Preface

Learning Microsoft Azure is a practical, hands-on book for learning how to build systems for Microsoft Azure. This book is themed around an enterprise case study based on a fictional industrial bakery called Azure Bakery, which spans three business units: sales, production, and supply. The entire system is built on the Microsoft Azure technology that utilizes a broad range of services.

The sales business unit is responsible for selling products to customers through the MVC 5 customer website, where customers can place orders and view their status as the order moves through the system. Products are managed through another administrator website that implements Azure Active Directory authentication. A Windows Phone app with .NET mobile service and Twitter authentication integrated with the customer website allows customers to view the order status on their phone and receive push notifications via the notifications hub when the order status changes and new products are created. The sales system has its own dedicated SQL Azure Database and communicates with the other systems via a Service Bus topic. A worker role is implemented to keep the sales system updated as orders are processed through the enterprise system.

The production business unit is responsible for manufacturing the products for the customer orders and has a worker role at the core of it, which consumes customer orders from the Service Bus topic, enters the orders into the production SQL Azure Database, creates batch schedules to bake products, and allocates stock in the system. Production staff uses an on-premises WPF client application with Azure Active Directory authentication to view batch schedules and manage stock via a Web API 2 service with SignalR hub and Azure Service Bus backplane, allowing client applications to update in real time.

The supply business unit is responsible for picking up and packing orders from the production business unit and delivering them to customers. A worker role consumes orders from the Service Bus topic and stores customer details in a table storage, and automatically creates barcode labels stored in a blob storage. Supply staff interacts with the system via an Enterprise Windows Store app, which is authenticated with Azure Active Directory and has a .NET mobile service backend.

As we're building the system, we learn about the topic we're exploring and apply it to our system with detailed walk-throughs and relevant code samples. There are complete working code samples for the entire system that are broken down chapter-wise.