Windows Azure Guidance, Patterns and Practices

While Microsoft continues to work on the first Windows Azure Architecture Guide, the company is making a variety of resources available, designed to help customers, partners and developers embrace its Cloud platform. An illustrative example in this regard is the patterns & practices Windows Azure Guidance site hosted on Microsoft CodePlex. The resources offered free of charge on the Redmond company’s open source project-hosting repository are set up to streamline development and design for applications targeting Windows Azure.

“The key themes for these projects are: 1. Moving to the Cloud. 2. Integrating with the Cloud. 3. Leveraging the Cloud. These themes will allow us to categorize the scenarios that we will be delivering. Most of the scenarios are challenges that customers face today. And as we progress the program forward we will have more scenarios. #1 is about migration and re-purposing existing applications and skills. #2 is about connecting cloud applications with on-premises systems and #3 is about taking advantage of intrinsic properties from the cloud, such as elastic demand, etc.” a message posted on the website reveals.

The downloads from the Patterns and Practices Windows Azure Guidance site on CodePlex allow access to both documentation as well as code samples, according to Microsoft. The Microsoft Architecture Strategy team is updating the resources periodically, and, in fact, introduced a refresh earlier this week.

“We are almost content complete for our first Windows Azure Architecture Guide (the most probable name for our book). Available for download today: New updated samples, including all file processing and background tasks (lots of small nuggets in there, such as use of multiple tasks in a single Worker, continuation tokens, data model optimization, etc). [And] 7 Chapters of the guide are now available,” Eugenio Pace, from the Software and Services group in Microsoft Architecture Strategy team, explains.