The Azure Services Platform is a cloud-computing technology from Microsoft. It is composed of four core components—Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services—each with a unique role in the functioning of your cloud service. It is the goal of this book to show you how to use these components, both separately and together, to build flawless cloud services. At its heart, Windows Azure Platform is a down-to-earth, code-centric book. This book aims to show you precisely how the components are employed and to demonstrate the techniques and best practices you need to know to use them to best effect. That said, author Tejaswi Redkar regularly takes time out to provide a thorough overview of the architectural concepts that underpin Windows Azure. Without this understanding, you will find it hard to use the platform to its full potential. By the time you've read this book, you will be comfortable building high-quality end-to-end Azure services of your own.

Three powerful technologies—Remoting, Reflection, and Threading—are combined in a single book! And when these technologies come together, you are faced with a powerful range of tools that allow you to run code faster, more securely, and more flexibly. (And performance gains are critical in todays industry!) So you'll be able to code applications across the spectrum—from a single machine to an entire network. This book begins by discussing the most fundamental of the three techniques: .NET Remoting in Visual Basic .NET, which allows you to customize your application communication processes. The next portion of the book covers reflection, which allows you to examine code at run time, regardless of prior knowledge of its structure. Finally, the book explores threading, which helps break up your application into multiple, independent threads.

Windows Azure Web Sites book provides you with a practical advice in building high-quality websites. It is based on my years of experience in building 100+ solutions on Windows Azure. Windows Azure Web Sites helps you build secure, scalable, and high-performing websites at a rapid pace like no other platform. This book dives deep into these core capabilities that today's web apps must have. Windows Azure Web Sites is built from the ground-up in the cloud, and this book takes a 360 degrees view of its capabilities not only from a developer's but also from an entrepreneur's point of view. Today's developers are entrepreneurs, they build their own mobile apps that need web services in the cloud. Windows Azure Web Sites is a perfect platform for hosting such web services and web sites. You will enjoy the examples of integrating websites with other cloud services such as Storage, Virtual Machines, and Service Bus. Throughout this book, I have provided step-by-step instructions explaining the significance of each feature and the optimal way of using it. The Web Site Capability Model discussed in this book will help you visualize the capabilities and migration risks of your websites. The Storage Object Distribution pattern will open-up your creative mind in thinking differently when designing cloud applications at scale, believe me it's different. Whether you are a novice or an experienced developer, you will learn something new after reading this book. So, Jump In! Here are the contents at a glance: Introduction Chapter 1: Architecture Overview Chapter 2: Web Sites Quick Start Chapter 3: Continuous Deployment Chapter 4: Operations Chapter 5: Migrating dynamicdeploy.com Chapter 6: Migrating ASP.NET MVC Music Store Chapter 7: Integrating with ElasticSearch Chapter 8: Adding Custom Analytics Chapter 9: Web Sites Lightening Round Chapter 10: Building Node.JS Apps