First, you need to set up a Windows Azure service in the cloud so you can deploy a Windows Azure application later. Each Windows Azure service created in the cloud is mapped to a virtual machine; however, you have no control over the virtual machine itself—you can only deploy your applications and configure certain parameters. Follow these steps:

As mentioned in Chapter 1, creating an affinity group is very important for two reasons:

Let's create a simple Windows Azure application in Visual Studio that displays a list of database users. The Windows Azure project is an ASP.NET application created with a special project template: Cloud.

Creating Your First Visual Studio Cloud Project

To create a Visual Studio cloud project, follow these steps:

1. Start Visual Studio in elevated mode (as an Administrator). To do so, right-click Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, and select "Run as administrator," as shown in Figure 9-5. Running as Administrator is required by the Windows Azure simulation tools that give you the ability to test your Azure solution locally.

   

   Figure 9.5. Start Visual Studio in elevated mode.

If you don't start Visual Studio in elevated mode, you're able to create the project but you can't run it. If you try, you get an error message telling you to restart Visual Studio, as shown in Figure 9-6.

Figure 9.6. Error trying to run an Azure project when not in elevated mode

1. Choose File → New → New Project to bring up the window shown in Figure 9-7 for Visual Studio 2008 or Figure 9-8 for Visual Studio 2010. Select the Cloud project type (Cloud Service in Visual Studio 2010), and choose Windows Azure Cloud service.

   

   Figure 9.7. Cloud project type in Visual Studio 2008

   

   Figure 9.8. Cloud Service project type in Visual Studio 2010

2. Enter a name for your project, and click OK. A new screen comes up (see Figure 9-9) in which you can select a role for your application. The role of your ASP.NET application dictates its primary purpose and what you're able to do with the project. The following roles are available:

   • ASP.NET Web Role. Lets you create a web site with ASP.NET.

   • ASP.NET MVC 2 Web Role. Lets you create an MVC 2 web application (only available in Visual Studio 2010).

   • WCF Web Service Role. Allows you to create a WCF service in Windows Azure.

   • Worker Role. Equivalent to a background service in Windows Azure that has no user interface.

   • CGI Web Role. Lets you create a web application using a technology other than ASP.NET, such as Python.

   

   Figure 9.9. Role Types in Visual Studio 2010

3. For this example, select the first option (ASP.NET Web Role), and click the right arrow (

   

4. To change the name, select WebRole1 and press the F2 key or click the Edit link. To see the Edit link, place your mouse somewhere on the WebRole1 service list item: you see two icons come up on the right. The first one (with the pencil) allows you to edit the name, and the second lets you remove this web role (see Figure 9-10).

   

   Figure 9.10. Editing the web role's name

5. Change the name to wrAzureExample, and press the Enter Key. Don't use AzureExample as the web role name, or there will be a conflict with the solution name provided earlier. The web role should now look like Figure 9-11.

   

   Figure 9.11. Web role name changed

6. Click OK.

At this point, you've created a new cloud solution. Solution Explorer looks a little different than it does for a typical ASP.NET project. Your cloud solution contains two projects: the AzureExample project and the wrAzureExample web role, which is itself a project, as shown in Figure 9-12. The AzureExample project contains configuration files that will be deployed later in Windows Azure.

Figure 9.12. Project layout for the ASP.NET web role

Note

At the time of this writing, Windows Azure supports .NET 3.5 SP1 and .NET 4.0.

Connecting a GridView to SQL Azure

Continue the example by following these steps:

1. Add a GridView control on the Default.aspx page, and connect it to a SQL Azure database. Although SqlDataSource is compatible with SQL Azure, it isn't possible to add a SqlDataSource and configure it with the built-in wizard; these steps next show you how to configure the SqlDataSource manually.

2. Open the Default.aspx page, and select Design view.

3. Drag a SqlDataSource from the Toolbox. Drag a GridView control on the page as well, and set its Data Source property to SqlDataSource1, as shown in Figure 9-13.

