Belotserkovskiy A. - Building Web Services with Microsoft Azure

Alex Belotserkovskiy is a technical evangelist for Microsoft Russia and lives in Moscow. He specializes in cloud, Internet of Things, and high performance computing topics. Alex is actively engaged in both local and international speaking activities, and works with top customers and partners to provide professional technical and technological support for their cloud projects.

Alex was the first Russian Windows Azure Most Valuable Professional, in 2012, and is a Microsoft certified developer and enterprise administrator. He is an experienced Microsoft technologies instructor.

I would like to thank my fiancee, Olga Vilkhivskaya, for putting up with my late night writing sessions and ideas. I would also like to express deep gratitude to Andrey Ivashentsev, Technical Evangelism Unit Lead for Microsoft Russia, without whose efforts this book would not have happened. Alexey Bokov, Technical Evangelist in Microsoft, has my gratitude for continuing to give me valuable experience and advice on how to do things in a better manner.

Stephen Kaufman works for Microsoft as a solution architect in the Americas Office of the CTO and is the lead architect for the US Azure PaaS Center of Expertise (CoE).

He is a public speaker and has appeared at a variety of industry conferences nationally and internationally at events, such as TechEd North America, TechEd EMEA, Microsoft SOA and BPM conference, as well as many internal Microsoft conferences over the years discussing application development, integration, and cloud computing, as well as a variety of other related topics.

Stephen is also a published author with two books Pro BizTalk 2009 (http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219815) and Pro Windows Server AppFabric (http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430228172), both by Apress Publishing as well as a number of whitepapers and other published content, including a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/skaufman.

In addition, he is a board certified architect (CITA-P-IASA Global) and continues to work mentoring and sitting on architecture certification review boards.

Lastly, Stephen was a contributing author for the Azure Architecture Certification Exam 70-534, Architecting Azure Solutions.

Nikhil Sachdeva is a senior consultant at Microsoft. He has over 11 years of experience in architecting and implementing scalable web applications and services using Microsoft technologies. He has been involved with Microsoft Azure since its early days and currently works as a subject matter expert in building custom Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions on the Azure platform. He has a passion for writing and is a contributing writer for Introducing Windows Azure for IT Professionals , Microsoft Press , and has contributed to several other Microsoft articles and blogs on Microsoft Azure and related technologies. His recent passion is building highly scalable and available solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) and frequently rants his experiences at http://connectedstuff.net.

I would like to thank my beautiful wife, Pratibha, for encouraging me to pursue my passion for writing and supporting me throughout the process. Thanks for being my support system, my buddy, my critic, and for giving me the best gift of life, our newborn son, Ayansh. A special thanks to the team at Packt Publishing for their continuous support and patience.

Harsh works as a software engineer for Microsoft. He has worked on quite a few things and he feels that it still hasn't been enough for his exploration and he should keep trying new technologies and keep learning.

Besides his interest in cloud computing (read Azure) and programming in general, he likes reading and fiddling with CTF questions and ciphers. He started the HackCon (Build the Shield) event in Microsoft, which is Microsoft's version of Capture the Flag events. He is also a moody blogger and tries to keep his portfolio up to date. You can find him at http://hars.in.

I would like to thank my friends and colleagues from whom I learn every day.

Alon Fliess is the chief architect and founder of CodeValue. He got his BSc degree in electrical and computer engineering from Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. He is also recognized as a Microsoft Regional Director (MRD). He is an expert in many technologies, be it Windows internals, C++ Windows programming (Win32/WinRT), .NET with C#, Windows Azure Cloud Computing, or Internet of Things (hardware and software).

Alon spends his time doing many interesting tasks such as software architecting, designing, mentoring, and programming. He is the author and technical reviewer of several computing books. Alon is an active member of several Patterns & Practices councils, among them is project Hiloa Windows Store Application in C++/CX and XAML.

He is one of the experts in the Microsoft Israel community. He helps Microsoft clients in many technological aspects. He gives lectures at Israeli and international conferences, such as NDC, CVCon, TechEd, and more.

To Deepti Thore, who gave me the chance to review this book, and to Milton Dsouza, who had the patience to wait for me to complete the reviewthank you both.

To my beloved wife, Liat, and my three children, Yarden, Saar, and Adva, thank you for all your understanding and support.

Harshwardhan Joshi lives and works in Pune and loves spending time with his wife, and pet cat named "Hulk". He calls himself "a Cloud engineer who writes APIs for a living". He has been passionately working on several Microsoft technologies from .NET Framework, Microsoft Silverlight, WF, and WCF to Microsoft Azure for the last 7 years and has worked on creating several exciting products. He has been working on Microsoft Azure since its inception. He currently works with RapidCircle as a Cloud Consultant. In his previous stint with Icertis, he was one of the core members responsible for building highly scalable, always available, and high performance APIs on Microsoft Azure.