaSmith, and contributes to the docs project for NuGet. He has worked at all three levels of Canadian government, with social and military firms, in food service and insurance, in telecommunication, and even the auto industry. He enjoys mentoring, learning from others and sharing his development experiences at conferences, web camps, user group meetings, and brown bag lunches. You can find him online at http://jameschambers.com or on Twitter as @CanadianJames. He lives in rural Manitoba the epicenter of software development in Canada where he and his wife are raising three mancubs and surviving the ownership of a dog and a cat.

ABOUT THE TECHNICAL EDITOR

CORY FOWLER is a Windows Azure Technical Evangelist at Microsoft Corporation. He has been working with Windows Azure since shortly after the beginning of the public beta in 2008, gaining him two consecutive MVP awards for his work in the Windows Azure community before joining Microsoft. Cory has extensive experience in web development spanning from Startup to Enterprise with various Server-side languages, including but not limited to ASP.NET, PHP, Perl/CGI. You can read more about Windows Azure Web Sites on Corys blog http://blog.syntaxc4.net or follow Cory on Twitter under the handle @SyntaxC4.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THANKS go to my incredible wife, Angie, who is supportive beyond reason, beautiful inside and out, and the perfect mother to our three awesome, inspiring children, Beemer, Pants, and Molly. Thanks to Cory and Bruce who helped make these pages come together, and Ami and Mary for putting up with my timely delivery. Though the work on this book has been short, it has been through a rough patch, so thanks to James 1:2-5 for helping me to keep focus. Thanks to my good friends, Edwin and Fred, who are walking through troubling times and showing me what true character is; and thank you to Kevin and Keith who have demonstrated wisdom, grace, and compassion that I can only hope to emulate.

INTRODUCTION TO THE WINDOWS AZURE BOOK SERIES

It has been fascinating watching the maturation of Windows Azure since its introduction in 2008. When it was announced, Azure was touted as being Microsofts new operating system. And at that level, it has not really lived up to its billing. However, if you consider Azure to be a collection of platforms and tools that allow you to cloud-enable your corporations applications and infrastructure, well, now youre on the right track.

And, as it turns out, a collection of cooperating tools and services is the best way to think of Azure. The different components that comprise Azure become building blocks that allow you to construct an environment to suit your needs. Want to be able to host a simple website? Well, then Azure Web Sites fits the bill. Want to move some of your infrastructure to the cloud while leaving other systems on premise? Azure Virtual Networking gives you the capability to extend your corporate domain to include machines hosted in Azure. Almost without exception, each twist and turn in your infrastructure roadmap can take advantage of the building blocks that make up Windows Azure.

A single book covering everything that encompasses Azure would be huge. And because of the breadth of components in Azure, such a book is likely to contain information that you are not necessarily interested in. For this reason, the Windows Azure series from Wrox takes the same building block approach that Azure does. Each book in the series drills deeply into one technology. If you want to learn everything you need to work with a particular technology, then you could not do better than to pick up the book for that topic. But you dont have to dig through 2,000 pages to find the 120 pages that matter to you. Each book stands on its own. You can pick up the books for the topics you are care about and know thats all that you will get. And you can leave the other books until desire or circumstance makes them of interest to you.