Wade Wegner

Today we published the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit – October Release. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit includes hands-on labs, presentations, and samples to help you understand how to build applications that utilize Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and the Windows Azure AppFabric.

• Download Now: You can download the full training kit including the hands-on labs, demo scripts, and presentations from the Microsoft download center here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=130354.
• Browse the hands-on labs: Alternatively, you can browse through the individual hands-on labs on the MSDN site here: http://bit.ly/WAPCourse

The October 2011 update of the training kit includes the following updates:

• [New Hands-On Lab] SQL Azure Data-tier Applications
• [New Hands-On Lab] SQL Azure Data Sync
• [New Hands-On Lab] SQL Azure Federations
• [New Demo] Provisioning Logical Servers using Cmdlets Demo
• [New Demo] Parallel Computing on Azure – Travelling Salesman Demo
• [Updated] SQL Azure Labs and Demos with the new portal and tooling experience
• Applied several minor fixes in content

As with the September release, we have shipped an (updated) preview of our web installer. The training kit web installer is a very small application weighing in at 2MB. The web installer enables you to select and download just the hands-on labs, demos, and presentations that you want instead of downloading the entire training kit. As new or updated hands-on labs, presentations, and demos are available they will automatically show up in the web installer – so you won’t have to download it again.

You can now download the training kit web installer preview release from here.

We really try to make these training resources valuable to you, so please be sure to provide feedback if you find a bug, mistake, or feel as if we should including something else in the kit.

Yesterday we released the Window Azure Platform Training Kit – September 2011 Release. You can get the content here:

• Windows Azure Platform Training Kit (offline)
• Windows Azure Platform Training Courses (online)

The September 2011 release of the training kit includes the following updates:

• [New Hands-On Lab] Service Bus Messaging
• [Updated] Labs and Demos to leverage the new Window Azure SDK & Tools 1.5
• [Updated] Labs and Demos to leverage the new Windows Azure AppFabric SDK 1.5
• [Updated] Introduction to Windows Azure Marketplace for Data
• Applied several minor fixes in content

The updates for the Windows Azure SDK & Tools 1.5 and the Windows Azure AppFabric SDK 1.5 are really quite significant – it takes a lot of work to pull this off. To give you an idea, take a look at everything we did:

• 25 of the 30 hands-on labs were updated to use the Windows Azure SDK 1.5 and/or Windows Azure AppFabric SDK 1.5.
• 15 of the 25 demos were updated to use the Windows Azure SDK 1.5 and/or Windows Azure AppFabric SDK 1.5.
• Approximately 145 projects updated.
• 86 dependency checker files updated for 25 hands-on labs and 18 demos.
• 22 hands-on labs and 7 demos updated for changes to the Windows Azure Portal experience.

We really try to make these training resources valuable to you, so please be sure to provide feedback if you find a bug, mistake, or feel as if we should including something else in the kit.

Now that we can get our hands on the Windows Developer Preview of Windows 8, I’m sure everyone is excited to start building applications! For many of us, this means that we’ll want to install all of the great Windows Azure tools on our Windows Developer Preview machine – especially if we plan to take advantage of the new Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8. However, there are a few things we’ll need to do in order to get things to work.

Quickly let me explain the three challenges you’ll run into:

1. The current Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio do not yet support Dev11 – you’ll have to install Visual Studio 2010.
2. There are a few quirks getting dependencies for IIS installed on Windows 8 using the Web Platform Installer.
3. After Visual Studio 2010 and the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio are installed on a machine with Dev11, the Windows Azure tools will grab an environmental path variable that points to 11.0 instead of 10.0.

Fortunately, these things are pretty easy to resolve and will certainly get addressed in later builds.

Here’s what you’ll have to do to get the tools and SDK working with the Windows Developer Preview:

1. Install Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.1. Easiest way is to type “Windows Features”, select Settings, and select Turn Windows features on or off. Then simply check the checkbox. Click OK to install.
   
2. Next we need to correctly configure IIS. Typically we’d do this through the Web Platform Installer, but this doesn’t work correctly on Windows 8. From Turn Windows features on or off you’ll need to do the following, then click OK to install.
   • Check Internet Information Services.
   • Expand Internet Information Services and World Wide Web Services.
   • Expand Application Development Features and check ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET 4.5, and CGI.
   • Expand Common HTTP Features and check HTTP Redirection.
   • Expand Health and Diagnostics and check Logging Tools, Request Monitor, and Tracing.
3. Install the Web Platform Installer (WebPI).
4. Install Visual Web Developer 2010 Express through WebPI. (You can use a different version of Visual Studio 2010, so long as it’s supported by the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio.)
5. Install Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – September 2011 through WebPI.

Okay, now you have everything installed. However, before you trying running Visual Studio, you have to create a script to launch Visual Studio 2010. This is because the Windows Azure tools use an environmental variable that’s incorrectly pointing to version 11.0, and we’ll need to change it right before we launch to version 10.0 (for Visual Studio 2010).

@ECHO OFF

SET VisualStudioVersion=10.0

SET VisualStudioPath="%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE"
IF NOT EXIST %WINDIR%\SysWow64 SET VisualStudioPath="%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE"

CD /D %VisualStudioPath%

VWDExpress.exe

As you can see, the script changes the VisualStudioVersion to 10.0 then launches Visual Web Developer Express (there’s a little extra code to set the path correctly regardless of 32- or 64-bit versions of Windows).

Save the above script as a CMD file (i.e. OpenVisualStudio2010.cmd) and then make sure to right-click and Run as administrator! If you forget to run the script as administrator then Visual Studio won’t have the permissions needed to run the Windows Azure tools correctly.

Look, it’s working!

NOTE: I found myself having to reboot Windows 8 in order to resolve a problem where the debugger wouldn’t attach. Not sure if this occurs every time, but in case you have a similar issue just try rebooting.

I hope this helps!