Book Image

Microsoft Silverlight 5 and Windows Azure Enterprise Integration

By : David Burela
Book Image

Microsoft Silverlight 5 and Windows Azure Enterprise Integration

By: David Burela

Overview of this book

Microsoft Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating rich media applications and line of business applications for the web and desktop. Microsoft Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Silverlight allows you to integrate with Windows Azure and create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on Windows Azure This book shows you how to create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on Windows Azure. Integrating Silverlight and Windows Azure can be difficult without guidance. This book will take you through all the steps to create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on the Windows Azure platform. The book starts by providing the steps required to set up the development environment, providing an overview of Azure. The book then dives deep into topics such as hosting Silverlight applications in Azure, using Azure Queues in Silverlight, storing data in Azure table storage from Silverlight, accessing Azure blob storage from Silverlight, relational data with SQL Azure and RIA, and manipulating data with RIA services amongst others.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Microsoft Silverlight 5 and Windows Azure Enterprise Integration
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Azure Table storage versus SQL Azure


When someone is first introduced to the Windows Azure Platform, it is very common to hear the question asked, Should I be using Azure Tables or SQL Azure? The largest difference between the two offerings is in the way each of them stores the data:

  • Azure Table storage: It is built on top of the Azure Storage platform. It comprises flexible or schema-less entities. There is no referential integrity between the tables, and no custom indexes. It can scale massive amounts of data due to the partition key.

  • SQL Azure: It is an SQL Server that has been configured to be hosted on top of the Windows Azure in a high availability mode. It comprises standard SQL Tables with indexes and referential integrity. It may not scale as far as Azure Table storage.

A table within the Azure Table storage can be thought of as a single spreadsheet. In a spreadsheet, all the data is stored inside it, separate and distinct from any other data, as there is no referential integrity...