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Publication Date: October 22, 2010 | Series: In Action
Azure in Action is a fast-paced tutorial intended for architects and developers looking to develop cloud-based applications on the Windows Azure Platform. Written by two of Microsoft's leading Azure evangelists, it's designed both for readers new to cloud concepts and for those familiar with cloud development but new to Azure.
Starting with core concepts, the book explores designing and scaling front-end and back-end services that run in the cloud, and more advanced scenarios in Windows Azure. Later chapters introduce the rest of the Azure Services Platform with a particular focus on SQL Azure Database.
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Chris Hay is a Microsoft MVP in Client App Dev, an international speaker who specializes in Silverlight, Azure, and ASP.NET development. He has presented Windows Azure at various conferences and usergroups since PDC 2008.
Brian Prince is an Architect Evangelist with Microsoft focused on building and educating the architect community. He has over 13 years IT management and consulting experience in numerous industries including real estate, financial services, healthcare, retail, and state government.
Brian H. Prince is an Architect Evangelist for Microsoft.
He gets super excited whenever he talks about technology, especially cloud computing, patterns, and practices. His job it to help customers strategically leverage MS technology, and help them bring their architecture to a super level.
In a past life Brian was a part of super startups, super marketing firms, and consulting firms. Much of his super architecture background includes building super scalable applications, application integration, and award winning web applications. All of them were super.
Further, he is a co-founder of the non-profit organization CodeMash (www.codemash.org). He speaks at various regional and national technology events including TechEd. He only wishes job didn't require him to say 'super' so much.
Brian holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Computer Science from Capital University, Columbus, Ohio. He is also a zealous gamer. For example, he is a huge fan of Fallout 3. He also knows how to spell defense correctly.
This book is a fairly quick read. Its strength is the way it describes the function and purpose of the main features of Azure. After reading the book, I have a better understanding of *why* and *when* to use each feature of Azure, optimization techniques, and solution architecture. There are code examples, but they tend to be rather short- you don't get deep coverage of the API's, so this book won't serve as a developer reference. You get just enough code examples to write introductory tests of Azure's features. The chapter on AppFabric seemed too brief, although this topic could probably use its own book.
In summary, this book is best for architects rather than coders.
I approached this book without having any experience with the Azure platform, and found it to be a nice, brisk, concise introduction to the platform. It spelled out the familiarities and differences between it and doing straight ASP.Net development, the differences between Web and Worker roles, the differences between the various models of access control, the authentication model support, and the different mechanisms for storing data within the Azure cloud, amongst other topics. I especially liked the parts of the book that allowed you to investigate the way the actual platform is hosted (getting details about the machine your app is running on, etc)
I felt I came away from reading it with a good understanding of how the pieces fit together, and how I could integrate portions of the platform into my work. This book was a well-timed, excellent introduction to the platform for me.
I am changing a bit my review towards the good side. This book has its own individual value add to learning Azure, however in order to make good use of it you need to complement it with some MS information. <rant> The frustrating part is finding information on the MS site, that is updated and coherent </rant>. Anyway, the info that worked for me in 04/11 is the labs of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit. Look for WAPTK on the web.
With that in hand, this book adds value as it provides backgrounder info / rationale which is collected together in a single place.
Bottom line: Don't get frustrated as I originally did because some of the examples / screen shots in this book are not accurate. Use the WAPTK for that and use this book as complement.
