This looks like a good starting point for getting redis installed under azure.

http://ossonazure.interoperabilitybridges.com/articles/how-to-deploy-redis-to-windows-azure-using-the-command-line-tool

Windows Azure is a great platform. There is however a massive hole where the documentation should be.

This is the list of the azure vm’s:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee924680.aspx

If you don’t want to use the latest guest os (if you do the upgrade plan is entirely at the mercy of the Azure OS team) then you need to stay no more than one version behind the latest. Fall off the list and then you can’t redeploy after 60 days. This is not helped by the poor quality os version details.

Here is the rss feed (http://sxp.microsoft.com/feeds/3.0/msdntn/WindowsAzureOSUpdates)

Here are some choice extracts:

 Guest OS Matrix page to be updated April 2nd

The Guest OS Matrix page has been frozen pending updates for the BUILD conference.  See this RSS feed for the latest Guest OS updates until that time.

No MSDN Guest OS Matrix updates until Jan 9th. December 2013 release info on RSS feed

No MSDN Guest OS Matrix updates until Jan 9th. Dec Guest OS release information to appear on RSS feed

Both of these are incidents where the key documentation is not updated in a timely fashion.

For example 3.12 has been released but the documentation says pending.

Theoretically 3.13 should be but is not.

https://github.com/chriseyre2000/AzureLogQuery

This is a utility to assist in reading WADLog files

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/articles/storage-dotnet-how-to-use-table-storage-20/

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2013/11/27/windows-azure-storage-release-introducing-cors-json-minute-metrics-and-more.aspx

It seems that microsoft have failed to keep the emulator in line with the storage account api.

I am trying to use the nuget package WindowsAzure.Storage.3.0.2.0

I have an attempt at creating a powershell script to query table storage.

It can be found on https://github.com/chriseyre2000/Powershell/tree/master/Azure

I plan on using the previous version windowsazure.storage 2.1.0.4 to see if that works against the emulator.

When working in Azure you need to keep up with versions before they are disabled, but if you go too far then it will hurt.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingWindowsAzureWebJobs.aspx

This is a simple technique for scaling up command line apps to cloud scale.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Windows-Azure-Friday

Here is a great article on this: http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Subscribe/Whats-new-in-the-Service-Bus-NET-SDK-20/

This is a useful site for azure table service documentation:

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/how-to-guides/table-services/

It is a good starting point but does have problems.

The update or insert example will fail if the item does not exist.

The example appears to show that a retrieve operation will provide an empty object if the item is not found.

This is not the case. You simply need to create an entity and treat it like the insert example.

The Azure Powershell scripts are great for small experiments:

First create a new directory and open a powershell prompt as administrator:

New-AzureServiceProject -ServiceName “CachingDemo”
New-AzureServiceProject -ServiceName “CachingDemo”
cd CachingDemo
Start-AzureEmulator -Launch

This will give you a minimal cache role running in the emulator.

This is only officially visible to other services running in the emulator.

However with the right sdk versions and config it should be available locally.

The following works for a local machine:

    dataCacheClient name=”default” useLegacyProtocol=”false”
hosts
host name=”127.255.0.0″ cachePort=”20004″
hosts
securityProperties mode=”None” protectionLevel=”None”
dataCacheClient

Assuming that the sdk version matches the caching library.