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

Chapter 7. Relational Data with SQL Azure and Entity Framework

Many enterprise applications require a relational database to persist business data. Microsoft offers a cloud-scale, relational database named SQL Azure. SQL Azure allows developers to begin with the building of cloud solutions quickly. This chapter will use Entity Framework to simplify the data access.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

  • SQL Azure

  • What Entity Framework is

  • Using SQL Azure in Silverlight

SQL Azure

SQL Azure offers a relational data store as part of the Windows Azure platform. It is highly available and requires less maintenance than a traditional on-premises SQL Server installation. SQL Azure is built on top of SQL Server technologies, which keeps the compatibility high with the existing technology stacks. This allows developers to jump quickly into a familiar environment and get started.

SQL Azure is a managed service. Microsoft handles all the basic maintenance and administration issues for you...