Chapter 5. Accessing Azure Blob Storage from Silverlight

Blobs are "binary large objects", which is another way of saying "any arbitrary file". There are many concepts that need to be covered in this chapter as the Blob storage API can be called directly from Silverlight, whereas the Queue and Table APIs are callable only from an Azure Role.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

• Azure Blob storage

• Creating, listing, and displaying files with Silverlight

• Using the shared access signatures to upload from Silverlight

• The Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Azure Blob storage

Azure Blob storage is a way to persistently store data in the cloud in which files can be uploaded and retrieved at any time. Files uploaded onto the Blob storage can be held in containers, the accessibility of these containers can be set as public or private as follows:

• Public: These are files which you want to access freely over the Internet to distribute to the users (such as images, videos, and documents...