Tech Analysis: Azure is Microsoft's entry into the cloud computing world, pitting it against the likes of Amazon.com and Google. Like Amazon.com, Microsoft has created a software system that runs on Microsoft's own distributed data centers. Microsoft has made available its Windows Azure SDK, which currently is in Community Technology Preview form, for application development. In this first of several articles, eWEEK Labs tries out the Azure SDK.

This is the first of several articles about Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform that was rolled out in 2008. Azure is quite large, and during the next year we're going to see several entire books written about Azure. In other words, there's far too much to fit into a single article. However, I do want give you an overview of it, and get you up and running. So for this first article, I'll present a walk-through of the basic starter sample that ships with the software development kit, while explaining the concepts.

If you want to follow along, you'll need either Vista with Service Patch 1 or Windows Server 2008, as well as Visual Studio 2008. (Or instead of Visual Studio 2008, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition works, too, according to the online documentation). You'll also need either SQL Server 2005 Express or SQL Server 2008 Express. SQL Server 2008 Express is available here.

Finally, you'll need both the Azure SDK and the Azure Tools for Visual Studio, which you can download here and here, respectively.

Read the whole article on eWEEK.com.