Microsoft Azure Fundamentals

Introducing Windows Azure
Welcome to this overview of the Windows Azure Platform. My name is Matt Milner. In this module we're going to take a look at why cloud computing has become so important and such a hot topic these days, we'll take a look at the various components at a high level of the Windows Azure Platform to give you a sense of what makes up that platform, and then we'll take a quick lap around the platform looking at each of those components in a little bit more detail to get a sense for what they provide you and where you might use them.

Azure architecture and tools
Welcome to this module on the Windows Azure Architecture and Tools. In this module we'll take a look at the Windows Azure platform, how things fit together, and we'll dig in to the tools you'll use to build your applications for the cloud. My name is Matt Milner, and I'm an instructor with Pluralsight. Now we'll begin by taking a look at the Windows Azure architecture. So specifically we're going to look at the platform itself and how it operates, how your code lives out there, and what the primary components are. Once we've done that, we'll dig into the developer fabric or the tools you'll use to develop locally on your desktop that helps you simulate that cloud environment. We'll learn about roles and how they fit into your environment, how you need to think about them in terms of development, how you configure things, so beyond your web. config and app. config, how you configure things to run in the cloud, how you take your applications and deploy them out to the cloud, and then the various management options such as the portal, the management APIs, and we'll take a look at some third party tools that you might find useful as you're doing development with Windows Azure.

Windows Azure Roles
Welcome to this module on Windows Azure Roles. We're going to focus on understanding how you use roles to build out the definition of your service and how you configure those roles, and really, how roles makes things slightly different in your. NET development. My name is Matt Milner, and I'm an instructor with Pluralsight. So in this module we're first going to talk a little bit about what roles are, really the difference between the web and the worker roles and what they provide you as a host for your code. We'll talk specifically about how you configure your roles, what some of the specific knobs are that you can turn and what some of the different settings are that you're required to set up to create your endpoints. Then we'll also talk then about web roles and how you can create web roles, either new applications or if you've got an existing web app that you want to move to the cloud. We'll focus on role entry points, the starting point for your role code and how you can customize those, and finally we'll talk about hosting WCF Services, because there's a couple different things that you need to do to host those services in the cloud, and it also helps an understanding how to manage the various endpoints that your service or your application is listening on, and how to use those within your code.

Windows Azure Storage - tables and queues
Welcome to this module on Tables and Queues where we'll begin to look at Programming Azure Storage. My name is Matt Milner, and I'm an instructor with Pluralsight. In this module we're going to first understand how tables work out in Windows Azure, what makes them up, how they store data, what you can put in them, and we'll talk about some of the APIs for managing the tables themselves and working with the table data, how do you insert data, how do you query data out of those systems. Then we'll move onto queues and we'll just take a look at what those are. And as it turns out it's really simple to read and write messages from those queues, but we'll talk a little bit about some of the semantics for how you retrieve messages but leave them in the queue so you can come back later to lock them, and also see how the queue storage and the table storage can be used together.

Azure blobs and drives
Hello, and welcome to this module on Blobs and Drives. It's the second part of the Azure Storage Story. The first part was all about tables and queues. My name is Matt Milner, and I'm an instructor with Pluralsight. In this module we're going to take a look at the core underpinnings of blob storage, so understanding what it's for, what it's all about. We'll look at how to program against blob storage and secure your blobs or provide access to them. And then we'll look at two other storage options that are related to blob storage for storing files or storing large objects as well, local storage and Xdrive storage.

SQL Azure
Hello, and welcome to this module introducing SQL Azure. My name is Matt Milner. In this module, we're going to take a look at what exactly SQL Azure is, we'll see what the differences are with SQL Server, and then we'll talk about some of the basic developer tasks for working with SQL Azure and understand some of the synchronization options for moving data between your SQL Azure databases or between the cloud and your on-premise or mobile applications.

Moving a web application to Azure
Hello, and welcome to this module on Moving an ASP. NET Web Application to Windows Azure by Example. My name is Matt Milner, and I'm going to walk you through an example of moving a web application from on-premise to in the cloud. As part of this, we'll start by looking at moving the database. So we'll move a database that's on-premise, script it out, update that script for SQL Azure, we'll create the database out there and then connect up and run the script. So you'll see how to take that database structure, all the stored procedures and everything and get those setup out in the cloud. Then we'll take the web application logic itself, we'll set up a project containing a web role for Windows Azure, we'll modify the application in terms of its Web. config and its references and its setup, and then we'll test that out locally with the Developer Fabric in the SDK, and then we'll publish that web application up to the cloud and see it running out on Windows Azure.