Windows Azure platform is created to help developers write, distribute and manage Web application and Web services on the Internet. Azure provides on-demand computation and storage services that allows Web applications to scale them on Internet simply by changing the configuration parameters. Azure is an operating system for the cloud, using which developers can host and manage their applications as services onWindows Azure platform.
Windows Azure supports both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments -developers can use Ruby, PHP, and Python to develop Azure Services. Azure supports a seamless development experience and is well integrated with Visual Studio.
Setting up development environment in Visual Studio
You can download the Azure SDK and Azure tools and use them in Visual Studio. In order to create an Azure application, the pre-requisite operating systems areWindows Vista with SP1, Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7. You would also need . NET framework 3.5 with SP1 installed. Additionally, the development machine should be configured with IIS 7 (with ASP.NET and WCF HTTP Activation). Also it requiresMicrosoft SQL Server (or express) 2005 or 2008.
To develop Windows Azure application you would need either of the following: MS Visual Studio 2008 SP1, MS Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 or MS Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition with SP1.
Once you have the required IDE, you will need Azure SDK and Azure tools for Visual Studio to start developing your first Azure application.
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