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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Cornball goes to Brunch with Chaplin

Lately I've been working pretty hard on different projects but not really stumbling upon anything blogworthy. The most recent project is quite interesting though, a single page, touch friendly, web application using the latest and greatest technologies. We've ended up with using Brunch with Chaplin , which is a very neat way of setting up a Backbone based single page web project with Brunch and Chaplin . Aside from this, I have my own little project that has lived on for almost 15 years already, The Cornball . From being a plain Windows application written i C an Win32 API, it has been ported to .NET using WPF, and is currently a Silverlight application hosted on Windows Azure. I could not find a better time to reanimate this project and create a new web based version, touch friendly, super optimized, awesome in any way. So I did... So please follow my journey at Github . It's going to take a while, I assure you, but I already have some ground work done. Meanwhile,...

Bindable RichTextBox with HTML conversion in WPF

In WPF , the RichTextBox  control is not really like other controls. Due to its flexible nature, there is no built in way of binding a property to the content. In this case, I wanted a simple  RichTextBox  control with a binding to an HTML formatted string to be able to use the built-in formatting features of the  RichTextBox  and allow users to create simple HTML formatted content. First, doing the conversion on-the-fly proved to have major performance issues, so I ended up binding the content to a XAML string. The XAML to HTML conversion can be performed at any time. I created a UserControl with a bindable Text-property. The view contains a  RichTextBox  control. <RichTextBox x:Name="richTextBox" TextChanged="OnRichTextBoxChanged"> The source code for the user control contains the Text property and the methods to handle the binding. public static readonly DependencyProperty TextProperty = DependencyProperty.Register( "Te...

Using ASP.NET MVC with MEF

I wrote this post almost a year ago, but never published it for some reason. Anyway, here is a little MVC/MEF magic. By default a controller in MVC must have a parameterless constructor. When using MEF a good practice is to inject the services via constructor parameters. These two in combination obviously creates an issue where the following scenario will not work out of the box, since there is no parameterless constructor for  MVC  to use. Note that the PartCreationPolicy is set to NonShared since a new controller have to be initialized for each request. [Export] [PartCreationPolicy(CreationPolicy.NonShared)] public class HomeController : Controller {     private readonly IServiceClient _service;     [ImportingConstructor]     public HomeController(IServiceClient service)     {         _service = service;     }     public ActionResult Index()     {         ...