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

The Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)


An advanced extension to Blob storage services is the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network. Usually, the files stored in the storage are hosted from a single geographical location. If the datacenter is in the US, but the user is living in Australia, there can be a large latency in getting the files to the user. A CDN can help to speed up the delivery of the files to end users by hosting files on "edge nodes" that are physically closer to the user than the original datacenter. The technology is currently employed by Microsoft as a way of distributing Windows updates, as well as the map tiles for Bing maps.

For systems that transfer large files, such as Windows updates, having the data physically closer increases the chance of it being delivered at higher data rates, due to the reduced number of links between the edge node and the Personal Computer (PC) of the user. A highly interactive application, such as Bing maps, can show a noticeable increase...