Building ASP.NET Applications with Windows Azure

In this brief lab, you will learn how to build ASP.NET applications that use the ASP.NET Azure Providers and explore Windows Live authentication in Windows Azure. You will be able to choose between MVC or Web Forms.

Overview

ASP.NET supports different implementations of the application providers for membership, role, profile and session management. Most providers come with a version that is based on a SQL database, or uses in-memory representations of data managed by the providers.

The Windows Azure samples include provider implementations that make use of scalable and reliable blob and table storage services. Additionally, the providers deal with the problem of Web applications that are hosted on a variety of different machines inside the Windows Azure fabric.

When you deploy your Web application in the Windows Azure data centers, the storage services for tables and blobs are readily available and are therefore easily accessible from your application.

Objectives

In this hands-on lab, you will learn how to:

• Migrate ASP.NET Web Form and MVC applications to Windows Azure
• Use Forms Authentication with Windows Azure
• Use Azure ASP.NET providers for membership, role, and session state support

The lab shows how to use these features for both ASP.NET Web Form and ASP.NET MVC applications and has an exercise dedicated to each technology. Since both exercises use the same scenario and cover the same material, choose the one that is most relevant to your needs.

Prerequisites

The following is required to complete this hands-on lab:

• Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
• Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.6

Setup

In order to execute the exercises in this hands-on lab you need to set up your environment.

1. Open a Windows Explorer window and browse to the lab’s Source folder.
2. Double-click the Setup.cmd file in this folder to launch the setup process that will configure your environment and install the Visual Studio code snippets for this lab.
3. If the User Account Control dialog is shown, confirm the action to proceed.

Using the Code Snippets

Throughout the lab document, you will be instructed to insert code blocks. For your convenience, most of that code is provided as Visual Studio Code Snippets, which you can use from within Visual Studio 2010 to avoid having to add it manually.

If you are not familiar with the Visual Studio Code Snippets, and want to learn how to use them, you can refer to the Setup.docx document in the Assets folder of the training kit, which contains a section describing how to use them.

Exercises

This hands-on lab includes the following exercises:

1. Moving a Web Application to the Cloud
2. Using the Azure ASP.NET Providers with MVC Applications
3. Using the Azure ASP.NET Providers with Web Form Applications

Estimated time to complete this lab: 45 minutes.