Book Image

Microsoft Azure: Enterprise Application Development

Book Image

Microsoft Azure: Enterprise Application Development

Overview of this book

Microsoft's Azure platform has proved itself to be a highly scalable and highly available platform for enterprise applications. Despite a familiar development model, there is a difference between developing for Azure and moving applications and data into the cloud. You need to be aware of how to technically implement large-scale elastic applications. In this book, the authors develop an Azure application and discuss architectural considerations and important decision points for hosting an application on Azure. This book is a fast-paced introduction to all the major features of Azure, with considerations for enterprise developers. It starts with an overview of cloud computing in general, followed by an overview of Microsoft's Azure platform, and covers Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and AppFabric, discussing them with the help of a case-study. The book guides you through setting up the tools needed for Azure development, and outlines the sample application that will be built in the later chapters. Each subsequent chapter focuses on one aspect of the Azure platform—web roles, queue storage, SQL Azure, and so on—discussing the feature in greater detail and then providing a programming example by building parts of the sample application. Important architectural and security considerations are discussed with each Azure feature. The authors cover topics that are important to enterprise development, such as transferring data from an on-premises database to SQL Azure using SSIS, securing an application using AppFabric access control, blob and table storage, and asynchronous messaging using Queue Storage. Readers will learn to leverage the use of queues and worker roles for the separation of responsibilities between web and worker roles, enabling linear scale out of an Azure application through the use of additional instances. A truly "elastic" application is one that can be scaled up or down quickly to match resources to demand as well as control costs; with the practices in this book you will achieve application elasticity.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Microsoft Azure: Enterprise Application Development
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

JupiterMotorsERP local application


Adding our local application to the solution is very simple. Right-click on our solution, and choose Add | New Project....

Under the project type Windows, select Windows Forms Application. Name the project as JupiterMotorsERP and click OK.

This will create a Form1.vb file and an app.config file. The Form1.vb will be our form design and code, whereas the app.config will hold any settings we wound need for the application.

As the first step toward setting up our local application, we're going to build the design of our form. We need the following:

  • Two listboxes named lbOrdersNotComplete and lbOrderStatuses

  • A label named lCurrentStatus and another named lMessage

  • A link button called lnkUpdateCurrentStatus

  • A button called btnUpdateOrderStatus

Our sample application form now looks like the following screenshot:

It's going to be a little tough for us to code our Windows Forms application to use our web services, as we haven't yet told the project where we're...