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

Fundamentals of Azure storage services


The Windows Azure storage service provides a scalable and durable way to persist data. It is recommended to store your data and "application state" in the Azure Storage, separated from your Azure compute instances. Each of the operations that are performed in the compute instances should be stateless, with the final state stored in a non-volatile store. Although it is possible to store data locally in the compute service instances, it is not a good idea as all the data stored inside an instance can be lost if an instance is taken offline.

All the operations of storage services can be done through a REST-based API. On being exposed as a REST service, it allows developers to consume the storage service APIs with Silverlight, ASP.Net, JavaScript, and other technologies.

Note

RESTful services

REST (REpresentational State Transfer) is used as a standard way of using the HTTP protocol to interact with the resources on a web server. The URL is used to define...