Real life experiences: Building your first Services Application (Designing applications for Windows Azure)

This session is a real world look at the implications of developing cloud applications - the benefits and the disadvantages; the reasons to embrace it and the reasons to stay away. The session has been developed from knowledge gained while developing real applications Windows Azure. I will show you what you need to know to get started in this new world; including the development environment, the "fabric" and the storage system. We will discuss the different types of architecture you can deploy and the reasons why you would choose one over the other. The steepest learning curve is going to be around the data layer and how to produce reliable applications without any transactional support. So we will go into detail on the storage elements of Red Dog; Queues, blobs and tables and how to use them effectively. Several patterns will be introduced that should be able to provide building blocks for your own code. Finally, in order to give you the most flexibility in this new world, we will talk about how to dev software to work well both in the cloud and in a on premise data centre without writing everything twice