How to use windows azure features on windows

How to use Windows Azure
features on Windows 8

Radu Vunvulea
vunvulear@gmail.com
http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.com

Agenda
• A short introduction in Metro App
• Push Notifications
• Scenario 1
• Scenario 2
• Scenario 3
• Shared Access Signature
• Scenario 4
• Scenario 5
• Conclusion

Metro Style application
• Focus on user experience

• Consistent UI through all the applications

• Consistent UI through all the applications
• Do one think, but do it best

What does Windows Azure offers to us
• Tables
• Blobs
• Queues
• Service Bus
• SQL Azure
• Push Notifications
• Shared Access Signature
• Web roles
• Worker roles
• Cache roles
• Virtual Machines roles
• ... and a lot more

Push Notifications
• Using this mechanism we can send toasts, badges, tiles and row
notifications to the client application
• The send request notifications can be send from a cloud service

Metro Style App

Notification Client
Cloud Service
Platform

Windows Push
Notification
Service

Scenario 1

Windows Azure

Scenario 1 – Azure Tables
• Use table storage to store what each patient eat at each meal
• The price for storing data in table storage is very low

Timestamp Partition Key Row Key … … …
2005-10-30 T Client ID Meal type
10:45 UTC

Problem
• How user can have limited access to only one part of the table ?

Scenario 1 - Azure Tables + SAS
Problem
• How user can have limited access to only one part of the table?

Solution
• We can use Shared Access Signature

• What we can do with Shared Access Signature
• Limit access of the user to only a specific numbers of tables
• Limit access to a specific partition key and row key intervals
• Limit what kind of actions a user can do on the table
• Give access to a resource for a specific time interval

What is Shared Access Signature
• Limit user access to a specific Windows Azure resource
• Types of resources:
• Tables
• Queues
• Blobs and containers
• You don’t need to know or register user LIVE account
• The only thing that you share with the user is a token
• User can access your resource based on a token

How to create a SAS for Azure Tables
• Create the access policy
SharedAccessTablePolicy tablePolicy = new SharedAccessTablePolicy()
{
Permissions = SharedAccessTablePermissions.Query
| SharedAccessTablePermissions.Add,
SharedAccessExpiryTime = DateTime.UtcNow + TimeSpan.FromHours(1)
};
• Assign permissions
TablePermissions tablePermissions = new TablePermissions();
tablePermissions.SharedAccessPolicies.Add(
"Client1",
tablePolicy);
myTable.SetPermissions(tablePermissions);
• Generate the access token signature
tableToken = myTable.GetSharedAccessSignature(
new SharedAccessTablePolicy(),
"Client1_1",
10, 0, 19, 100);

How to create a SAS for Azure Blobs
• Create the access signature
var sharedAccessSignature = myBlob.GetSharedAccessSignature(
new SharedAccessPolicy()
{
Permissions = SharedAccessPermissions.Write
| SharedAccessPermissions.Read,
SharedAccessExpiryTime = DateTime.UtcNow +
TimeSpan.FromHours(1);
}
• Generate access URL
string sharedAccessSignatureUri = blob.Uri.AbsoluteUri + +
sharedAccessSignature;
• Use the access signature
var storageCredentialsSAS = new StorageCredentialsSharedAccessSignature(
sharedAccessSignature);
var blobClient = new CloudBlobClient(
myAccount.BlobEndpoint,
storageCredentialsSAS);
var myBlob = blobClient .GetBlobReference(“myContainer/firstBlob.txt”);
string currentContentOfBlob = myBlob.DownloadText();
myBlob.UploadText(“New text appended”);

How to create a SAS for Azure Queues
• Create the access signature
SharedAccessQueuePolicy sharedAccessPolicy = new SharedAccessQueuePolicy()
{
Permissions = SharedAccessQueuePermissions .ProcessMessages,
SharedAccessExpiryTime = DateTime.UtcNow + TimeSpan.FromHours(1)
};
string policyIdentifier = "QueuePolicy1";
QueuePermissions queuePermissions= new QueuePermissions();
queuePermissions.SharedAccessPolicies.Add(
policyIdentifier,
sharedAccessPolicy);
myQueue.SetPermissions(queuePermissions);
• Generate access token signature
string accessSignature = myQueue.GetSharedAccessSignature(
new SharedAccessQueuePolicy(),
policyIdentifier);

Scenario 2

Windows Azure

Scenario 2 – Blob Storage
• Store all content on Blob Storage
• Cheap
• Scalable
• Can stream any type of content
• Multiply devices of the same client can access the same resources
based on the Shared Access Signature
• We can send the access token by email

Scenario 3

Windows Azure

Scenario 3 – Azure Queues
• Each document for processing a command is send to Azure queue
• The message from the queue can be consumed by the core
application that process the message
• Limited access based on Shared Access Signature
• The user that generate the requests will not be able to read or
pop any kind of messages from the queue

How to access Windows Azure content?

Shared Access Signature

Web Role

Scenario 4
• We are a well know photograph
• We decide that we what to share our pictures with peoples that own a
Windows 8 tablet all around the world
• Based on a subscriptions for each album we hope to make money
• An album can contain 10 to n photos

How can we share this content with our clients?

Scenario 4 - Blobs
• A simple solution is using blobs plus Shared Access Signature
• For each client we create an access token that allow clients to access the
album for which they already paid
• Over this structure we create a web-application that allow clients to
download the albums based on a token
• We can use the token that is generated by Shared Access Signature

Scenario 5
• Let’s imagine an application that will display stock reports for each week
• This information is generated based on a lot of computation power
• Because of this the company decides to sell this valuable content based on
a weekly subscriptions
• A client can have access only to information for the weeks that he paid
• The client want to access this content from a Metro app created by us but
he also want to import this data in his own systems

Stock

• Store all the weakly report information on Azure Tables
• Create a service that give the user the ability to access
report data based on a username and password
• Update and manage the username list and what reports
they can access

• Store all the weakly report information on Azure Tables
• Create a service that give the user the ability to access
report data based on a username and password
• Update and manage the username list and what reports
they can access
• Define a Shared Access Policy based on partition key and
row key
Partition Key – Week unique id (201234)
Row Key – Report name

Conclusion

Metro style apps are great to
create a consistent, elegant & compelling
user experience

THE END

Radu Vunvulea
vunvulear@gmail.com
http://vunvulearadu.blogspot.com

How to use windows azure features on windows

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