Creative Commons photo by Christopher Sessums. Click to see the original.
There’s no time like holiday downtime to go noodle with technologies you’ve been meaning to try out. Sometimes it’s nice to have a break from all the parties, family gatherings and the madness and crowds of Boxing-Day-and-beyond shopping. At the same time, I’m not a fan of completely vegging out in front of the TV. My own downtime plans – asides from catching up on some reading (I’m currently digging the the Oishinbo series of cooking manga) and playing the new Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty – include doing some noodling with Azure.
On the whole, Azure is pretty simple to use. As far as coding is concerned, there really aren’t too many differences between having your application run on Azure and having it run on a regular server. Naturally, setup and deployment are a little different, and the Azure team have worked hard on making it as simple as possible, and the latest Azure portal UI is the result. Still, it’s a new technology and new turf for a lot of people, and it’s easy to get lost.
If you’re working with Azure and find yourself “lost in the cloud”, we can help! Are you stuck at some point in the deployment process? Having trouble setting up a SQL Azure database? Don’t know where to start? We can help – email us at cdnazure@microsoft.com and we’ll help you get up and running!