Skip to main content

Moving to the cloud - part 4

When e-mail, files and blog are already in the cloud the Cornball is the only application left on my hosting provider. It is now getting really exciting because there is no doubt that the Corball should move to the Microsoft cloud, Windows Azure.

The Cornball is a Silverlight application which communicates through a WCF service with a MySQL database, all on the same hosting provider. This is about to be converted into a Silverlight application which communicates through a WCF service on Windows Azure that in turn communicates with an SQL Azure database.

Microsoft have published a lot of information to get started with Windows Azure, but basically it is quite simple. After downloading the tools and SDK it is just to get on with the development. Through my MSDN subscription I have got some free Azure capacity so just by logging on to the Windows Azure portal I am ready to configure my cloud.


The Windows Azure Management Portal is a Silverlight based user interface which is very easy to use an intuitive. There is a wide variety of settings and possibilities, but the things I needed for my application was to create a Data Store, a database and also a Hosted Service. Once these components were created I could easily set up a connection in Visual Studion which enabled me to Deploy my application directly to the cloud.


SQL Azure has a Silverlight based user interface as well, and it works perfectly for my simple needs. I have only got two tables and a couple of stored procedures. There are some limitations in SQL Azure compared to SQL Server but since I was moving from a MySQL server that was nothing I really thought about.

So, now I have moved e-mail, files, web sites and databases to the cloud and I could not be more happy! Everything has been running as clockwork and I have saved some money each year as well. I have also gained a lot of experience and set myself free from some worries.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Binding a HTML-formatted string to a WPF WebBrowser control

Sometimes there is a need to display a HTML formatted string in a WPF application. There are a couple of ways to do this, but the most stright forward is to use a WebBrowser control and the NavigateToString method. This approach has one big flaw, you cannot use binding to a string out of the box, but I found a great solution through Stack Overflow which adds a bindable property to the  WebBrowser  control using  NavigateToString . The following class is all that is needed to add that behavior. A new depencency property named Html is introduced to the  WebBrowser  and the proper change action is performed in the OnHtmlChanged method. public class BrowserBehavior { public static readonly DependencyProperty HtmlProperty = DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached( "Html", typeof(string), typeof(BrowserBehavior), new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(OnHtmlChanged)); [AttachedPropertyBrowsableForType(typeof(WebBrowser))] public static string GetHtml(WebBrowser bro
1 comment
Read more

User.Identity returns old login name after name change

When a person gets married or makes a name change for some other reason this usually means that the login name for the Active Directory-account changes as well. This is rarely a problem, but it turned out to cause some issues on our web server, where the  User.Identity  property was still returning the old login name. The user logged on with the new login name, but was identified by the web application as the old login name. The reason this occurs is because the  User.Identity  property relies on the  LsaLookupSids  method to convert the user SID to a login name. The method first calls the local  LSA-cache , which is not synchronized with the Active Directory. For this purpose a simple reboot of the web server to clear the  LSA-cache  propably would have sufficed. But since we didn't want to take the application offline rebooting was not an option. Instead, it is possible to set the registry value  LsaLookupCacheMaxSize in HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa. If this val
Post a Comment
Read more

Using Bootstrap Tooltip to show Parsley validation errors

I'm currently working on a web application using a variety of different frameworks, such as Backbone for the back-end, Bootstrap for the front-end and Parsley for client side form validation.  Parsley is a really powerful validation toolkit, but it takes some tweaking to make it blend with the Bootstrap front-end. Fortunately this is a one time fix, which can be re-used all over our project. Since there will be some custom options in our  Parsley  object, we can't use the default parsley-validate attribute on the form. Instead we have to initialize the validation with the jQuery syntax: $('#my-form').parsley(parsleyOptions); The options are were the magic happens, and in our case we have a global options object that our forms use to get the same experience all over the application. Here's what it looks like: var parsleyOptions = {  // Sets success and error class to Bootstrap class names  successClass: 'has-success',  errorClass: 'has-er
2 comments
Read more