Sevket Seyalioglu

It is actually not difficult to move your asp.net application to Azure even if you are using Sessions.

This is just because of the services offered by Azure Cache. In the end, you only need to make few changes your web.config and you will be running your session through distributed cache which is provided by Azure Cache.

In simple terms, the following is the only thing you need to do:

<sessionState  mode=”Custom” customProvider=”DistributedSessionProvider”>
<providers>
<add name=”DistributedSessionProvider”
type=”Microsoft.Web.DistributedCache.DistributedCacheSessionStateStoreProvider, Microsoft.Web.DistributedCache”
cacheName=”default” applicationName=”Contoso”
useBlobMode=”true” />
</providers>
</sessionState>

Please read more @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg185682

Here are few nice articles about Service Bus on Azure

1. How does it work: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/276400/Using-Windows-Azure-Service-Bus-Messaging
2. Another how does it work with topics and subscriptions: http://robbincremers.me/2012/02/20/windows-azure-service-bus-messaging-with-publishsubscribe-pattern-using-topics-and-subscriptions/
3. Great tool, Service bu Explorer: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazure/Service-Bus-Explorer-f2abca5a

Key benefits

1. $5 per month
2. 99.99% SLA on monthly basis

Details about service: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/sql-azure/

Migration made easy: http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/documentation

Building a new tool for personal use which can become commercial later on (so many alternatives already out there in market anyway) where my “My Documents” to be synced with the blob account using sync framework.
I am totally amazed with the amount of work Microsoft did for sync framework, it is really awesome.
Very well done and most problems are just simplified.

Starter blog/code for this is: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazure/Synchronizing-Files-to-a14ecf57

Next: Syncing database to SQL Azure using sync framework (I see lots of work done around this only)

Azure is so powerful and it is increasing its power with new use cases.
I am totally amazed and I see that the game will change  completely in 10 years where cloud will be a MUST!

Given that, let’s take a look into some challenges in Azure specifically.

Azure has a nice & simple management portal and it allows to add co-admins which is extremely nice however at the same time it is damn too powerful.
Once you have access, you simply can do anything and so far there  is no role based management.

Your team may want to see what is going on Azure and you simply can’t give this access to anyone.

At this exact moment, Management API comes to our help which has all the powers as the management portal but you can simply make a simple website which just gives existing setup to your employees as a read only portal.
Details of the API can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee460799.aspx

And one of the most important thing to implement Management API is, the Management Certificate (well, you need some sort of security to give access to the system and can’t really have the password shared anywhere)
Certificates in Azure is an important subject where this article in TechNet explains all details about that: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg607453.aspx

Note: Soon Azure Readonly Portal will be live

After doing enough research on both, what we’ve end up doing is; not using any ORM tool.

ORMs are designed to do rapid development for RIA (Rich Internet Applications) where performance is not a big concern.
Yes, ORM can speed up your development such as EF 4.0 or NH but they all lack one very important thing which is support for Stored Procedures for general select which shall be by default. All ORMs are focused on eliminating that and trying to optimize queries without SP.

If you ask me, SP are most useful when you use for select in general because you can really optimize the execution plan and it will be cached on SQL server. So in all subsequent calls to the database with same routine, SQL server will always know the execution plan and it will save time. [SP's execution plans are cached on SQL server.]

Therefore not using ORM is my choice.

Here are what I lose by not using ORM

1. oData
2. Extra quick development
3. Default behavior of throwing exception on an update where data was already changed before the update (concurrency handling)

Common problem as you cannot use “aspnet_regsql.exe” tool.
Fix is also very simple, just follow instructions @ http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2006191

Once done, you are good to go, just launch your asp.net configuration utility and enjoy.
Ohh , before I forget, you can ignore the script execution warnings such as “Cannot grant, deny, or revoke permissions to sa, dbo, entity owner, information_schema, sys, or yourself.”

Enjoy

This is something which shall be considered for all enterprise level software companies where hosting is part of your business.

Here we go,

After so much name discussion, finally project name is clear.

1. It needs to be on the cloud (Azure)
2. It needs to be clean (Green)
3. It needs to be unique