Connect to Media Services Using the Media Services SDK

To create a console or desktop client application, it is suggested that you add the required connection values to a configuration file in an <appSettings> section. This is not required but is a secure way to store connection data.

Caution

It is a highly recommended practice to store connection values, especially sensitive values such as your account name and password, in configuration. Also, it is a recommended practice to encrypt sensitive configuration data. You can encrypt the entire configuration file by using the Windows Encrypting File System (EFS). To enable EFS on a file, right-click the file, select Properties, and enable encryption in the Advanced settings tab. Or you can create a custom solution for encrypting selected portions of a configuration file by using protected configuration. See Encrypting Configuration Information Using Protected Configuration.

The following App.config file contains the required connection values. The values in the <appSettings> element are the required values that you got from the Media Services account setup process.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
    <startup> 
        <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5" />
    </startup>
  <appSettings>
    <add key="accountName" value="Add-Media-Services-Account-Name" />
    <add key="accountKey" value="Add-Media-Services-Account-Key" />
  </appSettings>
</configuration>

To retrieve connection values from configuration, you can use the ConfigurationManager class and then assign the values to fields in your code:

private static readonly string _accountName = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["accountName"];
private static readonly string _accountKey = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["accountKey"];

To start programming against Media Services you need to create a CloudMediaContext instance that represents the server context. The CloudMediaContext includes references to important collections including jobs, assets, files, access policies, and locators.

To create an instance of the server context in code, declare a new CloudMediaContext object, and pass to it the required connection values. The following code example shows a helper method that gets a new instance of the CloudMediaContext passing to it the required connection values that were read from the application configuration file as shown in the previous example.

Note
The CloudMediaContext class is not thread safe.

static CloudMediaContext GetContext()
{
    return new CloudMediaContext(_accountName, _accountKey);
}

You are ready to proceed to the next topic: Ingest Assets with the Media Services SDK for .NET.