   

   Figure 9.13. Changing the GridView's Data Source property

4. Open the web.config file, and enter your connection string. (Chapter 3 explains how to retrieve your connection string from the Azure Portal.) You need to add a connectionStrings node under the configuration node, as shown in the following example:

   <connectionStrings>
        <add
             name="Connection1"
             providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"
            connectionString="Server=tcp:jt4y4mmglp.database.windows.net;
                 Database=EnzoLog;User ID=test@jt4y4mmglp;
                 Password=yourPasswordHere;
                Trusted_Connection=False;Encrypt=True;"/>
   </connectionStrings>

   Note

   Make sure to specify the user ID as <user name>@<server name>.

5. Go back to the Default.aspx page, and change the SqlDataSource settings as follows by adding the ConnectionString and the SelectCommand settings manually.

<asp:SqlDataSource ID="SqlDataSource1" runat="server"
    ConnectionString="<%$ ConnectionStrings:Connection1 %>"
    SelectCommand="SELECT uid, name FROM sys.sysusers ORDER BY 1" >
</asp:SqlDataSource>

Running the project should give you output similar to that shown in Figure 9-14.

Figure 9.14. Running the solution locally and fetching data from SQL Azure

So far, you're running this project on the local machine. Although the Windows Azure Tools are required, this project doesn't use any of the Windows Azure storage options; it connects directly to a live SQL Azure database.

You could have created the same project as a regular ASP.NET application and obtained the same result. However, because you're about to deploy this project on Windows Azure, you must create a cloud project.

Note

This chapter assumes you've configured the SQL Azure firewall correctly. Also, connecting from a Windows Azure service requires you to set the "Allow Microsoft Services access to this server" option in the firewall configuration. If you get a connection error stating that you aren't allowed to connect from a specific IP address, see Chapter 3 for detailed information about how to properly set up the SQL Azure firewall.

You're almost there. In this section, you walk through the steps of deploying the ASP.NET application in the cloud:

Your screen should now look like Figure 9-18. To start your virtual machine, click Run under Staging. This operation may take a few minutes. When the startup operation is completed, you see the status of your service as Ready. At this point, you can test your ASP.NET application in the cloud by clicking the Web Site URL link in Staging. Notice that this isn't the URL you originally requested—the public URL previously registered is reserved for production. Instead, staging is given a deployment GUID that's also part of the web site's URL. In this case, the URL for the staging environment is http://de2d988c570d4c36b43a72686391d4b5.cloudapp.net/

Figure 9.18. Completed deployment of your service

Clicking the link opens another browser and runs your service in the cloud (see Figure 9-19).

Figure 9.19. Running the service in the cloud

Now that the code has been tested in staging, go back to the service management page (shown earlier in Figure 9-18) and click the center icon (

You may have noticed that you haven't changed any database settings between staging and production. Staging and production environments refer only to Windows Azure services, not the SQL Azure database running behind the scenes.

As a result all versions of your ASP.NET application (when run locally, in staging or in production) point to the same SQL Azure database by default, unless you specifically change your configuration settings in each environment (see Figure 9-20). You also need to make sure your firewall configuration is correctly set, or you may have a surprise when publishing your web application in the cloud.

Figure 9.20. Summary of deployment scenarios

This chapter showed you how to create a simple ASP.NET application that connects to a SQL Azure database. This requires a few configuration steps, including the creation of a Windows Azure service in the cloud and the installation of a Visual Studio extension called the Windows Azure Tools.

While this chapter focused primarily on deploying an ASP.NET application in the cloud, you can very easily deploy ASP.NET projects on your enterprise IIS servers and configure the connection string to connect to a SQL Azure database. This gives you multiple deployment options to consider, although you must keep in mind that each deployment option has a different cost structure. Data transfer between Windows Azure and SQL Azure is free within the same region, but you pay for compute time in Windows Azure.