Quick Pre-Requisites Install for Windows Azure

Jim Nakashima over at Cloudy in Seattle has a great post outlining steps to quickly install Windows Azure Tools and SKD Pre-Reqs.

Check it out @ Cloudy in Seattle.  This is a great timesaver if you’re building your own deveopment environment or just installing on a clean box.

Creating your First Azure Service – Azure Quickstart

In this first part of our Azure Quickstart series, we’ll build a simple Hello Cloud service.  This service will display “Hello Cloud” to anyone browsing to our page.  

To start, run Visual Studio as an administrator.

File –> New Project

We’ll begin by selecting the File –> New Project menu item in Visual Studio 2008. 

Once the New Project dialog box is brought up, select the Cloud Service Project Type on the left hand side of the dialog.  On the right hand side of the dialog, choose Web Cloud Service. 

We’ll name the project “HelloCloud” and click the OK button to create the project.

Newly Created Azure Solution

When the solution loads, two projects are created as within it.  The HelloCloud_WebRole is a standard ASP.NET project.  It is where we will be building our website.  The HelloCloud project is a Cloud Service project.  This project references the HelloCould_WebRole project and also contains a configuration file for our solution. 

Creating the Default Page

Creating our Default page will be minimal.  We will add a label to the page, which will display our Hello Cloud text.

Add the following code inside the form tag.

<div>
    <asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text="Hello Cloud" />
</div>

Testing the Page

Press the F5 key to start the application in Debug mode.  The ASP.NET project will compile as normal.  However, since there is a Cloud Service project in the solution, it will use the development fabric to load the application.  Finally, the page will load and display our “Hello Cloud” message.

If you look at the task bar, you will notice a new icon.  This icon is for the development fabric, which simulates the Azure runtime environment.  It is used for building and testing Azure services locally on your machine.

Wrap-up

In this post, we looked at building a simple service.   In later installments, we’ll cover debugging and logging, deployment, and the Azure dashboard.

Latest Azure SDK, Tools for Visual Studio & Training Kit

The latest version of the Azure Training Kit was just released.  It includes:

• 11 hands-on labs
• 18 demo scripts
• 9 presentations (including speaker notes)

The latest Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio & SDK is the March 2009 CTP Release.