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

Installation


Getting your system ready for the development with Silverlight and Windows Azure can be tricky, as there can be a lot of service packs, tools, SDKs, and SDK toolkits that need to be installed. Microsoft has a page dedicated to getting your system ready for the Silverlight development (http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/) and another for setting up Windows Azure (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/getstarted/).

As it can be difficult to keep a track of which versions of which tools need to be installed, the recommended setup method is to use the automated Microsoft Web Platform Installer.

Visual Studio 2010

Azure and Silverlight developments can be done with both the free Visual Studio 2010 Express Web Edition (http://www.microsoft.com/express/Web) and the full versions of Visual Studio 2010 (Professional, Premium, and Ultimate). There is a system requirement of IIS 7, which requires that your development machine should be Windows Vista or above (Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows 8, and so on).

This book will assume that the reader is using a full version of Visual Studio 2010, but most features should still be available in both the versions. If the reader does wish to use Visual Studio 2010 Express Web Edition, then it can be installed automatically at the same time with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer.

Web platform installer

Once Visual Studio 2010 has been installed on your computer, the recommended way for installing the required tools and SDKs is with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/). The web platform installer always lists the latest versions of the tools and SDKs, which save your time, trying to track them down. The web platform installer will also download and install any required prerequisites. The steps are as follows:

  1. 1. Download and install the web platform installer from http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/.

  2. 2. Open the Microsoft Web Platform Installer from the start menu by clicking on Start | All Programs | Microsoft Web Platform Installer.

  3. 3. In the search window, type Visual Studio 2010 service pack and select the latest service pack. In the following screenshot, Service Pack 1(SP1) was the latest available:

  4. 4. Search for Silverlight 5 and select Silverlight 5 Tools for Visual Studio 2010, as shown in the following screenshot:

  5. 5. Search for RIA Services Toolkit and select the latest version of the WCF RIA Services Toolkit.

  6. 6. Search for Azure and select the latest versions of:

    • Windows Azure SDK for .Net

    • Windows Azure Libraries for .Net

  7. 7. In order to connect to SQL Azure, the 2008 R2 version of SQL Management Studio is required. The free express version is available to be installed. Search for SQL Server Express 2008 R2 and install the following:

    • SQL Server Express 2008 R2 Management Studio Express with SP1

    • SQL Server Express 2008 R2

    Note

    Frequently updated tools

    The tools available to be installed can change frequently. Use the list as a guide to what should be installed on your PC. An easy rule of thumb is to select any option that mentions Silverlight RIA Services or Azure.

  8. 8. Once all the components have been selected and installed, the web platform installer should show those components as Installed and unable to be selected again for installation.