Learning Microsoft Azure: A comprehensive guide to cloud application development using Microsoft Azure

I am very pleased with the content and the way it is delivered.It is a great source of information for IT professionals who want to make a first step on Microsoft Azure with a single book and for those who want to use it as a reference book.It covers many of Microsoft Azure technologies including VMs,AD,SQL Azure etc and is full of configuration examples. Examples are really helpful to learn how to use the information provided in the book to the real-world needs.For me it's a must-have book to be one step ahead on Azure.

This book gives a very comprehensive, step by step tutorial on how to build systems usingMicrosoft's Azure cloud platform. I found it particularly useful in learning how to create adatabase application using Azure's SQL server database. One section in the book, took theuser through the process of creating a real­life data model to deploying it on the cloud. It thendescribed how to create an MVC based azure website using this database, and integratingActive Directory for user authentication and authorization. The step by step instructions wereconcise and clear, and their use of appropriate screenshots, made it very easy to follow.There is so much more in this book. I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking to migratetheir on­ premise development to the cloud.

The book presents the usage of many Azure services, composing an interesting and quite complex sample application through out the book.I appreciate the chapters about mobile and desktop applications as sample clients for cloud services, next to typical web app. I have appreciated the detailed description of deployment, debugging and authentication: I will use them as a reference guide.All chapters are easy to read. Some of them, like Cloud Services and Service Bus Topics, can be difficult to understand why applying them.The topic I really miss is a chapter about usage of Azure Storage at application level and storage opportunities in Azure in general (caching, NoSQL).It is a great book for anyone wants migrating his existing legacy asp.net web projects to Azure. It is not a book for who is searching an introduction to cloud principles, how to apply them in Azure and how to rethink application architecture.A worth read.

Cloud computing has already consolidated its presence in the tech industry, and it is quickly becoming a standard choice for hosting enterprise applications. The greatest advantage of the cloud is that resources are provisioned rapidly and on demand, without human intervention on the provider's part. Moreover, every provider offers a wide range of services that can significantly extend the capabilities of hosted application.In order to harvest the true power of the cloud, one needs thorough knowledge of distributed systems theory, awareness of which services are offered by the targeted cloud platform, plus a solid strategy for identifying and properly separating the concerns of a system. The ultimate goal for every cloud software architect is to design a reliable, highly-available system which can dynamically scale on demand to meet business needs.Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform. I have been designing and developing cloud applications on Azure for the last few years, starting as an early adopter and watching it grow rapidly ever since. Unfortunately, Azure's documentation focuses on each of the services offered separately, providing little to no advice on how to design a complete cloud solution. I ended up spending months researching, experimenting and brainstorming in order to come up with an acceptable architecture for a specific enterprise solution.Recently I came across a book called "Learning Microsoft Azure", written by Geoff Webber-Cross. Its purpose is to teach software engineers the main aspects of the Azure platform, and to do so in the context of the best architectural approach possible. It is a promising effort of great significance, and Geoff has done it wonderfully. The book is not just for Azure beginners; I was able to gain a lot from it, even after working on Azure for about three years on a daily basis.In Learning Microsoft Azure, Geoff helps you build pieces of an enterprise cloud application called "Azure Bakery". By the time you have worked through all the chapters, Geoff has introduced you to the three principal types of cloud service models (Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Software as a Service) as well as to all major services that Azure provides (Websites, Cloud Services, Active Directory, Mobile Services, Virtual Machines, SQL, Storage, Service Bus, Diagnostics, Visual Studio Online and more). He also offers fully-functioning code samples leveraging the Azure SDK, plus demonstrating the capabilities of various other development frameworks, like ASP.NET MVC, WEB API and SignalR. Finally, Geoff offers a comprehensive guide on deploying applications to Azure, a process which requires great attention, especially when it is performed on live systems.I found that Chapter 8, regarding worker roles, is one of the most important chapters in the book. Worker roles are used to perform CPU- or network-intensive tasks in an asynchronous manner. Experience shows that almost every cloud application uses at least one worker role. Apart from the theoretical background offered on worker roles, Geoff demonstrates the internal lifecycle of a cloud service, along with some solid code practices to follow when developing one.Geoff provides an excellent starting point for creating sound and maintainable cloud architectures. Those architectures involve proper separation of concerns and allow various parts of a solution to scale independently. The book is targeted towards intermediate software engineers who are already proficient in OOP and C#. Keep in mind that many of the design decisions described within the book are transferable, meaning that they can be used while developing solutions for other cloud platforms.I enjoyed the book and I found it valuable. I consider it to be the missing manual for Microsoft Azure. I believe you will enjoy it too!

