Book Image

Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook

By : Neil Mackenzie
Book Image

Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook

By: Neil Mackenzie

Overview of this book

The Windows Azure platform is Microsoft's Platform-as-a-Service environment for hosting services and data in the cloud. It provides developers with on-demand computing, storage, and service connectivity capabilities that facilitate the hosting of highly scalable services in Windows Azure datacenters across the globe. This practical cookbook will show you advanced development techniques for building highly scalable cloud-based services using the Windows Azure platform. It contains over 80 practical, task-based, and immediately usable recipes covering a wide range of advanced development techniques for building highly scalable services to solve particular problems/scenarios when developing these services on the Windows Azure platform. Packed with reusable, real-world recipes, the book starts by explaining the various access control mechanisms used in the Windows Azure platform. Next you will see the advanced features of Windows Azure Blob storage, Windows Azure Table storage, and Windows Azure Queues. The book then dives deep into topics such as developing Windows Azure hosted services, using Windows Azure Diagnostics, managing hosted services with the Service Management API, using SQL Azure and the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus. You will see how to use several of the latest features such as VM roles, Windows Azure Connect, startup tasks, and the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Storing large amounts of data for a message


The Windows Azure Queue Service supports messages containing up to 8192 bytes of data. There are obvious cases where this is not sufficient to store the data associated with a message. For example, the message could be a request to process an image or a video.

The solution is to use the Windows Azure Blob Service to store the data in a blob and store the URL of the blob in the message. When the message is retrieved, the blob can be retrieved and processed appropriately. If the data is associated only with the message, then the blob should be deleted after use. The same technique can also be used with the Windows Azure Table Service being used to store the data in a table.

In this recipe, we will learn how to store large amounts of data for a message.

How to do it...

We are going to add a message to a queue. The content of the message is the URI to a blob containing large amounts of data. We then retrieve the message and access the contents of the...