Windows Azure is a highly scalable, robust, and cost-effective solution for the deployment of applications and services—for organizations and enterprises of all sizes, and in all types of markets. My task at Microsoft is to ensure that developers can help these organizations and enterprises to achieve their goals by quickly and easily taking advantage of the power, flexibility, and availability of Windows Azure services.
Developing on the Windows Azure platform is a natural extension for developers who are familiar with the Microsoft platform, and with tools and development environments such as .NET and Visual Studio. However, to be really successful in this exciting new arena requires developers to understand some less familiar concepts such as multi-tenancy, data partitioning, and the robust storage mechanisms used in Windows Azure and SQL Azure.
Within our teams, we’ve done our best to build a broad set of the tools that developers can use to build Windows Azure applications and services. And now, with this guide, the patterns & practices team is extending the developer experience by providing the information they require to build high performance, real world-ready applications on the Windows Azure platform.
“Developing Applications for the Cloud” is the second in a series of patterns & practices guides that explore the scenarios for building cloud-hosted applications. The first guide showed how developers can move their applications to the cloud. This guide explores the development of new applications for the cloud. It is based on the experiences of a fictitious organization named Tailspin that is building a scalable, multi-tenant application to host surveys; and explores major concepts and implementation details associated with the development of Windows Azure applications.