The Microsoft Azure Portal provides a convenient and easy-to-use way of managing all the available services of an Azure subscription, as well as many configuration settings for each of these services. Microsoft also provides a REST API to access Azure resources in order to allow developers to build custom management clients or automation solutions.

The Service Management API provides almost complete control over the resources contained in a Microsoft Azure subscription. All operations using this API must be authenticated using an X509 management certificate, which is generated on the client side and trusted by Azure by uploading its public key onto the Azure Portal.

We will see how to create this trust in the Setting up the management client recipe. Once the trust is created, a programmatic client can transmit messages through a secure, encrypted connection, calling HTTP methods in a typical REST convention.

In the first half of 2014, Microsoft released a new set of libraries...