IntroductionThis time, it is an introductory book, where the reader is introduced to Microsoft Azure, and guided as he/she develops a full solution for an imaginary industrial bakery, from end to end, including a mobile app. It covers technologies such as ASP.NET MVC 5, Windows Phone 8, Entity Framework Code First and Web API, always using C# and .NET as the backing framework. At the end of each chapter, there’s a questions and answers page where we can assess our level of understanding of the topics that were discussed in it.The author is Geoff Webber-Cross (@webbercross), which also authored another book on Azure and Windows Phone.Chapter 1: Getting Started with Microsoft AzureThe first chapter, as we might expect, does an introduction to cloud computing and the Microsoft Azure service, presents a decision framework for aiding in selecting a cloud service as opposed to on-premises, guides the reader in creating an Azure account including it’s many services and costs, and lists the most relevant terms that we will be encountering throughout the book.Chapter 2: Designing a System for Microsoft AzureHere we are presented with the sample scenario, its objectives and requirements and the architectural vision of it. Different views on the system and its subsystems are presented and for each the technical decisions are explained.Chapter 3: Starting to Develop with Microsoft AzureNext we setup the development environment, choose a Visual Studio edition, download the required SDK and create a project to be published in our Azure account. Visual Studio Online is also presented and it’s integration with Azure, namely, in order to ensure continuous integration and delivery.Chapter 4: Creating and Managing a Windows Azure SQL Server DatabaseHere we get an overview of the SQL functionality of Azure, how to create and manage databases using the portal, Visual Studio and the SQL Server Management Studio, then we learn how to use Entity Framework Code First to access and manipulate its data, and to migrate to and from different versions using the Migrations API.Chapter 5: Building Azure MVC WebsitesThis chapter explains how we can build an MVC application using OAuth authentication (social accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, Google and Microsoft Live). It goes on explaining how we can set up custom domains and SSL certificates for HTTPS and how to integrate the Azure Active Directory for single sign-on and custom permissions.Chapter 6: Azure Website Diagnostics and DebuggingThis one is about diagnosing problems and debugging our applications. It presents the basic built-in tracing and logging features of Azure and how we can obtain this information and goes on to show how we can use table storage and blobs for custom storing of structured logs and its querying. Kudu is briefly introduced and at the end we learn how to do remote debugging.Chapter 7: Azure Service Bus Topic IntegrationNext up is Service Bus, Azure’s enterprise service bus service. We learn how to configure it, create and manage topics using the portal and how to use the service from our MVC application and expose it as a service.Chapter 8: Building Worker RolesThe next chapter is about Worker Roles, a feature of Azure Websites that performs disconnected (non web-related) tasks. The reader is guided in creating a Worker Role with Visual Studio, executing it in the Emulator and publishing it to Azure. The example presented builds on the Service Bus topics discussed in the previous chapter. We also learn about other scheduling mechanism of Azure, Scheduler jobs, and implement an example using Queues.Chapter 9: Cloud Service Diagnostics, Debugging, and ConfigurationHere we learn about configuring and using the diagnostics features of Cloud Services, again expanding the concepts introduced in chapter 6. We talk about IntelliTrace and Remote Debugging and on how to connect to our virtual machines with Remote Desktop. Finally we are given an example on how to use script tasks to automate common needs.Chapter 10: Web API and Client IntegrationThis chapter introduces ASP.NET Web API, Microsoft’s latest technology for building REST web services and SignalR, for asynchronous, duplex, real-time communication between web clients and the server. The provided example shows how to integrate these two technologies to broadcast messages to connected clients, including a desktop Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) application. In the end we learn how to use the Active Directory to authorize accesses to our services.Chapter 11: Integrating a Mobile Application Using Mobile ServicesComing closer to the end, this chapter walks the reader on the various aspects of building a mobile client that connects to the cloud using Azure Mobile Services. We see how to implement a mobile-enabled web application and Web API service, how to publish it and how to implement a matching Windows Phone application, fully featured with push notifications. It also guides us on configuring the mobile service with Active Directory for authentication. At the end we are shown how to build a Windows Store app to interact with our application.Chapter 12: Preparing an Azure System for ProductionThe final chapter puts everything in place, explains how to setup different build configurations for different deployment environments and how to build and deliver deployment packages for Azure. At the very end we get a deployment checklist that may come in handy if ever we run into problems.ConclusionOverall, I enjoyed reading this book. It doesn’t cover all of Azure, but it does a very decent job in explaining how one can build a real-life application that works and handles most typical concerns, including support for mobile devices.