Read on to know how the ASP.NET platform along with Windows Azure can help build highly scalable and well architected web applications.

1. Develop ASP.NET Solutions with Windows Azure
Frameworks, standards and tools are constantly evolving and emerging. To build highly scalable
applications, high capability servers, high bandwidth network and dedicated infrastructure are required.
These add significant cost overhead.
One of the simplest solutions to this challenge is to move such applications and their infrastructure to the
Cloud! Organizations are increasingly shifting from traditional on-premise and hosting environments to the
emerging public and private cloud.
The most popular cloud platform today is the Windows Azure offered by Microsoft. It enables developers
to quickly build, deploy and manage applications using Microsoft-managed data centers. Moreover,
applications can be built using any operating system, language or tool! ASP.NET is emerging as a
popular framework that allows programmers to build dynamic Web sites, Web applications and Web
services. When web applications are deployed in the Windows Azure data centers, the storage services
are readily available and easily accessible from the application.
Developing an ASP.NET solution that will run in the cloud has certain pre-requisites. The application
needs to be coded in a way that it can be scaled easily. After the web application is developed, it should
be published to the cloud (Microsoft data centers).
Windows Azure now supports .Net Framework 4.5. This gives developers the freedom to use all kinds of
new features while developing their web app. The most important feature that ASP.NET 4.5 offers web
developers is the new asynchronous methods. This asynchronous support enables developers to easily
build highly scalable and high performing web applications minus all the hassles that are normally
associated with asynchronous programming.
Preparing the Development Environment
Microsoft’s developer centers offer all the required tools for developers looking to take advant age of
Windows Azure. The .NET Developer Center offers all necessary tools in one download. The Microsoft
Web Platform Installer will install the Windows Azure SDK for .NET that contains Windows Azure SDK,
Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio and Windows Azure Client Libraries for .NET.
An important tool that developers will require to develop ASP.Net Solutions with Windows Azure is the
Windows Azure Developer Emulator. It is one of the core tools in the Windows Azure SDK that enables
development of cloud applications on local workstations. ASP.NET developers will experience seamless
integration with Visual Studio using this tool.
Developing ASP.NET solutions
Talentica is well known for .Net Development. Getting started with development is simple and hassle free
once developers have an understanding of the emulator, roles and instances in Windows Azure. The
Windows Azure service project consists of configuration files that configure the roles and number of
instances that the hosted service will use in the datacenter. It also contains links to the Visual Studio
projects that contain the ASP.NET application. The Windows Azure service project also enables
developers to seamlessly test and debug their ASP.NET application in the Windows Azure Developer
Emulator using the standard “F5” debug experience.
The Windows Azure cloud service can provide many capabilities that are unavailable with on-premise or
traditional hosting. For example, Azure blob storage when combined with CDN capabilities brings fault
tolerance and distributed performance. It offers geo replication of data at two data centers hundreds of
miles apart at no extra cost. There are various advantages of Windows Azure that can be leveraged by
ASP.NET developers to build highly scalable and well architected web applications.