Course: Windows Azure 2012 development

This course will introduce you to the cloud and Windows Azure. You will see the difference between a public and private cloud. Then you’ll be shown how to get started using the tools, how to setup a subscription, and see the Windows Azure Training Kit. Next you’ll get the tour of Azure, including new features, how to get around the portal and when you need to go to the old portal.

Windows Azure has many features that are useful for IT work. This course covers how to setup and run a virtual machine. You well then see about the various web sites that can be set up. Then you well learn about many of the cloud services Azure has to offer.

Windows Azure offers a new way for data storage. This course will explore Azure storage options with Blobs, Tables, Queues, and SQL. You will also get a flyover of the Content Delivery Network (CDN) and SQL Data Sync. Then you take a look at how and where the public cloud enables solutions and where it fits in an IT strategy.

This is an intro to “Platform as a Service” and how it is different from Web Sites and why you would design for this. It dives deep into service definitions and cloud configuration, explores startup tasks and how to codify an instance. We show how worker roles fit into the model and communication patterns for working with them.

Working with BLOB, Tables and Queues requires an understanding that some data makes sense for relational storage and some does not, this session dives into storage accounts, patterns for working with the storage API’s.

This is an overview of working with SQL Azure and how it is different than SQL Server on Premise. We show creating a server, adding databases, migrating data to the database in the cloud, and some of the connection patterns for working with the data. Then you’ll be shown how to create a site and work with deployments, including TFS and GIT. You’ll see scaling, custom domain names, and web site configuration.

Today's users don't live on just a workstation or a laptop. With the proliferation of laptops, smart phones, and tablets people work from a variety of forms and clients. Mobile Services is a new compute service available in Windows Azure, and it makes it very easy to work with data and identity to give your customers a consistent experience across all their devices. So we will look at the patterns for building connected applications and what Mobile Services has to offer. Establishing identity for your applications is a problem that developers have had to deal with since computers have been around. Historically we have had to depend on user names and passwords to identify who is using our apps, and with creating passwords for each application means that you have to also support managing them too. Because of this we will look at how Access Control Services provides services for managing that identity conversation for us, and simplifies how we can use this service in our apps.

Cloud Computing refers to ways to use virtualization technology to make it possible to provision and deploy applications and systems into public and private data centers around the world. But it doesn't mean that there will never be problems, and in this course is all about how patterns for architecting solutions not only scale but also support our efforts to understand how they run. We will look at how tools we can use to look under the hood and see what is going on and diagnose the servers when there is a problem. Building large scale systems means connecting our applications and services together across boundaries and networks to allow them to communicate and share data to get business done, the challenge of making this work is that while we may own some of the systems we probably don't own them all. So you will be introduced to the concept of the Service Bus, which is a collection of communication services available in Windows Azure. We will take a look what these services are and how they work, and see how we can get started working with the Service Bus.