Working with SQL Azure using .NET

[This article was contributed by the SQL Azure team.]

In this quick 10 minute video, you'll get an understanding of how to work with SQL Azure using .NET to create a web application.   I'll demonstrate this using the latest technologies from Microsoft, including ASP.NET MVC3 and Entity Framework.

Although the walkthrough utilizes Entity Framework, the same techniques can be used when working with traditional ADO.NET or other third party data access systems such as NHibernate or SubSonic. In a previous walk-through, we used Microsoft Access to track employee expense reports.  We showed how to move the expense-report data to SQL Azure while still maintaining the on premises Access application.

In this video, we will show how to extend the usage of this expense-report data that's now in our SQL Azure cloud database and make it more accessible via an ASP.NET MVC web application.

The sample code and database scripts are available on Codeplex, if you want to try this for yourself.

If you want to view it in full-screen mode, go here and click on the full-screen icon in the lower right-hand corner of the playback window.

We've got several other tutorials on the SQL Azure Codeplex site , go to https://sqlazure.codeplex.com.  Other walk-throughs and samples there include ones on how to secure a SQL Azure database, programming .NET with SQL Azure, and several others.

If you haven't started experimenting with SQL Azure, for a limited time, new customers to SQL Azure get a 1GB Web Edition Database for no charge and no commitment for 90 days.  This is a great way to try SQL Azure and the Windows Azure platform without any of the risk.  Check it out here. 

-Steve