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Is Azure Driving You Nuts!?…

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So one of the things I’ve noticed recently as I try and get my leg over all the Azure Services Platform bits, is… it’s hard work!

Now, at the risk of sounding like a punce, I find a couple of things hard to swallow with the developer on-ramp process:

1. The tokens are doing my head in! Tokens for this, tokens for that, and when you think you have your token, you get an error message, and your hosed!

2. SDKs!!? So many, so different, so dense. I can’t find contextual solutions to my problems in the SDKs. For example, if I’m trying to get Windows Azure talking to SQL Services, what’s the best approach?

3. VS integration. There aren’t any power toys or toolkits? I definitely want some static analysis stuff. Some FxCop updates or migration sweepers to tell me how much work it’s going to take to move my app from where it is now to Azure. Something that simply says, “Hey Dave, your WCF app would need three coding tasks and about 3 hours to hook up to the .NET Services Service Bus”, for example. That would rock… wouldn’t it?

4. Hands-on Labs. Ok, so these are great at conferences, or when you have downtime and a fully tweaked env, but when you’re using your 4 hour before-bed coding window to rev the Azure engine, HOLs don’t cut it. What I need is a Quickstart project, something like, “Azure Map Mashup Quickstart”, something I can just spin up, tweak and run. And not Hello World! No more Hello World!

Anyway, as I work on the product team, you may be asking, “Do you always talk to yourself?”… I do, but don’t judge me! What I really want to know is are other devs hitting the same issues, or am I just big girls blouse? Give me some good oil folks!

Thank you and good day!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 05, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 05, 2008
    Hey buddy, Can't really say - as i'm STILL WAITING FOR TOKENS !! check your email - have petitioned you to show us some love!! Anyways, i'm sure you're just a big girls blouse anyways :p he hehehe

  • Anonymous
    November 05, 2008
    Totally agree! Tokens and the PDC process was a complete fiasco – still don’t have one of the tokens I apparently need – the tokens and instructions/urls/etc should have been provided with “the Goods”. Less than committed developers are highly likely to walk away and do something else. SDKs and documentation are scattered all over the place (and get installed all over the place). An especially bad pain when you have multiple machines to deal with. I’ve encountered numerous broken links trying to track everything down. Too many similar names make getting a grasp of the technology really hard. Certainly could use a couple of diagrams more detailed than the basic Azure diagram everyone showed. I’m making progress but the going is tuff.

  • Anonymous
    November 06, 2008
    @Dave Angers - I agree Dave, I think a unified SDK would make finding your way around much easier, and a map as opposed to a "markitecture" would be more substantial. Also, the token process should be a lot more streamlined. All great feedback, I'll make sure I share with the teams.