As I already mentioned, I was honored to be technical reviewer of one of the first books on the Azure subject: Microsoft Azure: Enterprise Application Development from Packt Publishing. The process of technical reviewing does take time, and requires attention. You can’t just sit and say “hey I will be reviewing this book”. You often go through the references, check for correctness of provided links, run the provided code to check for any errors, carefully read the content and check for missing or misspelled technical terms / details. I can only imagine what is the process of writing a book. It literally takes an year or more. So don’t be surprised if you don’t see screenshots from the new Silverlight portal, or some of new stuff that sneaked in during PDC 2010! Before all, this book was written by the time of first commercial availability of Windows Azure and represents technically correct everything what was available for Windows Azure SDK 1.2! Which by the way is 100% technically accurate with Windows Azure SDK 1.3. You just have more features available since PDC 2010, but nothing from the existing feature has drastically changed, that would not reflect what is in the book content. Microsoft Azure: Enterprise Application Development covers all aspects and modules (if I may say so) of Windows Azure and how an Enterprise can leverage the platform to build highly scalable and reliable solution on top of Microsoft’s Cloud!
There is another book, which focuses on SQL Azure – SQL Azure: Enterprise Application Development. While you will one chapter for the Windows Azure platform in general and hosting ASP.NET application within the cloud, the focuses solely on the only one Relational Database Management System As A Service – SQL Azure! I have the honor to obtain a copy of that book and write an abstract overview of the full content. While it may take a bit more of my time I will just share with you that this book will give you the answers for questions like: How can I use SQL Azure with SSIS / SSRS? Can I use SQL Azure without paying for Windows Azure (for sure you can)? Can I use SQL Azure with my PHP application? What about syncing on-premise with Cloud data? And much more! So stay tuned for full overview of this new book on the SQL Azure!
