With the introduction of Windows Azure I was looking for something I could write where I could kick the tires and see what’s involved with this new technology.  For a quick overview what I came up with, please see the video video I created for my Mix09 “Show Off” entry hosted on SoapBox.  My first (of hopefully many) Azure applications I created is online at http://www.tweetmyrun.net.  The user experience needs a little tweaking but it seems to be working great!

This application uses the following technologies:

• Windows Live Authentication
• Windows Azure Hosting Services
• Windows Azure Table Storage
• Silverlight 2.0 “talking” to Azure via WCF

Here’s are some high-level bullet points you need to get started:

1. Download the Windows Azure SDK
2. Download the Windows Visual Studio Tools for Azure
3. Apply to participate in the beta.
4. Create a library project to contain your DAL, I found this post as a great starting point.
5. Start your development storage from the start menu after configuring the your table storage settings with the following settings:
   1. AccountName = devstoreaccount1
   2. Shared Key = Eby8vdM02xNOcqFlqUwJPLlmEtlCDXJ1OUzFT50uSRZ6IFsuFq2UVErCz4I6tq/K1SZFPTOtr/KBHBeksoGMGw==
   3. Storage Endpoint = 127.0.0.1:<StoragePort>
6. Create BAT file to extract the settings from your DAL assembly to create tables to simulate you Azure Table Storage with something similar to:
   "Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0\bin\DevtableGen.exe" /forceCreate "/server:localhost\SQLExpress" "/database:MyDatabase" obj\Debug\MyDAL.dll
   pause
7. For more information on configuring IIS 7.0 click here.
8. Although you can certainly test your application on the local development fabric, as long as you create your site as a web role, you can test most of the features as just a standard IIS web site.
9. When working with Live Authentication redirection back to your server, I found creating an entry in your HOSTS file works good.

If you have any questions, please free to message me on Twitter via @bytemaster

-ec