Cloud Development

On October 27th 2008 Microsoft announced Windows® Azure™
the comprehensive cloud environment from Microsoft. With
Windows® Azure™ Tools for Microsoft® Visual Studio®
you can build, debug and deploy services and applications
for Windows Azure.

Windows Azure offers a scalable hosting environment for
the Internet, built on geographically distributed data centers.
It handles load balancing and resource management, and
automatically manages the life cycle of a service based on
requirements that you establish. With the service, you include
code specifications for the service topology, the number of
instances to deploy, and any configuration settings. Windows®
Azure™ deploys the service and manages upgrades and failures
to maintain availability.

The Windows Azure environment is designed as a utility
computing model, so that you pay only for the resources
used by your service, while benefitting from the reliability and
performance provided by the hosting environment.

Windows Azure Tools provide the means to create services
and applications within the framework of Visual Studio. That
includes a project model specifically for Windows Azure, as
well as the debugging capabilities of Visual Studio. With Visual
Studio, you can build a package containing your service, and
use Windows Azure Tools to deploy the package to Windows
Azure through the Windows Live Developer Portal.

There are a few hidden gems in Visual Studio that are easy to overlook. One of those is the Code Definition Window (ctrl+\,ctrl+d or View – Code Definition Window).

The Code Definition Window will work in two different ways. The first is with your current code editing window. As you navigate your code, the Code Definition Window will display the definition of the objects currently under your cursor. For instance, if your cursor is currently over a class level variable, the Code Definition Window will display the location in the source file where the variable is declared. The same goes for methods and classes both within the current source file and in other source files within your current solution.

The second way the Code Definition Window can work is in conjunction with the Visual Studio Class View Window (ctrl+shift+c or View – Class View). The Class View Window is a handy tool window in its own right, giving a quick overview of the object model of the current solution and allowing fast navigation through namespaces, classes, and methods. If you double click on a method in the Class View Window, Visual Studio will open the appropriate source code file and scroll to that particular method. This is quite useful for larger projects and for projects that might have multiple class definitions in each file. However, if you single click on a method, the contents of that method will show in the Code Definition Window without opening the file in a text editing window.