Product Description

We have developped this “Azure Tables for LightSwitch” as part as our interest in both Visual studio LightSwitch, and the Windows azure platform.

“Azure Tables for LightSwitch” enables LightSwitch developers to use azure tales data sources, which does not come as an integrated option in the original LightSwitch suite.

Currently we do not intend to sell this product for profit, but use it as part of a software development projects that enables building applications that use both SQL Azure and Azure tables data sources in order to lower application costs, and are using mainly LightSwitch as the back-office system for these projects.

Here are a few more details regarding this product:

The Product:

ATLS – Azure Table for LightSwitch - Managed Azure Tables using LightSwitch 

What is it good for?

Now anyone can easily access Azure tables’ right from within LightSwitch!

Azure Tables storage is meant to store large chunks of data. It is much cheaper than using Azure SQL, especially if you have tons of flat data.

LightSwitch enables development of quick and powerful back office systems

Who is it good for?

Any company who is making use of Azure tables for high traffic or for huge piles of data, who wishes to have easy management access to this data.

Ideal for media and advertisement companies who needs large data storage with very high load of transactions, which needs a quick management application.

Features:

1. Connect to existing entity storage

2. Create new Azure Tables with a simple designer

3. Define a partition strategy

4. Define custom keys

5. Auto-generate WCF RIA service to interact with full CRUD support

6. Support searching within huge data piles

7. Supports paging

8. Define tables’ relationships - coming soon!

9. All is defined right within the familiar environment of Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011

Walkthrough

Open Visual Studio 2010 and create a new Visual Studio LightSwitch project:

From the Tools menu, Select – "Azure Tables for LightSwitch":

When the wizard opens, press the "Add New Credentials" link to set the credentials to connect to Windows Azure Storage Server:

In the Credentials Window insert the name of the storage account and the Primary access key.

Check the save credentials check box, if you want the credentials to be persisted for the next time you open the wizard.

Please note that the saved credentials are currently saved in a none-encrypted text file.

After setting the credentials details, select the desired credentials account, and press the "Fill Tables" button in order to view all of the Azure tables defined in the storage you connected to:

You can also add a new Azure table by pressing the "Create New Table" button and defining the columns you want the table to have:

You should than select the table you want to connect to (you can select multiple tables), and select the table partition key and partition key strategy:

For further information regarding Azure Tables Partition keys, please read here.

After completing the wizard, a new project will be added to your solution. This project is a RIA WCF Project that exposes all of the Azure tables you selected through WCF RIA Service.

Next, you should add a reference to the data-source project. In order to do so, you should right click on the Data Sources folder in the Visual Studio LightSwitch project you created, and select the "Add new Data Source" menu:

You should then select to add a WCF RIA Service data source, press the "Add Reference" button, and select the data source project you created from the Projects tab:

In order for the data source to work, you should also add a reference to Windows Azure Storage Client assembly (Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient):

You should then select the entities you want to be able to edit from the selected data source:

After completing the data source wizard, a new data source, containing all of the tables you selected will be created in your Visual  Studio LightSwitch project.

You can now continue developing the Visual Studio LightSwitch application using the data source you have created.

Good Luck!!!

You can find us at www.because.co.il