Free ebook: Building Cloud Apps with Microsoft Azure

9780735695658fGreetings! We’re happy to release a free ebook today: Building Cloud Apps with Microsoft Azure: Best practices for DevOps, data storage, high availability, and more, by Scott Guthrie, Mark Simms, Tom Dykstra, Rick Anderson, and Mike Wasson.

You can download all formats (PDF, Mobi and ePub) at the Microsoft Virtual Academy.

This ebook walks you through a patterns-based approach to building real-world cloud solutions. The patterns apply to the development process as well as to architecture and coding practices.

The content is based on a presentation developed by Scott Guthrie and delivered by him at the Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC) in June of 2013 (part 1, part 2), and at Microsoft Tech Ed Australia in September 2013 (part 1, part 2). Many others updated and augmented the content while transitioning it from video to written form.

Who should read this book

Developers who are curious about developing for the cloud, are considering a move to the cloud, or are new to cloud development will find here a concise overview of the most important concepts and practices they need to know. The concepts are illustrated with concrete examples, and each chapter includes links to other resources that provide more in-depth information. The examples and the links to additional resources are for Microsoft frameworks and services, but the principles illustrated apply to other web development frameworks and cloud environments as well.

Developers who are already developing for the cloud may find ideas here that will help make them more successful. Each chapter in the series can be read independently, so you can pick and choose topics that you're interested in.

Anyone who watched Scott Guthrie's "Building Real World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure" presentation and wants more details and updated information will find that here.

Assumptions

This ebook expects that you have experience developing web applications by using Visual Studio and ASP.NET. Familiarity with C# would be helpful in places.

UPDATE (on August 20, 2014)

We’ve been notified of two errors and an out-of-date statement in the ebook:

On page 87 in the PDF, the following bullet:

  • Azure table storage     A column-oriented NoSQL database.

should instead be:

  • Azure table storage     A key/value NoSQL database.

On page 186 in the PDF, the following statement applies to Visual Studio 2013 as originally released:

When Visual Studio creates a new web project, bundling and minification of JavaScript files is not enabled by default.

If you install the latest update for Visual Studio 2013, bundling and minification is enabled by default.

On page 189 in the PDF, step 5 reads like so:

5. If you have multiple subscriptions, use the Set-AzureSubscription cmdlet to specify the subscription you want to create the test environment in.

It should read like so:

5. If you have multiple subscriptions, use the Select-AzureSubscription cmdlet to specify the subscription you want to create the test environment in.

Thanks.