Book Image

Windows Azure programming patterns for Start-ups

By : Riccardo Becker
Book Image

Windows Azure programming patterns for Start-ups

By: Riccardo Becker

Overview of this book

Leverage different Windows Azure components together with your existing Microsoft .NET skills to fully take advantage of the power of Windows Azure. Use this book to start small and end big by creating and using storage, cloud services, sql databases, networking, caching and other innovative technology to realize your first top-class Windows Azure service! "Windows Azure for Start-ups" is an incremental guide that will take you from the essentials of the Windows Azure platform up to the realization of your own cloud services running on the platform. You will learn how to apply different technologies of the Windows Azure platform with the help of examples all focusing on one single fictitious start-up scenario. This book is centred around a fictitious company called Geotopia that wants to build a brand new social network by using the Windows Azure platform. It will take the reader from the theory and rationale behind Windows Azure right to building services and coding C#. The books starts by outlining the concepts of Windows Azure. It then demonstrates how to set up a development environment and how to build your application by using different storage mechanisms, applying different features from the Windows Azure platform and ending with the newest features explained from the latest release. Windows Azure for Startups will help you take full advantage of the Windows Azure platform and bring your new service online as quickly as possible.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Windows Azure Programming Patterns for Start-ups
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Best practices


This section describes best practices with respect to the use of SQL Database and contains some code snippets and walkthroughs on how to implement these best practices.

Encryption and security

Encryption within Windows Azure SQL Database is the responsibility of the application, as it does not support the data encryption mechanisms for data that resides on the SQL database.

Obviously, it is not a good security approach to store passwords in source code. Store all your secrets encrypted in configuration files.

Encryption demo

To use encryption from your web or worker roles, use Pkcs12 Protected Configuration Provider, since the standard protected configuration providers in the .NET framework, for example, RsaProtectedConfigurationProvider, is not supported on the Windows Azure platform. If you connect to your instances of Windows Azure SQL Database from applications running on your own datacenter, it is still recommended that you use the configuration providers from the .NET framework...