Chapter 4. It’s time to run with the service
This chapter covers
- Interacting with Windows Azure via the ServiceRuntime assembly
- Defining your Windows Azure role
- Configuring your Windows Azure role
In the last chapter we got into the guts of the infrastructure and architecture of Windows Azure. During that chapter we introduced the concept of the service model and how it’s used by the FC to manage your role.
In this chapter we’ll take some time out to look at the parts of the service model that we didn’t get to mess around with much (specifically the service definition and service configuration files). But first, let’s spend a little time with the Service Management API.
In both chapter 1 and chapter 2, you created a brand new Windows Azure web role from scratch. As we pointed out then, a web role hosted by Windows Azure is a regular old ASP.NET web application with a little bit of extra magic that allows you to interact with Windows Azure. That extra magic is three new assemblies that are automatically added to your new web application when you create a new Windows Azure Cloud Service project in Visual Studio. Figure 4.1 shows these assemblies listed in the Visual Studio 2010 Solution Explorer.
