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

Creating a table


The Windows Azure Table Service supports a simple two-level hierarchy. There is a single level of tables each of which contains zero or more entities. An entity can have up to 255 properties, including three system-defined properties, and there is no requirement that different entities in the same table have the same properties. This feature makes the Table service schemaless. The only requirement of entities in a table is that the combination of PartitionKey and RowKey is distinct for each entity in a table. Consequently, when a table is created, the only required information is its name.

The Windows Azure Storage Client library contains a CloudTableClient class that provides a set of synchronous and asynchronous methods supporting the creation and deletion of tables. It also supports the listing of the tables associated with a Windows Azure Storage Service storage account.

In this recipe, we will learn how to use the synchronous methods to create and delete tables as well...