The reason I didn’t write many posts on the blog in the early part of this year was that I was writing a book on Windows Azure for Packt Publishing. This book, Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook, is now available from all the usual outlets as well as direct from the publisher.
The book is one of a series of cookbooks published by Packt. They are intended to provide “recipes” showing how to implement specific techniques in a particular technology. They are not intended to be narrative books read from cover-to-cover – although they certainly can be.
In the Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook, I show how to perform various development tasks across the Windows Azure Platform – including the Window Azure Storage Service, Windows Azure hosted services, Windows Azure Diagnostics, and the Windows Azure Service Management REST API. I also provided some “recipes” for the Windows Azure AppFabric and SQL Azure, although these areas are sufficiently large as to deserve their own books rather than be reduced to chapters in a general book. Packt has provided a free download of the chapter on the Windows Azure Service Management REST API.
One of the problems in writing about a new technology is that the technology develops as the book is being written. This was particularly true of the Windows Azure Access Control Service. This is an interesting part of the Windows Azure Platform but is one that is not covered in the book – partly because the technology was changing and partly because of the difficulty of shoehorning information about it into the structure of the book.
As with any large project, the creation of a book takes many people. I am particularly indebted to the technical editors who provided a lot of comments that immeasurable improved the book:
Maarten Balliauw (@maartenballiauw)
Michael Collier (@MichaelCollier)
Gaurav Mantri (@gmantri)
Brent Stineman (@BrentCodeMonkey)
They, of course, bear no responsibility for the errors that are inevitable in any project like this. I am also grateful to the many people at Packt who worked on the book and helped ensure it came out in a timely fashion.
The chapters on the Windows Azure Storage Service would have been very difficult to do had I not used Cerebrata’s Cloud Storage Studio. This is an excellent product and I highly recommend it to anyone using the Windows Azure Storage Service.
The genesis of the book is clearly in this blog. However, the coverage of the various features is much more extensive in the book. So, if you like the posts on the blog you should look at the Microsoft Windows Azure Development Cookbook.
And now, on to all that new stuff the Windows Azure Team keeps announcing.
