Azure impressions

So, I decided to do something proper with my free Azure subscription (bundled with my MSDN account) and create a cloud service for my Windows Phone 7 application. It’s been a while since I worked with Azure and I was really impressed by the current version; the ease of deployment and online management.

The Silverlight management tools at http://windows.azure.com is very comfortable to work with and creating simple SQL Azure databases via a web browser is just, well, easy The Visual Studio 2010 Azure templates are equally great and gets you up and running within minutes.

In simple terms: Created a web service role for my WP7 application to talk to, used Entity Framework to connect to the Azure SQL database, created a worker role that (in this case) checks shipment statuses and sends push notifications back to the WP7 app and voila: Cloud-enabled app

The local debugging capabilities (Compute and Storage emulators) are all wired up for you and a quick F5 gets you going.

Basically, that’s my impressions for the current version of Azure and thus far I’m (obviously) pleased with it