The MIX10 conference is over and Clark and I are jazzed over the announcements about Windows Phone 7, Silverlight 4, OData, Web Deploy, etc., etc., etc. Check out the last day recap.
Many thanks to Lance Larson, Travis Feirtag and Aaron Hoffman for joining us in what was going to be a quick recap of the day but turned into a really interesting conversation about what we all got out of the day at MIX10.
Topics
Go to the Smackdown and get the details.
The huge topics of the day are Silverlight 4 and Windows Phone Series 7. The CTP version of the development tools for the phone are available and include:
Go to the Smackdown and get the details.
Clark and I are at MIX10 and we talked about some of the new features of Silverlight 4 (available in Visual Studio 2010 or Web Developer Express 2010). We also touch upon ASP.NET MVC 2.0 which was just released.
Go to the Smackdown and get the show.
In this musing Clark and Mark kick off their trip to the Microsoft Mix 2010 Conference in Vega$. We will explore some of the different techniques they use to navigate such a conference.
Go listen at DeveloperSmackdown.com!
Gonna be in Vegas? Ping us through Twitter –> CSell5 and Mark_Nic
Install and/or setup these components:
I am going to assume that you have already installed one of the required Visual Studio environments. In fact, I am assuming that you have VS 2008 and possibly 2010. The reason I am assuming that is this: VS 2010 has an Azure Cloud setup process already built in. If all you are using is 2010 then you can go here and it will show you how easy it is to do in 2010 (it specifically mentions the beta version but the content holds for RC). I, like many others, have VS 2008 and 2010 installed so I want both environments to be able to work with Azure.
As part of your setup, you may have installed SQL Server Express (or already had SQL installed). If not, go back and install SQL Server Express – Azure Development Storage utilizes a SQL Server database.
The step I will start with is IIS 7.0. These installation steps are for Windows 7.
1. Verify that you have IIS 7.0 installed and active in your system. Do this through “Control Panel / Programs and Features”
2. Then select “Turn Windows features on or off”
3. The Windows Features dialog will pop up. Within that, select ASP.NET within “IIS/WWW Services/App Dev Features” as shown below. .Net Extensibility and the ISAPI options will automatically select. You can also select to support CGI if you wish as that is an option within the Azure environment.
4. Farther down in the features list is “Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.1. Open that up and select “WCF HTTP Activation”
5. Click OK. Windows will install those features for you. When it is done, the install window will go away.
Note: Activating IIS 7.0 within W2K8 is somewhat different. In that case you are going through the Server Manager “Roles” and you will select “Add Roles”. Within Add Roles, select “Web Server (IIS)”. A wizard will then appear to walk you through the activation. Select “ASP.NET” within that wizard and install. “WCF HTTP Activation” is also done through the Server Manager but as a “Feature”. Select “Features” and then “Add Features”. Within the “Add Features” wizard, select “WCF HTTP Activation” and finish out the wizard to install the feature.
So, now we have Visual Studio, SQL Server and IIS installed. The next step is to install the Azure SDK. You can do this by installing the “Windows Azure Software Development Kit” or “Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio” which contains the Azure SDK. As of this writing, the February 2010 version was just released so those are the links used here. If you are working with the beta version of VS 2010, take note of the “Brief Description” at the top of the page since the tools for VS requires the November 2009 version.
Installation of the tools/SDK is easy. Just execute “VSCloudService.exe” and walk through the wizard screens. There isn’t much to do other than click “Next”. It will tell you what it is installing and what it will be updating.
OK, Visual Studio, SQL Server, IIS, Azure SDK and the Azure Tools have been installed. The only thing left is to activate the development storage. Development Storage gives you access to the various cloud storage capabilities such as Blob Storage, Queues, Tables (although easy to do so, this should not to be confused with SQL Storage), SQL Storage and an Azure Drive.
This step is pretty easy. All you have to do is create a “Cloud” application in Visual Studio and the activation will start for you. I created an MVC Web Role application and the following window appeared:
Like the others, this is a one-time step and will then be available for you whenever you work on your cloud apps. You may also notice a system-tray popup that will tell you things are running.
After the activation, you can try running your cloud app in the simulated environment. When I created the MVC Web Role application, it generated a simple “Hello World” page that ran for me:
You can see from the URL that port 81 is being used for the simulated Azure cloud.
Once the Azure environment is installed you can check on the development fabric and development Storage environments. Access them both through the system tray. Just open up the tray and look for the Azure icon:
Right-click that icon and you can do several things. You can open up the dev fabric UI and review any running cloud applications:
You can also open up the dev storage UI and start/stop any of those services:
You can also shut down the fabric or storage services.
Hopefully, this gives you a quick view of how to get up and running (locally at least) with the Azure Development environment. I did not go into how to create a real Azure account where you can upload and run your applications – that’s a topic in itself.
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